Last week I had the pleasure of debating the question "does AI pose a threat to society?" with friends and colleagues Christian List, Maja Pantic and Samantha Payne. The event was organised by the B...
Over the past few weeks, we’ve blogged about how machine learning is transforming research, nuclear decommissioning, and astronomy. Building on our “Ask the Experts” panel discussion on driverle...
How can we create robots that can carry out important tasks in dangerous environments? Machine learning is supporting advances in the field of robotics. To find out more, we talked to Dr Rustam Stolki...
Northwestern University mechanical engineering professor Todd Murphey and his team are engineering robots that one might say could make robotic assistance as seamless as "humanly" possible. With suppo...
In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Bradley Knox, founder of bots_alive. Knox speaks about an add-on to a Hexbug, a six-legged robotic toy, that makes the bot behave more like a character. They di...
If you take humans out of the driving seat, could traffic jams, accidents and high fuel bills become a thing of the past? As cars become more automated and connected, attention is turning to how to be...
Whether an A.I. ought to be granted patent rights is a timely question given the increasing proliferation of A.I. in the workplace. Examples: Daimler-Benz has tested self-driving trucks on public road...
For robots to do what we want, they need to understand us. Too often, this means having to meet them halfway: teaching them the intricacies of human language, for example, or giving them explicit comm...
Artificial intelligence (AI) already plays a major role in human economies and societies, and it will play an even bigger role in the coming years. To ponder the future of AI is thus to acknowledge th...
In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell repeatedly mentions what has become known as the “10,000-hour rule”, which states that to become world-class in any field you must devote 10,000 hours of “...
Computer scientist Regina Barzilay is working with MIT students and medical doctors in an ambitious bid to revolutionize cancer care. She is relying on a tool largely unrecognized in the oncology wor...
There’s a great deal of concern over artificial intelligence; what it means for our jobs, whether robots will one day replace us in the workplace, whether it will one day lead to robot wars. But cur...
Machine ethics offers an alternative solution for artificial intelligence (AI) safety governance. In order to mitigate risks in human-robot interactions, robots will have to comply with humanity’s e...
A recent Conversation piece pointed out that the British electricity mix in 2016 was the cleanest in 60 years, with record capacity from renewable energy, mainly from wind and solar power. But one pro...
It’s a fact of nature that a single conversation can be interpreted in very different ways. For people with anxiety or conditions like Asperger’s, this can make social situations extremely stressf...
Modern character AI could be better.
I’m unaware of any NPCs or electronic toy characters that can sustain an illusion of life over more than an hour. They suffer from predictability, simplicity, a...
Part 1: Autonomous Systems and Safety
We all rely on machines. All aspects of modern life, from transport to energy, work to welfare, play to politics depend on a complex infrastructure of physical...
In this fascinating animation from Oxford Sparks, we take a look at how statistics and computer science can be used to make machines that learn for themselves, without being explicitly programmed....
We're beginning to see more and more jobs being performed by machines, even creative tasks like writing music or painting can now be carried out by a computer.
But how and when will machines be abl...
MIT researchers and their colleagues have developed a new computational model of the human brain’s face-recognition mechanism that seems to capture aspects of human neurology that previous models ha...
Developed by a team at the University of Toronto, mROBerTO (milli-ROBot TORonto) is designed for swarm-robotics researchers who might wish to test their collective-behavior algorithms with real physic...
Will your next doctor be an app? A cost-cutting NHS wants more patients to act as “self-carers,” with some technologized assistance. A series of flowcharts and phone trees might tell parents whose...
In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Edson Prestes, Professor at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and an organizer of the Humanitarian Robotics and Automation Technology Challenge (HRATC) 20...
In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews several researchers presenting their work at the Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) 2016 conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan....
In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Fredrik Gustafsson, Professor in Sensor Informatics at Department of Electrical Engineering in Linköping University, about an initiative to reduce poaching in ...
The idea of connecting brain-inspired models of computation to robots is probably as old as the discipline of robotics itself; as far back as 1950, neurophysiologist William Grey Walter had already co...
Two years after the small London-based startup DeepMind published their pioneering work on “Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning”, they have become one of the leaders in the chase for Ar...
In episode sixteen we chat with Danny Tarlow of Microsoft Research Cambridge (in the UK not MA). Danny (along with Chris Maddison and Tom Minka) won best paper at NIPS 2014 for his paper A* Sampling. ...
In episode twelve we talk with Andrew Ng, Chief Scientist at Baidu, about how speech recognition is going to explode the way we use mobile devices and his approach to working on the problem....
In episode eleven we chat with Neil Lawrence from the University of Sheffield. We talk about the problems of privacy in the age of machine learning, and the responsibilities that come with using mach...
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In Episode 10 we talk with David Blei of Columbia University. We talk about his work on latent dirichlet allocation, topic models, the PhD program in data that he’s helping to create at C...
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In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Todd Hylton, Senior Vice President at Brain Corporation, about neuromorphic computers. They discuss the robotics development board bStem, which appro...
In episode nine we talk with George Dahl, of the University of Toronto, about his work on the Merck molecular activity challenge on kaggle and speech recognition. George recently successfully defend...
In episode eight we talk with Charles Sutton, a professor in the School of Informatics University of Edinburgh about computer programming and using machine learning to better understand how it’s d...
The UCLA Biomechatronics Lab develops a language of touch that can be "felt" by computers and humans alike.
Research engineers and students in the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Biomech...