University of Washington researchers have developed a new skill for a smart speaker that for the first time monitors both regular and irregular heartbeats without physical contact.
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TROY, N.Y. The original goal of human-like artificial intelligence was abandoned decades ago in favor of less ambitious approaches, two cognitive scientists argue in a new book. If that initial vision is to be realized, they say, AI systems will require a full understanding of language and meaning, the development of which remains a daunting but doable challenge.
In Linguistics for the Age of AI, published by MIT Press, co-authors Marjorie McShane and Sergei Nirenburg, both faculty in the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and co-directors of the Language-Endowed Intelligent Agents Lab, present a novel approach to language processing for AI systems.
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In a perfect world, what you see is what you get. If this were the case, the job of artificial intelligence systems would be refreshingly straightforward.
Take collision avoidance systems in self-driving cars. If visual input to on-board cameras could be trusted entirely, an AI system could directly map that input to an appropriate action steer right, steer left, or continue straight to avoid hitting a pedestrian that its cameras see in the road.
But what if there s a glitch in the cameras that slightly shifts an image by a few pixels? If the car blindly trusted so-called adversarial inputs, it might take unnecessary and potentially dangerous action.
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IMAGE: A seminal 1981 study organized the a history of ocean life into three hierarchies, with certain animals reigning the seas during each time periods. Two mass extinctions cleared the way. view more
Credit: Jeff Gage/Florida Museum of Natural History
GAINESVILLE, Fla. - Evolutionary arms races between marine animals overhauled ocean ecosystems on scales similar to the mass extinctions triggered by global disasters, a new study shows.
Scientists at Umeå University in Sweden and the Florida Museum of Natural History used paleontological databases to build a multilayered computer model of the history of marine life over the last 500 million years. Their analysis of the fossil record closely echoed a seminal 1981 study by paleontologist J. John Sepkoski - with one key difference.
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IMAGE: Insects remarkable acrobatic traits help them navigate the aerial world, with all of its wind gusts, obstacles, and general uncertainty. view more
Credit: Courtesy of Kevin Yufeng Chen
If you ve ever swatted a mosquito away from your face, only to have it return again (and again and again), you know that insects can be remarkably acrobatic and resilient in flight. Those traits help them navigate the aerial world, with all of its wind gusts, obstacles, and general uncertainty. Such traits are also hard to build into flying robots, but MIT Assistant Professor Kevin Yufeng Chen has built a system that approaches insects agility.