Artificial Intelligence & Robotics

[CaaC (John)+]

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We’re in the largest boom in the application and development of AI for science in history.

Landmark CSIRO report assesses the impact of artificial intelligence on science and its future.

A world-first report from Australia’s science agency, CSIRO, has found that scientists are adopting artificial intelligence (AI) at an unprecedented rate.

Analysing the impact of AI on scientific discovery, ‘Artificial intelligence for science’ draws insight from millions of peer-reviewed scientific papers published over 63 years and identifies key issues ahead for the sector.

The report found that artificial intelligence is now implemented in 98 per cent of scientific fields, and by September 2022 approximately 5.7% of all peer-reviewed research worldwide was on the topic.

“AI is no longer just the domain of computer scientists or mathematicians; it is now a significant enabling force across all fields of science, which is something we live every day at CSIRO, where digital technologies are accelerating the pace and scale of our research in fields ranging from agriculture to energy to manufacturing and beyond,” says CSIRO Chief Scientist Professor Bronwyn Fox.

AI in science has grown significantly since 1960

The report uses a bibliometric analysis – statistical methods analysing trends in peer-reviewed research – to determine what percentage of the 333 research fields studied were publishing on artificial intelligence between 1960-2022.

Analysing all disciplines of natural science, physical science, social science and the arts and humanities, the report found that only 14% of fields were publishing on artificial intelligence in 1960. Just over a decade later in 1972 that proportion had reached more than half, and at present sits at 98%.

Growth in AI publishing has been greatest in the past 5-6 years, with the relative share of AI publishing rising from 2.9% of all publications in 2016 to 5.7% of all publications in 2022. Among the most prolific adopters are the fields of mathematics, decision sciences, engineering, neuroscience and health professions.

“Human curiosity will always be at the heart of science, but these technologies, combined with deep domain understanding, are increasingly helping to open-up new frontiers for knowledge discovery,” says Fox.

“AI is also helping to deliver higher-impact, real-world solutions to Australia’s greatest challenges, like AI to help detect disease, predict bushfires and manage the enormous amount of data we are gathering about our universe.”

And there are no apparent signs of this current boom slowing down.

So, what does the future hold for artificial intelligence?

However, according to the report the pathway to artificial intelligence adoption and capability uplift is challenging; searchers are likely to experience both success and failure as they develop AI systems within their domains of expertise.

The report identifies six future development pathways for researchers and research organisations seeking to upgrade their AI capability for the future – harnessing the benefits while mitigating the associated risks.

1. Software and hardware upgrades. Purpose-built processors designed for machine learning are speeding up computations, while quantum computing could lead to transformative leaps in computational power.
2. The quest for better data. The era of “big data” may be transitioning into the era of better data. Recent breakthroughs have been achieved using smaller datasets that are well-curated, fit-for-purpose and provenance assured.
3. Education, training and capability uplift. Between 2017-2020 the number of university courses teaching AI increased by 103%. Research organisations can take advantage of this to recruit AI talent and uplift capabilities of existing staff.
4. Toward human centric artificial intelligence. In the vast majority of cases AI will be augmenting, not replacing, the human scientist. Issues of trust, transparency and reliability will be important for scientists and reviewers working on AI systems.
5. Improving workforce diversity. Improving the gender, ethnic and cultural diversity of the AI research workforce will lead to better science outcomes.
6. Ethical AI. Research organisations will be challenged to develop capabilities, technologies and cultures that deliver increasingly ethical AI.

“To make the most of this technology for Australia, there are key issues we will need to tackle. CSIRO has one of the largest teams of digital experts in the country, but these are not issues that can be solved by one organisation alone,” says Fox.

“The development of trusted, responsible and ethical AI solutions will be increasingly important globally, and because we have moved quickly to build deep expertise in the field, Australia has a unique opportunity to lead in this area.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/technology/artificial-intelligence-science/

 

 

[Mel81x+]

https://www.perplexity.ai/

Came across this while I was browsing. Fun little thing and has a SQL-based search engine for some of Twitter as well if anyone is interested.

[Bluewolf]

Starship delivery service... 

Starship delivery robot stuck on icy pavement stuns passer-by by politely thanking him for his help (msn.com)

[nudge]

15 minutes ago, Bluewolf said:

Starship delivery service... 

Starship delivery robot stuck on icy pavement stuns passer-by by politely thanking him for his help (msn.com)

Cute little fella!  

[Tommy]

22 minutes ago, Bluewolf said:

Starship delivery service... 

Starship delivery robot stuck on icy pavement stuns passer-by by politely thanking him for his help (msn.com)

I want to hear it's voice! Very underwhelming article. 

[nudge]

5 minutes ago, Tommy said:

I want to hear it's voice! Very underwhelming article. 

I read it in B2EMO's voice  

Not too far off:

 

 

[Bluewolf]

11 minutes ago, Tommy said:

I want to hear it's voice! Very underwhelming article. 

 

4 minutes ago, nudge said:

I read it in B2EMO's voice  

Not too far off:

 

 

Looks like a turf war broke out in Bromley.... 

[Tommy]

On 16/12/2022 at 21:39, nudge said:

I read it in B2EMO's voice  

Not too far off:

 

 

Oh, didn't see that post until now. 

Amazing. 

[Tommy]

On 16/12/2022 at 21:45, Bluewolf said:

 

Looks like a turf war broke out in Bromley.... 

 

Found the video of that. 

[CaaC (John)+]

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You’ve heard of predictive text, now we have predictive touch

A spray-on smart skin can use AI to interpret hand movements and gestures.

Scientists have devised a new material that can be sprayed onto the back of human hands to track their movements, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Electronics.

The researchers have built a prototype that recognises simple objects by touch and can even do predictive two-handed typing on an invisible keyboard.

A tiny electrical network senses the stretching and bending of the skin as the hand moves, which is then interpreted by artificial intelligence (AI) to identify movements.

The algorithm was able to type “No legacy is so rich as honesty” from William Shakespeare and “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul” from William Ernest Henley’s poem “Invictus.”

The researchers say that this technology could have applications in a variety of fields from gaming to sports, telemedicine, and robotics.

Electronic devices that can identify the movement and intended tasks of the human hand already exist. But these are often bulky and require large amounts of data to be collected for each user and task to train the algorithm. Unsurprisingly, widespread adoption has been limited.

Now, researchers have created a sprayable electrically sensitive mesh network – made up of millions of silver nanowires coated in gold and embedded in polyurethane – which conforms to the wrinkles and folds of the human finger and stays on — unless rubbed away in soap and water.

“As the fingers bend and twist, the nanowires in the mesh get squeezed together and stretched apart, changing the electrical conductivity of the mesh. These changes can be analysed to tell us precisely how a hand or a finger or a joint is moving,” explains senior author Zhenan Bao, Professor of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University in the US.

A light-weight Bluetooth module is also attached to wirelessly transfer those signal changes and machine learning steps in to interpret them.

The changing patterns in conductivity are mapped to specific tasks and gestures and the algorithm learns to recognise them. For instance, typing the letter X onto a keyboard. And once the algorithm is suitably trained the physical keyboard isn’t needed any more – just the hand movements by themselves are enough.

The machine learning scheme is also more computationally efficient than existing technologies.

“We brought the aspects of human learning that rapidly adapt to tasks with only a handful of trials, known as ‘meta-learning.’ This allows the device to rapidly recognise arbitrary new hand tasks and users with a few quick trials,” says first author Kyun Kyu “Richard” Kim, a post-doctoral scholar in Bao’s lab.

“Moreover, it’s a surprisingly simple approach to this complex challenge that means we can achieve faster computational processing time with less data because our nanomesh captures subtle details in its signals,” Kim adds.

Because it is sprayed-on, the device can conform to any size or shaped hand and could be used to recognise sign language or even objects by tracing their exterior surfaces by hand. In the future, it could also potentially be adapted to the face to capture subtle emotional cues, which may enable new approaches to computer animation or even virtual meetings.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/technology/smart-skin-ai-hand-movements/

 

Edited January 4, 2023 by CaaC (John)
Spacing correction

[CaaC (John)+]

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AI could be the secret to finally finding aliens

Old data, new tricks.

Ever discovered an important email in your spam? The same principal has some astronomers wondering if aliens might have already tried to make radio contact, but we’ve missed it in piles and piles of unused data created by telescope research every year.

Now a new study has used machine learning to comb through hundreds of hours of radio signals for items of interest which could be the equivalent of an important message in your spam tray.

They identified 115 million items, but then using machine learning tool, were able to narrow the search to eight newly discovered ‘signals of interest’.

Unfortunately, there’s no definitive signs of aliens found yet, but the new method could be used on other large datasets, potentially allowing researchers to quickly search through large swathes of data to maybe find messages from extraterrestrials.

“‘Are we alone?’ is one of the most profound scientific questions that humans have asked,” the international team of researchers wrote in their new paper.

“The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) aims to answer this question by looking for evidence of intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy via the ‘technosignatures’ created by their technology.”

The researchers took data from the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, located in West Virginia, in the US. The dish is the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescope and does about 6500 hours of radio observations every year.

A whopping 480 of those hours was used in this new study, zooming in on the radio data from 820 stars. This data was given to a machine learning tool that uses a novel ‘β-convolutional variational autoencoder’ or β-VAE for short.

The machine learning model looked at 115 million ‘snippets’, and came back with almost 3 million ‘signals of interest’.

However, of these signals of interest, a lot of them were found to be radio frequency interference. That means that it’s probably radio signals from Earth, not from space. After some human wrangling of the data, they got the number down to just over 20,000 signals of interest.

“[We reduced] the number of candidate signals by approximately two orders of magnitude compared with previous analyses on the same dataset,” they wrote in their paper.

“Upon a visual inspection, we identify eight promising signals of interest that show narrow, drifted signals.”

In May 2022, the team went back to check on these eight sources, which were coming from five different stars. Unfortunately, they didn’t find any similar readings, so this is no smoking gun when it comes to aliens.

However, letting AI look through millions of snippets of radio noise and narrowing down the search for where to look is an enticing prospect for researchers.

With most astronomical data being unused currently, it could be a good way to ‘reuse’ some of that data to find a whole new way of seeing.

“I think one of the underutilised possibilities right now is that we have so much data coming in from telescopes everywhere – optical, radio, infrared, X ray. And if we’re trying to answer specific science questions with them, a lot of the other stuff in the data is noise,” CSIRO’s Dr Vanessa Moss told Cosmos in December.

“I think that’s a missed opportunity … Some code, or machine learning, or intelligence that could look at all the data, ever and then try to find these outliers.”

The researchers of this current study are already looking forward to analysing other data sets – from the Square Kilometre Array in Australia to the Very Large Array in New Mexico. 

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/ai-aliens-green-bank-telescope/

 

[Goku de la Boca]

There are 2 that have my attention at the moment.

Firstly, VEO AI Camera for football. This is one I'm looking to obtain first for my scouting business. It even offers analytics via what the camera records. It's really cool, and as someone who has had to watch games in this manner, it CAN be frustrating but it's a very useful way of recording the games as it records every little bit.

Secondly, Dall-E. I'm sure @nudge has heard of it. Fun tool to just fuck around. A few images I made:

[Dr. Gonzo]

9 minutes ago, Goku de la Boca said:

There are 2 that have my attention at the moment.

Firstly, VEO AI Camera for football. This is one I'm looking to obtain first for my scouting business. It even offers analytics via what the camera records. It's really cool, and as someone who has had to watch games in this manner, it CAN be frustrating but it's a very useful way of recording the games as it records every little bit.

Secondly, Dall-E. I'm sure @nudge has heard of it. Fun tool to just fuck around. A few images I made:

Lmao did you edit on Terry & that Chelsea crest?

[Goku de la Boca]

1 minute ago, Dr. Gonzo said:

Lmao did you edit on Terry & that Chelsea crest?

I put the face and Chelsea crest on, yes. But I asked Dall-E to look up Terry fighting a thief in Callao.

It's an inside joke I have with my dad. Basically we were saying how if you send a Londoner to a dangerous barrio in Lima or Callao, that they'd be targetted for having a "gringo" look, when in reality the Brit is just as badass as the thieves here  

[CaaC (John)+]

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An AI created robots out of living tissue. Then they started to reproduce…. Meet the xenobots

Scientists are using living materials to make machines that some would regard as alive… and now they’ve started to replicate

 

[CaaC (John)+]

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Be careful around the home – children say Alexa has emotions and a mind of its own
Should you be kind to robots? Kids say yes

Is technology ticklish? Can a smart speaker get scared? And does the robot vacuum mind if you put it in the cupboard when you go on holidays?

Psychologists from Duke University in the US asked young children some pretty unusual questions to better understand how they perceive different technologies......

 

[CaaC (John)+]

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A revolution in real time: Transferring robots out of the lab and into the real world

Robots are front-and-centre from the moment secondary school students arrive at Wyndham Tech School.

‘Spot’ greets them out front. The Boston Dynamics dog-like robot does a little dance before leading students inside to where SoftBank’s child-sized humanoid robot ‘Pepper’ welcomes them and acknowledges Country.......

 

[CaaC (John)+]

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Unfair! When AI-controlled Tetris turns sour

When a two-player Tetris game unfairly allocates turns, the player with the smaller share perceives their team mate as less likeable, even when they know an algorithm made the decision.

US researchers used the timeless video game in an experiment to better understand the effects of artificial intelligence (AI) decisions on human relationships......... 

 

[Bluebird Hewitt]

I know ChatGPT is the highlight, but what are opinions of Google Bard by comparison?

I was using it briefly to help with an exam I had yesterday (not to cheat, in case anyone says anything, but to help with scenario based questions for computer specifications based on user requirements) and thought it was very useful.

[nudge]

22 hours ago, Bluebird Hewitt said:

I know ChatGPT is the highlight, but what are opinions of Google Bard by comparison?

I was using it briefly to help with an exam I had yesterday (not to cheat, in case anyone says anything, but to help with scenario based questions for computer specifications based on user requirements) and thought it was very useful.

I was away for a while so am just catching up with all the recent developments now, actually tried Bard out today, just a few prompts though, so can't really make meaningful comparisons with ChatGPT yet. It does make a first impression of being a bit less advanced though. 

There are so many AI tools sprouting up, it's mental...

[nudge]

 

 

Humanoid droids are coming!!!

[CaaC (John)+]

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Google’s AI chatbot Bard gives European privacy regulators pause

The European release of yet another artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot has run aground over privacy concerns.

Google’s AI chatbot Bard cannot be released as planned in the European Union until the tech company can demonstrate its compliance with privacy legislation, according to reporting in Politico.

Bard is a large language model similar to ChatGPT, a form of generative AI trained on text data largely drawn from the internet as well as user prompts.....

 

[CaaC (John)+]

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Degenerative AI: Researchers say training artificial intelligence models on machine-generated data leads to model collapse

When artificial intelligence (AI) large language models are trained on machine — instead of human — generated data it leads to model collapse, according to a study by UK and Canadian researchers.

“In other words, the use of [large language models] at scale to publish content on the Internet will pollute the collection of data to train them,” the paper says..........

 

[CaaC (John)+]

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Google DeepMind AI speeds up search for disease genes

Google's AI firm DeepMind has used artificial intelligence to identify changes in human DNA that might cause diseases.......

 

[Mel81x+]

On 21/09/2023 at 04:30, CaaC (John) said:

 

Just going to put this out there because everyone likes to say they are working in "AI". This picture (from the article) sums up how clueless folks are to believe the things told to them.

That is pattern matching, not to be confused with AI. You know what would be AI? If you showed it something and said go figure what this is and how to make it better. We're not 100% there yet but we will be in under a decade.