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5 Major Tech Giants collaborate in Future of AI

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The world’s biggest technology companies are joining forces to consider the future of artificial intelligence (AI).

Amazon, Google’s DeepMind, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft will work together on issues such as privacy, safety and the collaboration between people and AI.

Dubbed the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, it will include external experts.

One said he hoped the group would address “legitimate concerns”.

“We’ve seen a very fast development in AI over a very short period of time,” said Prof Yoshua Bengio, from the University of Montreal.

“The field brings exciting opportunities for companies and public organisations. And yet, it raises legitimate questions about the way these developments will be conducted.”

Bringing the key players together would be the “best way to ensure we all share the same values and overall objectives to serve the common good”, he added.

One notable absentee from the consortium is Apple. It has been in discussions with the group and may join the partnership “soon”, according to one member.

The group will have an equal share of corporate and non-corporate members and is in discussions with organisations such as the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

It stressed that it had no plans to “lobby government or other policy-making bodies”.

“AI has tremendous potential to improve many aspects of life, ranging from healthcare, education and manufacturing to home automation and transport and the founding members… hope to maximise this potential and ensure it benefits as many people as possible,” it said.

It will conduct research under an open licence in the following areas:

  • ethics, fairness and inclusivity
  • transparency
  • privacy and interoperability (how AI works with people)
  • trustworthiness, reliability and robustness

Microsoft’s managing director of research hailed the partnership as a “historic collaboration on AI and its influences on people and society”, while IBM’s ethics researcher Francesca Rossi said it would provide “a vital voice in the advancement of the defining technology of this century”.

Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Google’s artificial intelligence division, DeepMind, said he hoped the group would be able to “break down barriers for AI teams to share best practice and research ways to maximise societal benefits and tackle ethical concerns”.

And Amazon’s director of machine learning, Ralf Herbrich, said the time was ripe for such a collaboration.

“We’re in a golden age of machine learning and AI,” he said.

“As a scientific community, we are still a long way from being able to do things the way humans do things, but we’re solving unbelievably complex problems every day and making incredibly rapid progress.”

Artificial intelligence is beginning to find roles in the real world – from the basic AI used in smartphone voice assistants and web chatbots to AI agents that can take on data analysis to significant breakthroughs such as DeepMind’s victory over champion Go player Lee Sedol.

The win – in one of the world’s most complex board games – was hailed as a defining moment for AI, with experts saying it had come a decade earlier than anyone had predicted.

DeepMind now has 250 scientists at its King’s Cross headquarters, working on a variety of projects, including several tie-ins with the NHS to analyse medical records.

In a lecture at the Royal Academy of Engineering, founder Dr Demis Hassabis revealed the team was now working on creating an artificial hippocampus, an area of the brain regarded by neuroscientists as responsible for emotion, creativity, memory and other human attributes.

But as AI has developed, so have concerns about where the technology is heading.

One of the most vocal and high-profile naysayers is Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, who has tweeted the technology is “potentially more dangerous than nukes [nuclear weapons]” and expressed concerns humans were “just the biological boot loader for digital super-intelligence”.

In order to combat this fear, Google are developing their own AI kill switch which will always allow humans to maintain control over AI machines.

Last year, Mr Musk set up his own non-profit AI group, OpenAI.

It is not, at this stage, part of the Partnership on AI.

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– Jane Wakefield

Incredible House-Building Robot

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A new robot builder can construct an entire house in two days – and never needs a tea break.

Hadrian X is a giant truck-mounted robot that can lay up to 1,000 bricks an hour using a 30-metre arm, meaning it can stay in a single position throughout.

Bricks are fed on to a conveyor belt which sends them along the robot’s long arm – otherwise known as a telescopic boom.

At the end of the boom is a hand which grabs and arranges the bricks, securing them with construction glue instead of cement.

It is smart enough to leave spaces in the brickwork for wiring and plumbing, and can even cut and shape bricks to size.

The robot was created by Australian firm Fastbrick Robotics, and founder Mark Pivac told Perth Now: “People have been laying bricks for about 6,000 years and ever since the industrial revolution, they have tried to automate the bricklaying process.

“We’re at a technological nexus where a few different technologies have got to the level where it’s now possible to do it, and that’s what we’ve done.”

The robot took 10 years to create, and has cost about £4.5m in research and development so far.

Mr Pivac insists he has “nothing against bricklayers”, but says he just wants to streamline the construction process.

The prototype needs no human intervention once the process begins.

Fastbrick Robotics says it will take about a year before the robot is ready to hit the market.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8Q0j3UwjnQ

– SkyNews

Self-Driving Robots To Deliver Food In London

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The self-driving robot uses a GPS tracker coupled with on-board cameras and sensors to help it navigate the streets at 4mph.

Six-wheeled self-driving delivery robots which trundle along at 4mph will soon be used to deliver meals to homes around London.

The self-driving robots can navigate through city streets using a GPS tracker coupled with on-board cameras and sensors.

When the robot arrives at its destination, the customer has to type in a code that has been sent to them.

This lets them open the robot’s lid to collect their food.

So far, 30 robots have travelled 5,000 miles during tests in Greenwich, Milton Keynes and Glastonbury.

Now food delivery firm Just Eat plans to start using them to deliver food to homes in London later this month.

Allan Martinson, the chief operating officer of developer Starship Technologies, said: “We haven’t lost a single robot in eight months, or been involved in any accidents that resulted in loss or injury.”

He said most people who’ve spotted them in the street are unfazed, but kids “love it”.

“We’ve seen them try to chase it, hug it. One person tried to feed it a banana.”

To prevent theft and other interference, it is fitted with a movement sensor that sends an alert if it is lifted off the ground.

It also has nine cameras and two-way audio to a control room, from which humans oversee the robot army.

It is cheaper than regular delivery – costing around £1 to transport goods within a 3 mile radius.

Just Eat chief executive David Buttress said: “In busy times there’s a shortage of supply drivers. These will enable restaurants to meet the demand.”

– Sky News

AI Fighter Pilot wins in Combat Simulation

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An artificially intelligent fighter pilot system has defeated two attacking jets in a combat simulation.

The AI, known as Alpha, used four virtual jets to successfully defend a coastline against two attacking aircraft – and did not suffer any losses.

Alpha, which was developed by a US team, also triumphed in simulation against a retired human fighter pilot.

One military aviation expert said the results were promising.

In the simulation, both attacking jets – the blue team – had more capable weapons systems.

But Alpha’s red team was able to dispatch the enemy planes after performing evasive manoeuvres.

‘Deadly opponent’

In their paper, researchers from the University of Cincinnati and defence company Psibernetix describe Alpha as “a deadly opponent”.

Reporting on simulated assaults against retired US Air Force colonel Gene Lee, the researchers wrote: “Not only could he not score a kill against it, he was shot out of the air by the reds every time after protracted engagements.”

Alpha uses a form of artificial intelligence based on the concept of “fuzzy logic” – in which a computer considers a wide range of options before making a decision.

Because a simulated fighter jet produces so much data for interpretation, it is not always obvious which manoeuvre is most advantageous or, indeed, at what point a weapon should be fired.

Fuzzy logic systems can weigh up the significance of these individual pieces of data before making a broader decision.

The researchers’ key achievement here was to do this in real-time with computational efficiency.

“Here, you’ve got an AI system that seems to be able to deal with the air-to-air environment, which is extraordinarily dynamic, has an extraordinary number of parameters and, in the paper, more than holds its own against a skilled and capable, experienced combat pilot,” said Doug Barrie, a military aerospace analyst at think tank IISS.

“It’s like a chess master losing out to a computer.”

Ethical questions

But Mr Barrie also stated it might not be easy or appropriate to translate the system to real-world combat environments.

If such a system were ever used in a live setting and decided to attack a non-military target, the results could be dire, he said.

“The public furore about that would be immense,” he said.

However, at the very least, Mr Barrie said, Alpha had potential as a simulation tool or as a device to help develop better systems for assisting human pilots in the air.

– Chris Baraniuk

Could a House Cleaning Robot be Developed?

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Elon Musk’s openAI project says it is working on a robot to clean people’s Houses

Building a robot that can help people in their homes will be a good way of testing the future of AI, Musk’s research group says – and so to ensure that they don’t take over the world and kill us

Elon Musk’s $1 billion artificial intelligence group wants to build a robot to clean people’s houses.

OpenAI – which is funded by the billionaire maker of reusable rockets and electric cars – hopes to build a domestic robot as a test of its research into how to build artificial intelligence that won’t kill us.

Building such a robot isn’t just a way of getting rid of household chores. It would also be a neat way of testing whether or not its work in artificial intelligence is progressing in the right way.

There are already ways of creating a robot that can carry out specific tasks, the researchers note. The difference is that Musk’s team hopes to create “learning algorithms” that would allow the creation to serve as a “general purpose” robot – meaning that it can be left around the home and be clever enough to work out what it needs to do to clean.

Creating such a robot is a “good testbed for many challenges in AI”, the team note. The robot won’t be built by OpenAI, but instead use components from elsewhere that are programmed by the group.

Creating a household robot is the second goal of the OpenAI group. It has already detailed its work in meeting goal one – “Measure our progress” – when it laid out plans for a special gym that can help train artificial intelligence programs.

The goals that follow are building an agent that can understand natural language and creating one that could solve a “wide variety of games”. OpenAI hopes that the different goals capture different kinds of problem-solving and together can progress towards its goal of building smart AI systems that don’t also wipe out life on Earth.

– Andrew Griffin

Incredible Badminton-Playing Robot

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A fully automated Robot capable of playing Badminton

Students and professors at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China have developed a robot that can play badminton as well any amateur. The robot uses a combination of cameras, motion sensors, and a unique navigation system to sweep through Chinese robotics competitions while racking up the wins.

The Robomintoner, as its inventors call it, was fittingly created through the spirit of competition. The UESTC team was tasked with creating a badminton-playing bot for the Asia-Pacific Robocon 2015, where robots would face off against each other in doubles matches. “We were the only team who made this robot fully-automated. We are in the business of making clever devices. We might as well make it fully intelligent,” said Huang Xi, student from University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, at the time.

The robot has become something of celebrity in China, an occurrence known to happen from time to time.  It has played ceremonial matches against Dong Jiong, an Olympic medal winning badminton player. Recently, it took on table tennis champion Wang Liqin. Although out of his comfort zone, Liqin said he was “amazed” at the robot’s speed and ability.

With two high-definition cameras acting as its eyes, the Robomintoner tracks the shuttlecock—the badminton equivalent of a ball. It projects a trajectory and then sends that information to a mobile platform through Bluetooth, which then guides the robot’s physical motion. This is crucial because, as mechatronics professor from UETSC Luo Deyuan notes, “currently there’s no perfect system in the world for a robot to locate itself indoors.”

Robots that can win at chess and Go often win the big headlines with their dynamic ability to learn, while the jock robots playing sports might seem like more like one-trick ponies. But speaking about the robot after seeing it at work, table tennis player Liqin remarked that it might not be long before robots start replacing practice partners for elite-level athletes. Considering how the UETSC teams plans on marketing and selling Robomintoners as soon as possible, the jock bots could quickly become the practice norm.

– Gizmodo

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