A new AI tool identified long COVID in 22.8% of patients, a much higher rate than previously diagnosed. By analyzing extensive health records from nearly 300,000 patients, the algorithm identifies long COVID by distinguishing symptoms linked specifically to SARS-CoV-2 infection rather than pre-existing conditions. This AI approach, known as "precision phenotyping," helps clinicians differentiate long COVID symptoms from other health issues and may improve diagnostic accuracy by about 3%.
Another one of OpenAI’s lead safety researchers, Lilian Weng, announced on Friday she is departing the startup. Weng served as VP of research and safety since August, and before that, was the head of the OpenAI’s safety systems team. In a post on X, Weng said that “after 7 years at OpenAI, I feel ready […]
Now that the election is over, the dissection can begin. As this is the first election in which AI chatbots played a significant part of voters’ information diets, even approximate numbers are interesting to think about. For instance, OpenAI has stated that it told around 2 million users of ChatGPT to go look somewhere else. […]
There isn’t a shortage of AI-powered coding assistance startups. They include Augment, Codeium, Magic, and Poolside. However, Cursor has become one of the most popular. Its developer, Anysphere, has seen its revenue grow from $4 million annualized recurring revenue (ARR) in April to $4 million a month as of last month, according to a person […]
Anthropic has announced a partnership with Palantir and Amazon Web Services to bring its Claude AI models to unspecified US intelligence and defense agencies. Claude, a family of AI language models similar to those that power ChatGPT, will work within Palantir's platform using AWS hosting to process and analyze data. But some critics have called out the deal as contradictory to Anthropic's widely-publicized "AI safety" aims.
The partnership makes Claude available within Palantir's Impact Level 6 environment (IL6), a defense-accredited system that handles data critical to national security up to the "secret" classification level. This move follows a broader trend of AI companies seeking defense contracts, with Meta offering its Llama models to defense partners and OpenAI pursuing closer ties with the Defense Department.
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
Researchers at Meta FAIR are releasing several new research artifacts that advance robotics and support our goal of reaching advanced machine intelligence (AMI). These include Meta Sparsh, the first general-purpose encoder for vision-based tactile sensing that works across many tactile sensors and many tasks; Meta Digit 360, an artificial fingertip-based tactile sensor that delivers detailed touch data with human-level precision and touch-sensing; and Meta Digit Plexus, a standardized platform for robotic sensor connections and interactions that enables seamless data collection, control and analysis over a single cable.
The first bimanual Torso created at Clone includes an actuated elbow, cervical spine (neck), and anthropomorphic shoulders with the sternoclavicular, acromioclavicular, scapulothoracic and glenohumeral joints. The valve matrix fits compactly inside the ribcage. Bimanual manipulation training is in progress.
Equipped with a new behavior architecture, Nadia navigates and traverses many types of doors autonomously. Nadia also demonstrates robustness to failed grasps and door opening attempts by automatically retrying and continuing. We present the robot with pull and push doors, four types of opening mechanisms, and even spring-loaded door closers. A deep neural network and door plane estimator allow Nadia to identify and track the doors.
In this study, we integrate the musculoskeletal humanoid Musashi with the wire-driven robot CubiX, capable of connecting to the environment, to form CubiXMusashi. This combination addresses the shortcomings of traditional musculoskeletal humanoids and enables movements beyond the capabilities of other humanoids. CubiXMusashi connects to the environment with wires and drives by winding them, successfully achieving movements such as pull-up, rising from a lying pose, and mid-air kicking, which are difficult for Musashi alone.
[ CubiXMusashi, JSK Robotics Laboratory, University of Tokyo ]
Thanks, Shintaro!
An old boardwalk seems like a nightmare for any robot with flat feet.
This paper presents a novel learning-based control framework that uses keyframing to incorporate high-level objectives in natural locomotion for legged robots. These high-level objectives are specified as a variable number of partial or complete pose targets that are spaced arbitrarily in time. Our proposed framework utilizes a multi-critic reinforcement learning algorithm to effectively handle the mixture of dense and sparse rewards. In the experiments, the multi-critic method significantly reduces the effort of hyperparameter tuning compared to the standard single-critic alternative. Moreover, the proposed transformer-based architecture enables robots to anticipate future goals, which results in quantitative improvements in their ability to reach their targets.
We present the first static-obstacle avoidance method for quadrotors using just an onboard, monocular event camera. Quadrotors are capable of fast and agile flight in cluttered environments when piloted manually, but vision-based autonomous flight in unknown environments is difficult in part due to the sensor limitations of traditional onboard cameras. Event cameras, however, promise nearly zero motion blur and high dynamic range, but produce a large volume of events under significant ego-motion and further lack a continuous-time sensor model in simulation, making direct sim-to-real transfer not possible.
[ Paper University of Pennsylvania and University of Zurich ]
Cross-embodiment imitation learning enables policies trained on specific embodiments to transfer across different robots, unlocking the potential for large-scale imitation learning that is both cost-effective and highly reusable. This paper presents LEGATO, a cross-embodiment imitation learning framework for visuomotor skill transfer across varied kinematic morphologies. We introduce a handheld gripper that unifies action and observation spaces, allowing tasks to be defined consistently across robots.
The 2024 Xi’an Marathon has kicked off! STAR1, the general-purpose humanoid robot from Robot Era, joins runners in this ancient yet modern city for an exciting start!
In robotics, there are valuable lessons for students and mentors alike. Watch how the CyberKnights, a FIRST robotics team champion sponsored by RTX, with the encouragement of their RTX mentor, faced challenges after a poor performance and scrapped its robot to build a new one in just nine days.
In this special video, PAL Robotics takes you behind the scenes of our 20th-anniversary celebration, a memorable gathering with industry leaders and visionaries from across robotics and technology. From inspiring speeches to milestone highlights, the event was a testament to our journey and the incredible partnerships that have shaped our path.
The Beatles have been nominated for two Grammy awards this year, and no, we did not accidentally fall into a time warp back to the 1960s. The Beatles’ song “Now and Then,” refined with the use of AI and released last year, is up for Record of the Year and Best Rock Performance. So, the […]
After a career as a corruption investigator, Aaron Narva had an idea for a startup in the age of LLM AI: help hospitals identify risky behavior by doctors.
These days, it seems like every company either wants to or is already offering an AI product or service. For startups building an AI product in this space, it’s a really good time, but they aren’t without their challenges — the tech is still early, and though many companies are interested in trying generative AI […]
Ask a few random people about Apple Intelligence and you’ll probably get quite different responses.
One might be excited about the new features. Another could opine that no one asked for this and the company is throwing away its reputation with creatives and artists to chase a fad. Another still might tell you that regardless of the potential value, Apple is simply too late to the game to make a mark.
The release of Apple’s first Apple Intelligence-branded AI tools in iOS 18.1 last week makes all those perspectives understandable.
Among the decades-old Windows apps to get renewed attention from Microsoft during the Windows 11 era is Notepad, the basic built-in text editor that was much the same in early 2021 as it had been in the '90 and 2000s. Since then, it has gotten a raft of updates, including a visual redesign, spellcheck and autocorrect, and window tabs.
Given Microsoft's continuing obsession with all things AI, it's perhaps not surprising that the app's latest update (currently in preview for Canary and Dev Windows Insiders) is a generative AI feature called Rewrite that promises to adjust the length, tone, and phrasing of highlighted sentences or paragraphs using generative AI. Users will be offered three rewritten options based on what they've highlighted, and they can select the one they like best or tell the app to try again.
Rewrite appears to be based on the same technology as the Copilot assistant, since it uses cloud-side processing (rather than your local CPU, GPU, or NPU) and requires Microsoft account sign-in to work. The initial preview is available to users in the US, France, the UK, Canada, Italy, and Germany.
There’s a big opportunity for generative AI in the world of translation, and a startup called Panjaya is taking the concept to the next level: a hyperrealistic, GenAI-based dubbing tool for videos that recreates a person’s original voice speaking the new language, with the video and the speaker’s physical movements automatically modifying to match up […]
Amazon is considering increasing its investment in OpenAI rival Anthropic. According to The Information, Amazon is in talks to invest multiple billions in Anthropic, its first financial pledge in the company since a $4 billion deal struck last year. The new investment is structured similar to the last one — but with a twist. Amazon […]
AI startup Mistral has launched a new API for content moderation. The API, which is the same API that powers moderation in Mistral’s Le Chat chatbot platform, can be tailored to specific applications and safety standards, Mistral says. It’s powered by a fine-tuned model (Ministral 8B) trained to classify text in a range of languages, […]
Microsoft announced on Thursday that Outlook is getting a new feature that will allow you to use generative AI to create themes based on your personal preferences. AI-powered themes are available to people who have a Copilot Pro consumer subscription and business accounts with Copilot enabled. They are available on iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and […]
Ars Technica descended in force last week upon our nation's capital, setting up shop in the International Spy Museum for a three-panel discussion on artificial intelligence, infrastructure, security, and how compliance with policy changes over the next decade or so might shape the future of business computing in all its forms. Much like our San Jose event last month, the venue was packed to the rafters with Ars readers eager for knowledge (and perhaps some free drinks, which is definitely why I was there!). A bit over 200 people were eventually herded into one of the conference spaces in the venue's upper floors, and Ars Editor-in-Chief Ken Fisher hopped on stage to take us in.
Looking down one of the tables just before the panel discussions began.
Credit:
DC Event Photojournalism
From left to right are Ars reporter Kevin Purdy, Ars science-master Dr. John Timmer, security genius Sean Gallagher, and me. Here I'm accusing Kevin—whom I'm meeting in person for the first time—of being unreasonably tall.
Credit:
DC Event Photojournalism
"Today's event about privacy, compliance, and making infrastructure smarter, I think, could not be more perfectly timed," said Fisher. "I don't know about your orgs, but I know Ars Technica and our parent company, Condé Nast, are currently thinking about generative AI and how it touches almost every aspect or could touch almost every aspect of our business."
Ars EIC Ken Fisher takes the stage to kick things off.
Credit:
DC Event Photojournalism
Fisher continued: "I think the media talks about how [generative AI] is going to maybe write news and take over content, but the reality is that generative AI has a lot of potential to help us in finance, to help us with opex, to help us with planning—to help us with pretty much every aspect of our business and in our business. And from what I'm reading online, many folks are starting to have this dream that generative AI is going to lead them into a world where they can replace a lot of SaaS services where they can make a pivot to first-party data."
A recent study questions if large language models (LLMs) truly form coherent world models, despite their accurate outputs in complex tasks like generating directions or playing games. Researchers found that while LLMs provide nearly flawless driving directions, they fail with unexpected changes, suggesting the models don't grasp underlying rules.
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A new AI tool identified long COVID in 22.8% of patients, a much higher rate than previously diagnosed. By analyzing extensive health records from nearly 300,000 patients, the algorithm identifies long COVID by distinguishing symptoms linked specifically to SARS-CoV-2 infection rather than pre-existing conditions. This AI approach, known as "precision phenotyping," helps clinicians differentiate long COVID symptoms from other health issues and may improve diagnostic accuracy by about 3%. 
