Meet Mori, a Cute Robot Mushroom That Doesn't Really Say (or Do) Anything Step one in convincing people to live with robots with cameras on their faces? You've had a long day. You finally get home, fling the door open, plonk on the couch, and let out a big sigh. In the corner of your eye, you notice your mushroom lamp perk up. Its microphone must have heard you come in.

Pasty skin, empty eyes and slightly misshapen features against delirious music tracks – it's the recent TikTok trend with a dose of disconcerting strangeness. Generally called the uncanny valley makeup trend, it involves creators using makeup to appear as hyper-realistic bots. Some of the videos under this trend have received up to 13 million likes on the platform. I love the uncanny valley makeup trend because it taps into the primal fear of being stalked by a not-quite-human thing that's ambiguously threatening. Modern thrillers often confuse surprise with fear: Lingering creepiness is much scarier than one-time jump scares and CGIs.

Another lifelike robot is striking horror into the hearts of humans. Named Ameca, the android can convey an impressive range of facial gestures -- and people are freaking out. How it'll start vs How it's going to go pic.twitter.com/MQQcRTy7NB Tickets to TNW 2022 are available now! Whenever a machine shows another human-like capability, from dancing to speaking, it sparks fears of robot uprisings. These anxieties are somewhat misplaced.

Over the past few decades, roboticists have developed systems for a variety of real-world settings, including healthcare facilities. Among their many possible uses in healthcare, robots could help to assist patients in nursing homes or hospitals; for instance, administering medication, food or helping patients to walk. Researchers at Hokkaido University in Japan have recently developed an innovative autonomous system that can serve as a walking aid for patients in nursing facilities or hospitals. This robotic medical walker, presented in a paper published in SpringerLink's Artificial Life and Robotics journal, does not require any intervention from nurses and caregivers, as it can autonomously locate patients and approach them when they wish to go for a walk or move to a different place within their healthcare facility. "If a patient is able to walk using a walker, doctors typically recommend walkers over wheelchairs as a tool to perform moderate exercise in nursing facilities," Yuto Mori, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore.

Manchester – In the 10 years since the March 11, 2011, Great East Japan Earthquake disaster, scientists have sought answers to a variety of questions relating to the deadly tsunami that began tearing through coastal communities just 15 minutes after the quake. Researchers have probed how a tsunami gathers height as it nears a shoreline and how this affects the damage it can cause. They've also begun to assess technologies for the early detection of tsunamis and improving tsunami observing systems across Japan. "The speed of a tsunami offshore is the same as a jet airplane and its speed inland similar to Usain Bolt," says Nobuhito Mori, a professor in the Coastal Disaster Research section of the Disaster Prevention Research Institute at Kyoto University. While tsunamis are fast, they are not as fast-moving as the earthquakes themselves.

The government is likely to fall far short of its target of issuing work permits under a new visa system to 340,000 non-Japanese over the next five years to alleviate acute labor shortages in 14 sectors. As of the end of September, only 219 foreign residents had obtained the "specified skills" visa introduced last April, according to the Immigration Services Agency. The number of people holding the status abroad stood at 1,024 as of Nov. 15. Non-Japanese wishing to obtain the specified skills visa are required to pass a test on the skills needed in their desired work sector as well as a Japanese-language proficiency examination. People who have completed the government's three-year technical intern training program are exempt from taking the test and are allowed to change their visa status to the new one.

At Google's I/O developer conference in 2018, Alphabet's Google CEO Sundar Pichai demonstrated the amazing Duplex feature of the Google Assistant, still in development. It was all over the internet in short order, but in case you didn't see it: In the demo, he asks his Google Assistant to schedule a haircut for him, and "behind the scenes" (though we get to see it in action in this demo) the Assistant spins off an agent that calls the salon in a voice that is amazingly human-sounding. Give it a listen in the video below. Later in the demo he has the Assistant (with a male voice this time) contact a restaurant to make reservations. There's a lot to discuss in these scenarios, but for this pattern we're focusing on its human-sounding-ness.

For a computer science professor, Greg Mori doesn't spend nearly as much time staring at a computer as one might think. "A lot of what I do is talk to people," said the director of Simon Fraser University's School of Computing Science. It's fitting, then, that he's using both his human and his computer skills for his next venture: making computers see and perceive the world as humans do. Mori is leading the latest artificial intelligence lab within a network of cross-Canada AI labs that the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) research institute Borealis AI is operating. The lab, announced by the big bank late last month, will be housed in a downtown Vancouver facility where researchers will be tackling fairness, privacy and bias in AI in addition to its mandate for computer vision. Mori said this holistic approach of Borealis AI helped entice him to join.

Although the company has been attending SXSW since the show's music festival days, this is only Sony's second time bringing a warehouse full of quirky mini adventures to SXSW, and it's expanded a bit beyond last year's VR-heavy affair. Walking into the Wow Studio this year, you're confronted with robots, photobooths and dark little rooms hiding mysterious demos with names like "Ghostly Whisper" and "Acoustic Vessel'Odyssey'." You can stop to play with adorable new Aibos (that now understand English) if you wish, but the fun lies beyond the foyer. Some of them have obvious sports themes. Things like "VR Soccer" and "A(i)r Hockey" showed off creative implementations of existing tech.

An artificial intelligence program that scans thousands of human body cells was able to predict – with 86 percent accuracy – which would become cancerous. The Yokohama, Japan AI study was able to detect colorectal cancer before benign tumors were able to become malignant. The program took microscopic images of a colorectal polyp, magnified it by 500 times and then cross-referenced the variations with more than 30,000 images. The database of images contained both pre-cancerous and cancerous cells, and was the first cross-referencing image research of its kind, Inverse first reported. The AI-assisted system pulled off an impressive 86 percent prediction accuracy rate that was derived after assessing patients with a colorectal polyp diagnosis.