The 2024 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2024) will be held from 14-18 October in Abu Dhabi, UAE. The programme includes plenary and keynote talks, workshops, tutorials, and forums. We (AIhub) are also holding a science communication session, run in collaboration with IEEE Spectrum. The forums are three-hour events that focus on a particular topic. Each forum will have keynote speakers, with some including a poster session and other talks.

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As Verne understood, the U.S. Civil War (during which 60,000 amputations were performed) inaugurated the modern prosthetics era in the United States, thanks to federal funding and a wave of design patents filed by entrepreneurial prosthetists. The two World Wars solidified the for-profit prosthetics industry in both the United States and Western Europe, and the ongoing War on Terror helped catapult it into a US $6 billion dollar industry across the globe. This recent investment is not, however, a result of a disproportionately large number of amputations in military conflict: Around 1,500 U.S. soldiers and 300 British soldiers lost limbs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Limb loss in the general population dwarfs those figures. A much smaller subset--between 1,500 to 4,500 children each year--are born with limb differences or absences, myself included.

Artificial intelligence could perform more quickly, accurately, reliably, and impartially than humans on a wide range of problems, from detecting …

Andrew Ng has serious street cred in artificial intelligence.

According to a recent McKinsey survey, a majority of enterprises of all sizes are actively embracing AI. The areas seeing the biggest boost from AI adoption include service-operations optimization, AI-based enhancement of products and contact-center automation. When the general American populace is asked about AI, most have a positive view on AI's potential. But if you ask the more engineering-centric, IEEE Spectrum crowd, AI has a long, long way to go before they're willing to stand and applaud. IEEE Spectrum "members are involved with hard-to-penetrate vendor decision teams, usually in management capacity," according to the 2020 media kit.

The massive document, produced by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, is packed full of data and graphs, and we've plucked out 15 that provide a snapshot of the current state of AI. AI research is booming: More than 120,000 peer-reviewed AI papers were published in 2019. The money continues to pour in. Global corporate investment in AI soared to nearly $68 billion in 2020, an increase of 40 percent over the year before. Corporations are steadily increasing their adoption of AI tools in such industries as telecom, financial services, and automotive.

With AI systems today determining whether someone can get a job or a loan, it's in the interest of the company running the AI system to make sure the underlying dataset is not so biased that it leads to errors in its conclusions. Cases of biased data leading to biased results have been documented, such as in the research of Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru, authors of a 2018 study that showed facial-recognition algorithms were very good at identifying white males, but recognized Black females only two thirds of the time. If law enforcement is using such a system to identify suspects, that can lead to some serious problems. The stage is set for serious effort to go into reducing biased datasets on which AI systems rely. "It's an opportunity," stated Alexandra Ebert, chief trust officer at Mostly AI, a startup focused on synthetic data based in Vienna, quoted in a recent account in IEEE Spectrum.

Ruth the Cookie Coach is a digital human being introduced by the Toll House brand of Nestle Global to provide baking assistance on a 24-7 basis, using an avatar incorporating AI that exhibits a degree of emotional intelligence, according to the company. Ruth is named after the creator of the Nestle Toll House original chocolate chip cookie, Ruth Wakefield. The avatar is the culmination of two years of effort between Soul Machines, which offers a Human OS platform with a Digital Brain, and Nestle. Founded in 2016 in Auckland, New Zealand, Soul Machines has raised $65 million to date, according to Crunchbase. The company was spun out of the University of Auckland by Mark Sagar, CEO and Greg Cross, chief business officer.

When I started writing about science decades ago, artificial intelligence seemed ascendant. IEEE Spectrum, the technology magazine for which I worked, produced a special issue on how AI would transform the world. I edited an article in which computer scientist Frederick Hayes-Roth predicted that AI would soon replace experts in law, medicine, finance and other professions. Not long afterward, the exuberance gave way to a slump known as an "AI winter," when disillusionment set in and funding declined. Years later, doing research for my book The Undiscovered Mind, I tracked Hayes-Roth down to ask how he thought his predictions had held up.