Tech & Society
Imitation Learning in the Wild: How a drone's obstacle avoidance system works
Faster than a speeding skateboard! Able to dodge tall trees while chasing a dirt bike! It’s … an upgrade in the making from an innovative drone maker.
Robotics
Business
Packing Robots Get a Grip: This robot arm can handle over 10,000 different objects.
Robots are moving into a job that traditionally required the human touch.What’s new: A commercial warehouse that ships electrical supplies deployed AI-driven robotic arms from Covariant, a high-profile Silicon Valley robotics firm.
Interviews & Essays
Chelsea Finn — Robots That Generalize: Generalization for robotics through reinforcement learning
Many people in the AI community focus on achieving flashy results, like building an agent that can win at Go or Jeopardy. This kind of work is impressive in terms of complexity.
Interviews & Essays
Anima Anandkumar — The Power of Simulation: How simulation can be useful for supervised learning
We’ve had great success with supervised deep learning on labeled data. Now it’s time to explore other ways to learn: training on unlabeled data, lifelong learning, and especially letting models explore a simulated environment before transferring what they learn to the real world.
Tech & Society
A Smoldering Conflict Flares: The debate between AI symbolism and connectionism, explained
A year-long Twitter feud breathed fresh life into a decades-old argument over AI’s direction. Gary Marcus, a standard bearer of logic-based AI, waged a tireless Twitter campaign to knock deep learning off its pedestal and promote other AI approaches.
Tech & Society
Simulation Substitutes for Data: When simulation works wonders with deep learning
The future of machine learning may depend less on amassing ground-truth data than simulating the environment in which a model will operate. Deep learning works like magic with enough high-quality data. When examples are scarce, though, researchers are using simulation to fill the gap.
Machine Learning Research
Different Skills From Different Demos: Implicit reinforcement without interaction at scale, explained
Reinforcement learning trains models by trial and error. In batch reinforcement learning (BRL), models learn by observing many demonstrations by a variety of actors. But what if one doctor is handier with a scalpel while another excels at suturing?
Business
A Sleeping Giant Stirs: Sony launches three AI R&D centers.
Sony, the consumer-electronics powerhouse behind the PlayStation and other hit gadgets, is launching three research-and-design centers to focus on AI. Staffing up means competing with — and likely poaching talent from — frontrunners like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.
Business
What the Watchbot Sees: How Knightscope security robots use AI for surveillance
Knightscope’s security robots look cute. But these cone-headed automatons, which serve U.S. police departments and businesses, are serious surveillance machines.
Machine Learning Research
Robotic Control, Easy as Apple Pie
Robots designed to assist people with disabilities have become more capable, but they’ve also become harder to control. New research offers a way to operate such complex mechanical systems more intuitively.
Tech & Society
Cube Controversy
OpenAI trained a five-fingered robotic hand to unscramble the Rubik’s Cube puzzle, bringing both acclaim and criticism. The AI research lab OpenAI trained a mechanical hand to balance, twist, and turn the cube.
Tech & Society
Autonomous Drones Ready to Race
Pilots in drone races fly souped-up quadcopters around an obstacle course at 120 miles per hour. But soon they may be out of a job, as race organizers try to spice things up with drones controlled by AI.