When a fight broke out recently in the parking lot of Salt Lake Park, a few miles south of downtown Los Angeles, Cogo Guebara did what seemed the most practical thing at the time: she ran over to the park's police robot to push its emergency alert button. "I was pushing the button but it said, 'step out of the way,'" Guebara said. "It just kept ringing and ringing, and I kept pushing and pushing." She thought maybe the robot, which stands about 5 feet tall and has "POLICE" emblazoned on its egg-shaped body, wanted a visual of her face, so she crouched down for the camera. Without a response, Rudy Espericuta, who was with Guebara and her children at the time, dialed 911.

The robot you know only as a lowly cleaner may also be an expert firefighter. A robot that clumsily fumbles an object may still have life-saving skills. Baxter, a robotic deli operator, was used in preliminary research about how humans perceive robot competence. "If people are going to work together with robots, they're going to form judgments, and they're going to base decisions on those judgments," said Ross Knepper, assistant professor in Computing and Information Science. "If the collaborations are going to be efficient, people need to have accurate estimates of robots' competence."

THE HAGUE, Netherlands – Artificial intelligence will be a requirement for securing carrier 5G networks – which is shaping up to be a technology juggernaut that presents unique challenges unlike any ever seen in the world of telecom until now. That was the assessment at the GSMA Mobile 360 Security for 5G conference, taking place here this week. To understand the challenges and the drivers for artificial intelligence (AI), it's important to understand that existing telecom networks, even today's 4G LTE networks, are built from a hardware-centric perspective, using the vertical-stack Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model. Features include a heavy reliance on hardware big routers and switches with device-specific software to run them. Functions are hard-coded and largely siloed.

You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license. Researchers have developed a Minecraft modification that uses artificial intelligence to help players improve their in-game architecture skills. Minecraft is a popular 3D video game where players build and navigate their own digital environments. The modification will tell players whether their buildings fit into certain architectural styles and offer ideas for how the structures could be improved. "One of the things that's important to learn when you're a kid and throughout life is creativity, abstraction--how to envision what you want and then create it," says senior author Ross Knepper, assistant professor of computer science at Cornell University.

In recent years, a handful of others have set out to teach robots to assemble Ikea furniture, a task that can mimic the manipulations robots can or may someday perform on factory floors and that involves a brand many know all too well. "It's something that almost everybody is familiar with and almost everybody hates doing," said Ross A. Knepper, an assistant professor of computer science at Cornell University, whose research focuses on human-robot interaction. In 2013, Mr. Knepper was part of a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that presented a paper on its work in the area, describing the "IkeaBot" the team created, which could assemble the company's Lack table on its own. But chairs, with backs, stretchers and other parts, pose a more complex challenge; hence the interest of the Nanyang researchers. Their robot was made of custom software, a three-dimensional camera, two robotic arms, grippers and force detectors.