You know robotic grippers are getting advanced when they can pick up a potato chip without crushing it. In order to do that, they need tactile sensing and proprioception -- an awareness of where they are in space. This kind of sensing has been absent in most soft robots, but now two teams from MIT have solutions that could change that. Their research may enable soft robots to better sense what they're gripping and how much force to use. One team built off previous research from MIT and Harvard University in which researchers developed a soft, cone-shaped robotic gripper that collapses on objects like a Venus flytrap and can pick up items 100 times its weight.

For leading potato chip maker Frito-Lay, to be innovative at scale requires artificial intelligence. The company's culinary experts and scientists make …

Just in time for us all to be working from home because of the pandemic coronavirus, Microsoft's built new technology for its Teams software that can identify your voice and filter out any other sounds. That could be a leaf blower, a dog barking or even, yes, you rustling through a bag of potato chips. Microsoft demonstrated the technology to journalists earlier this week by having Robert Aichner, a principal program manager on Microsoft's communications division, move his hand around in a bag of chips with the tool turned on. As promised, the technology removed noise of the bag while he still spoke. "With the power of AI, Teams can remove that background noise and you can understand me very clearly," he said.

While terrifyingly sophisticated robots a la Westworld are still a long way off, artificial intelligence technology has found plenty of applications in the food and restaurant sphere -- from making restaurant recommendations and reducing food waste to recognizing customer's faces and ensuring pizza toppings are evenly distributed. And one startup believes that A.I. holds the key to the future of flavor: As the New Food Economy reports, NYC-based Analytic Flavor Systems envisions a future in which food is hyper-customized for people's individual tastes -- "a day when we'll each have a Doritos of our own." Mass-market snacks and drinks are designed to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, resulting in what CEO Jason Cohen believes are "endless shelves of products that most people like, but few people really love." His company has created an AI platform called Gastrograph -- a free version can be downloaded via the iTunes App Store -- that collects highly specific data from individual users, with the goal of "giving food and beverage companies the information they need to develop products optimized for more and more specific sensibilities." The app's central feature is a wheel with 24 spokes, where each sliver represents a discrete category of sensory experience--such as "meaty," "bitter," or "mouthfeel."

You knew it was going to happen at some point. Amazon just integrated Alexa with its Prime Now program, allowing members of the cut-rate shipping program to order items with their voice and get them a few hours later. Anyone who subscribes to Amazon Prime, lives in one of the 30 Prime Now cities, and also has an Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, Amazon Tap, Fire Tablet, or Fire TV can say, "Alexa, order some potato chips on Prime Now." Alexa will then choose the next available two-hour delivery window on Prime Now to bring your stuff. The new ordering service allows you to place orders for multiple items at once, and Alexa can also make recommendations based on what's available in Amazon's catalog. Using the potato chip example, if you just said potato chips, Alexa would list available items for you to choose from.

During the recent Consumer Goods Forum global summit here in Cape Town, I had the opportunity to briefly chat with Vivienne about some of the issues confronting the digital disruption of this industry sector. [The original transcript has been edited for clarity and space.] Named one of 10 Women to Watch in Tech in 2013 by Inc. Magazine, Vivienne Ming is a theoretical neuroscientist, technologist and entrepreneur. She co-founded Socos, where machine learning and cognitive neuroscience combine to maximize students' life outcomes. Vivienne is a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, where she pursues her research in neuroprosthetics. In her free time, Vivienne has developed a predictive model of diabetes to better manage the glucose levels of her diabetic son and systems to predict manic episodes in bipolar suffers. She sits on the boards of StartOut, The Palm Center, Emozia, and the Bay Area Rainbow Daycamp, and is an advisor to Credit Suisse, Cornerstone Capital, and BayesImpact. Dr. Ming also speaks frequently on issues of LGBT inclusion and gender in technology. Every once in a while I have the opportunity to discuss wide-ranging topics with an intellect that stimulates, is passionate and really cares about the bigger picture. Those opportunities are more rare than one would think. Although set in a somewhat unexpected venue (the elite innards of consumer capitalism) her observations on the inescapable disruption that the new wave of modern technologies are prescient and thoughtful. Ed: In a continent where there is a large focus on putting people to work, how do you see the challenges and disruptions resulting from AI, robotics, IoT, VR and other technologies playing out? These technologies, as did other disruptive technologies before them, tend to replace human workers with machine processes. Vivienne: There is almost no domain in which artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and automation will not have a profound and positive impact. Medicine, farming, transportation, etc. will all benefit. There will be a huge impact on human potential, and human work will change. I think this is inevitable, that we are well on the way to this AI-enabled future.