Artificial intelligence disrupted the music industry this week when a major recording label signed--and then quickly dropped--a "robot rapper" who casually dropped the N-word in their lyrics. Many Black artists felt the decision to sign the AI rapper in the first place was a racist slap in the face. "Real talk, anybody who was involved with research, development, and signing this artist at Capitol music should have their resignation submitted or their jobs terminated," rock singer Ali Adkins of Ali A and the Agency in Phoenix told The Daily Beast. "Because that just means you don't get 50 fucks about the music. You just care about making a [dollar]."

The MEKA project provides an open source implementation of methods for multi-label learning and evaluation. In multi-label classification, we want to predict multiple output variables for each input instance. This different from the'standard' case (binary, or multi-class classification) which involves only a single target variable. MEKA is based on the WEKA Machine Learning Toolkit; it includes dozens of multi-label methods from the scientific literature, as well as a wrapper to the related MULAN framework. NEW RELEASE April 12, 2017: Meka 1.9.1 is released.

Boston Dynamics The desire to make robots seem gentle and appealing is not foremost among Boston Dynamics' priorities. Its thuggish looking creations, usually inspired by an animal, have largely been developed for the US military, for purposes which are delicately described as "search and rescue" tasks. Boston Dynamics has also developed a humanoid prototype called Atlas, which is able to, in the company's words, "lift, carry and manipulate the environment" Schaft If Meka is providing the foundations for the top half of Google's robot, Schaft may offer the bottom. The Japanese designed robot, which stays balanced even when jostled, trounced its rivals at a recent robotics competition held by the US department of defence. Redwood Robotics Comprising of the amalgamated expertise of three major developers, including Meka, focused on the elusive goal of developing a fully functioning robotic arm.

Looking back, Google's emergence as a robotics powerhouse seems obvious--and inevitable. First came the scattered hires of roboticists and the release of self-driving cars into Bay Area traffic. Then, the search giant reportedly bought two humanoid HUBO robots from South Korean university KAIST. But it wasn't until December's revelation that Google had acquired eight robotics companies--including Boston Dynamics, maker of BigDog, WildCat and a stable of other astonishing Pentagon-funded bots--that it became clear: Google means to build robots. Although the prospect of merging Google's insatiable appetite for data with sprinting, leaping hardware has inspired an unsurprising battery of Skynet jokes, the response among roboticists has been overwhelmingly positive.

Meka is intended to design a robot that builds emotional links between humans and the machines themselves, and at the recent Intelligent Robots and Systems event, Professor Sentis of the University of Texas showed off Meka's most recent iteration. Unlike other androids, like the hyper-realistic Geminoid series, Meka's looks are deliberately non-realistic, right down to his glowing ears. Would that make you trust it more than a robot that's creepily realistic? This week the tech world has been blown-away by Siri, the (slightly) artificially-intelligent voice-activated assistant in Apple's new iPhone--particularly because the way Siri is programmed makes it able to understand natural language to a certain extent and even understand context, in a limited way. But Siri is nothing compared to the research of Osamu Hasegawa at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

Are we on the brink of a robotics revolution? That's what numerous media outlets asked last December when Google acquired eight robotics companies that specialize in such innovations as manipulation, vision, and humanoid robots. Among those acquisitions was MIT spinout Meka Robotics, co-founded by Aaron Edsinger SM '01, PhD '07 and Jeff Weber, a former research engineer in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. Founded in 2006, Meka was an early creator of "compliant" humanoid robots that now work safely alongside humans in everyday environments -- including factories and cramped research labs. Based on the co-founders' work at MIT, Meka's sleek robotics hardware included adult-size arms and hands, as well as heads, torsos, and full-body systems with advanced control innovations, such as spring-based Series Elastic Actuators (SEAs) that provide torque control and measurements at each joint.