These cuddly, connected companions could disrupt everything from make-believe to bedtime stories. No wonder some lawmakers want them banned. The main antagonist of, in theaters this summer, is a green, frog-shaped kids' tablet named Lilypad, a genius new villain for the beloved Pixar franchise . But if Pixar had its ear to the ground, it might have used an AI kids' toy instead. AI toys are seemingly everywhere, marketed online as friendly companions to children as young as three, and they're still a largely unregulated category.

Social media has become a ubiquitous tool for connecting with others, staying updated with news, expressing opinions, and finding entertainment. However, understanding the intention behind social media posts remains challenging due to the implicitness of intentions in social media posts, the need for cross-modality understanding of both text and images, and the presence of noisy information such as hashtags, misspelled words, and complicated abbreviations. To address these challenges, we present MIKO, a Multimodal Intention Kowledge DistillatiOn framework that collaboratively leverages a Large Language Model (LLM) and a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to uncover users' intentions. Specifically, we use an MLLM to interpret the image and an LLM to extract key information from the text and finally instruct the LLM again to generate intentions. By applying MIKO to publicly available social media datasets, we construct an intention knowledge base featuring 1,372K intentions rooted in 137,287 posts. We conduct a two-stage annotation to verify the quality of the generated knowledge and benchmark the performance of widely used LLMs for intention generation. We further apply MIKO to a sarcasm detection dataset and distill a student model to demonstrate the downstream benefits of applying intention knowledge.

A recent study found robots that speak in a "charismatic" tone while directing a college class can boost creativity among humans. Robots are here -- and they're ready to teach your children and grandchildren. Miko is an artificial intelligence-powered robot that was designed specifically to take kids' learning to a new level. The company's SVP of growth, San Francisco-based Ritvik Sharma, told Fox News Digital in an interview that the personal robot aims to elevate education. HOW AI AND MACHINE LEARNING ARE REVEALING FOOD WASTE IN COMMERCIAL KITCHENS AND RESTAURANTS'IN REAL TIME' The current iteration, Miko 3, which launched in 2021, is voice-activated just like Amazon Alexa -- but the robot is also capable of having a back-and-forth conversation.

Square Off charmed us at CES 2019, when the startup showed off its robotic chess board at our Hardware Battlefield event. Watching the pieces move on their own, courtesy of underlying AI, grabbed the attention of a jaded crowd of showgoers. This morning, it takes the next step in the startup lifecycle, as Bay Area-based kids robotics firm Miko announces that it has acquired a majority stake of 70% of the firm. "We're thrilled to join forces with Miko on this journey to revolutionize edutainment for kids," Square Off's co-founder and CEO, Bhavya Gohil, says in a short press release tied to the news. Miko, meanwhile, is a Disney Accelerator grad best known for its eponymous toy robot.

We introduce the conceptual formulation, design, fabrication, control and commercial translation with IoT connection of a hybrid-face social robot and validation of human emotional response to its affective interactions. The hybrid-face robot integrates a 3D printed faceplate and a digital display to simplify conveyance of complex facial movements while providing the impression of three-dimensional depth for natural interaction. We map the space of potential emotions of the robot to specific facial feature parameters and characterise the recognisability of the humanoid hybrid-face robot's archetypal facial expressions. We introduce pupil dilation as an additional degree of freedom for conveyance of emotive states. Human interaction experiments demonstrate the ability to effectively convey emotion from the hybrid-robot face to human observers by mapping their neurophysiological electroencephalography (EEG) response to perceived emotional information and through interviews. Results show main hybrid-face robotic expressions can be discriminated with recognition rates above 80% and invoke human emotive response similar to that of actual human faces as measured by the face-specific N170 event-related potentials in EEG. The hybrid-face robot concept has been modified, implemented, and released in the commercial IoT robotic platform Miko (My Companion), an affective robot with facial and conversational features currently in use for human-robot interaction in children by Emotix Inc. We demonstrate that human EEG responses to Miko emotions are comparative to neurophysiological responses for actual human facial recognition. Finally, interviews show above 90% expression recognition rates in our commercial robot. We conclude that simplified hybrid-face abstraction conveys emotions effectively and enhances human-robot interaction.

A team led by computer scientist Lydia Kavraki used a machine learning approach to predict the quality of scaffold materials produced by 3D-printing, given the printing parameters. The work also found that controlling print speed is critical in making high-quality implants. Bioscaffolds developed by co-author and bioengineer Antonios Mikos are bonelike structures that serve as placeholders for injured tissue. They are porous to support the growth of cells and blood vessels that turn into new tissue and ultimately replace the implant. Mikos has been developing bioscaffolds to improve techniques to heal craniofacial and musculoskeletal wounds.

Around a decade ago at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT-B), classmates Sneh Rajkumar Vaswani, Chintan Subhash Raikar, and Prashant Iyengar were involved in a project to build intelligent underwater vehicles for the India Navy and the oil and gas industry. In the process, they developed a knack for artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. That culminated in their setting up of emotix in 2015, and this startup has now developed Miko, India's first companion robot. Miko, weighing around 750 grams and standing a little over a foot, engages, educates, and entertains children above the age of five. Besides talking to and playing games with the kids, Miko is also equipped to answer basic questions related to general knowledge and academics.

This article was originally posted on LinkedIn. In a few short years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been thrust into the limelight – elevating itself from a far-fetched, science-fiction topic to one that is currently dominating my conversations with customers, partners and industry leaders across Asia. The journey to where we are today with AI is a long one – almost seven decades in the making. However, in the last few years, the convergence of big data, ubiquitous and powerful cloud computing, along with breakthroughs in software algorithms and machine learning have made exciting new scenarios in AI deployment a possibility. AI today is at the center of the digital transformation of organizations and even nations.

Next time you go to Japan take Miko along to help you plan your vacation and see the sights. Miko is a super-smart chatbot, which is fueled by artificial intelligence (AI) and designed to take the guesswork out of traveling. It is the star of the Japan Trip Navigator – a new smartphone app created by Microsoft in partnership with two Japanese companies – travel agency, JTB Corp., and navigation firm, NAVITIME Co. Miko (pictured left) acts like virtual travel concierge who is constantly learning about what's hot and where to go. It answers questions by drawing on JTB's extensive knowledge resources and learns from the input of information and images from other travelers who use the app. Users will also be able to make hotel and other bookings on the app.

Miko, created in India by emotix, is your child's new companion -- a brain with loads of heart. You will be amazed with how much Miko can do -- be it chatting away about the facts of the world or adapting and responding to your child's needs. Miko has a wide pool of knowledge and an even wider pool of fun. About emotix: emotix is a consumer electronics company founded on the pillars of Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Internet of Things. The core team of roboticists has been together since 2009, making some of the world's most widely acclaimed robots.