Category Archives: Robotics

Army researchers are looking to add muscle tissue to robot platforms, giving them never before seen mobility and agility.

The effort by scientists with the Armys Combat Capabilities Development Command, Army Research Laboratory and Duke University and the University of North Carolina is looking first at adding muscle to legged robot joints rather than using actuators, according to an Army Research Laboratory statement.

The combined muscle and robot echoes a line from the 1991 film, Terminator 2: Judgement Day when the T-1000 character explains what he is to the young protagonist John Connor shortly after they meet.

Connor: You are a Terminator, right?

T-1000: Yes, Cyberdyne Systems Model 101.

Connor: Youre really real. I mean, like a machine underneath but sort of alive outside?

T-1000: Im a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton.

While the early Army research makes no mention of cyborgs, scientists do note the advantages of muscle tissue as compared to robotics components currently in use.

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Though impressive in their own right, todays robots are deployed to serve a limited purpose then are retrieved some minutes later, said Dean Culver, a research scientist at the laboratory. ARL wants robots to be versatile teammates capable of going anywhere Soldiers can and more, adapting to the needs of any given situation.

Those first, legged applications are likely to include platforms similar to the existing Army Legged Locomotion and Movement Adaptation robot, or LLAMA and the Marine Corps Legged Squad Support System, or LS3, according to the statement.

They main goal is to get legged robots, which have certain utilities in rough terrain, better stability in on uneven, cluttered surfaces.

For example, one criticism that soldiers testing a wheeled robotic combat vehicle in rifle platoon maneuvers at Fort Benning, Georgia, in November had was its difficulty in working alongside soldiers in dense vegetation during dismounted operations.

One obstacle that faces ground-based robots today is an inability to instantly adjust or adapt to unstable terrain, Culver said. Muscle actuation, though certainly not solely responsible for it, is a big contributor to animals ability to navigate uneven and unreliable terrain.

The same is true for winged creatures who can reconfigure their shape to move in tight spaces, such as among tree branches, Culver said.

The research isnt without precedent. In 2014, teams at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign built the first self-propelled, microscopic, biohybrid robots powered by beating cardiac muscle cells that were derived from rats, according to the National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center.

Similarly, Army scientists look to grow muscle cells and tissue for the robots for the robot biohybrid work instead of extracting it from living organisms.

Muscle tissue is outstanding at producing a specific amount of mechanical power at a given moment, and its versatility is unrivaled in robotic actuation today, Culver said.

To make the muscles work with various sizes of joints, existing methods include creating a sort of type of gel with the muscle cells inside, Ritu Raman, a mechanical engineer who works in biohybrid design, told Science Focus Magazine in October.

That gel is then molded to the shape needed for the muscular action on the robot.

Then, because the cells are alive, when they go through this process, theyre sensing and responding to their environment, Raman said.

Read more:

Not quite the Terminator, but 'muscle-bound' robots are coming for the Army, Marines - ArmyTimes.com

Date: 12/07/2020Writer: Tiffany Acosta, 575-646-3929, tfrank@nmsu.edu Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Google+

More than 80 middle- and high-school students from across New Mexico and El Paso, Texas, gathered virtually for the 2020 NM Boosting Engineering, Science and Technology Robotics competition Nov. 21. While the COVID-19 pandemic affected the BEST competition, the 20-year event, hosted by New Mexico State Universitys College of Engineering, continued.

The BEST competition engages middle- and high-school students with engineering and technology concepts and skills through participation in a robotics design challenge. Typically teams receive a kit of parts and electronics to design and build remote-controlled robots to accomplish a specific task. This year in Outbreak Online, teams designed and built their robotics prototypes using MATLAB, a software program used by professional engineers and rarely taught until higher education. Students simulated their driver-controlled and autonomous robots on a 3D virtual field. Students still maintained an engineering notebook, prepared marketing presentations and displayed their robot in an exhibit, virtually.

Winners of the 2020 Outbreak competition include Chaparral Middle School from Chaparral, New Mexico, Arrowhead Early College High School from Las Cruces, School of Dreams Academy from Los Lunas, New Mexico, and Franklin High School and William D. Slider Middle School from El Paso, Texas. The winning teams advanced to the virtual regional competition held Dec. 7-11.

BEST Robotics is one of the few robotics competitions in the country that takes students through the entire engineering design process, said STEM Program Manager Clara Welles. While the theme of each game changes annually, the experience is one that mirrors real-world engineering projects, and this year is no different. The students learn project management, engineering design, marketing, prototype development using digital software, as well as virtual collaboration. Even in a virtual setting, these students have learned skills that are critical for success in the real world.

This year, Outbreak: Adjusting to the Threat challenged middle- and high-school student teams to help slow the spread of a virus. The competition highlighted the real-world issue of disease control, giving participants an opportunity to apply their knowledge and experience to a subject effecting the entire world and to an industry that so desperately needs advancements in technology.

It is amazing that many of the BEST Robotics competitions have been so applicable to New Mexicos economy, and the direct experiences of New Mexico students, Welles said. Our STEM outreach efforts are important for meeting the workforce needs of our state, and competitions like BEST create a pivotal link in the pipeline.

NM BEST participants often pursue engineering and other STEM-related fields at universities across the state. The program is offered at no cost to participating schools thanks to financial support provided by Sandia National Labs, Chevron and El Paso Electric Company.

More here:

NMSU hosted virtual robotics competition, winning teams advance to regional event - New Mexico State University NewsCenter

The FIRST robotics community will move full speed ahead with its team-based robotics programs this season, although the experience might look slightly different because of the pandemic.

We had to make a bunch of modifications, especially for the younger age groups, said Mark Giordono, vice-president of development with FIRST.

FIRST Lego League already started its season this fall with teams either meeting in-person or remotely depending on the status of their school districts, according to Giordono.

The FIRST Robotics program for high school students will kick off next month and will operate in a similar fashion, he said. There will be tons of remote collaboration taking place, said Giordono, adding each team will decide how to make the situation work for them, and then share their success with the rest of the FIRST community.

We always help each other out. There is a strong culture of collaboration, said Christine Miska, founder of her own FIRST team and BAE Systems engineer director.

The FIRST programs are even more critical this year, according to Miska, who said that during a time when remote learning has become the norm, providing students with another opportunity to collaborate with their peers and become a part of a team is vitally important.

One of the main objectives of FIRST is to work together as a unified team to solve problems. The pandemic is simply another challenge these teams must face and overcome, and they are doing it seamlessly, said Miska.

On Monday, FIRST announced that BAE Systems is now one of its new strategic partners. To date, the company has donated more than $9 million to FIRST teams and events, and provided thousands of hours of employee volunteerism while also granting $40,000 in scholarships to FIRST students each year and sponsoring hundreds of FIRST teams across the nation.

We have seen kids transform from super shy to confidently presenting as part of a team up in front of a large group, said Miska, stressing FIRST is so much more than just robots.

It inspires students through collaboration, critical thinking and creativity, Tom Arseneault, president and CEO at BAE Systems, Inc., said in a statement. That is why BAE Systems is a proud partner of FIRST, and why our employees are strong supporters of the students who will carry these leadership experiences with them for the rest of their lives.

FIRST also exposes children to STEM fields at an early age, helping to build their confidence and, possibly, create future engineers, operators or technicians, explained Miska.

Giordono agreed, adding BAE Systems has been working with FIRST for the past 25 years, working tirelessly to help support FIRSTs programs, mission and overall success.

Continue reading here:

FIRST Robotics program set to kick off in January, with BAE Systems providing support - The Union Leader

Ive been helping the local high schools FIRST Robotics team for a decade, although not technically theyve got real engineers. I write and put together the kids parody musical as part of their fund-raising night, and they are much better than youre thinking right now.

COVID-19 has, of course, upended the whole program, which has gone global since Dean Kamen started it in a New Hampshire gym in 1992, and Im not sure whats happening this year. Very sad: Tons of geeky kids itching to get their hands on gears, belts, wheels and software are stranded!

So I enjoyed a story in the Valley News (read it here) about a local FIRST Robotics team helping doctors make telepresence robots for patients. The idea is pretty simple: Put an iPad with camera at eye level atop a tall stick and have it drive around on a remote-controlled stand. Lots of them exist in various forms, and the pandemic has boosted their use.

But the devils in the details, such as how to attach things.

One of my students came up with the idea to use magnets, said James Cole-Henry, a mechanical engineer at Lebanon-based Fujifilm Dimatix who is also head coach for the Grasshoppers, the FIRST robotics team at the Hartford Area Career Technical Center. I was a little embarrassed. At work Im like Mr. Magnet.

But wait, you say, wouldnt a magnet mess up the iPad? Youll have to read the story to see the answer.

See more here:

How to make one of those iPad telepresence robots? Magnets! - Concord Monitor

Finally, the ultimate kitchen gadget you never knew you wanted is here but it will cost you about the same as the average UK house.

For those stumped as to what to buy the super-rich person in their lives this Christmas, how about a fully robotic kitchen that promises to whip up a choice of up to 5,000 recipes at the press of a button?

A London-based robotics company on Sunday unveiled the worlds first robot kitchen, which it promises cooks from scratch and even cleans up afterwards without complaint.

The Moley Kitchen robot, brainchild of Russian mathematician and computer scientist Mark Oleynik, promises to make restaurant standard meals without its owner having to lift a finger or order a takeaway.

Its not cheap though: the robot costs a minimum of 248,000, roughly the same as the average UK house. Oleynik acknowledged the high cost, but claims there had been 1,205 qualified sales enquiries from people interested in buying one. He said the price was equivalent to a supercar or small yacht. The company hopes to introduce lower-priced models in the future.

What you are looking at here is the worlds first consumer robotic kitchen, Oleynik said as he launched the robot kitchen at the Gulf information technology exhibition in Dubai. Like all breakthrough technologies cars, televisions and computers it will appeal to enthusiasts, professionals and early adopters, and is priced accordingly.

We anticipate that our pricing will be reduced significantly over time with production volume, efficiencies and economies of scale.

The robot has been developed with the assistance of Tim Anderson, a culinary innovator and winner of the 2011 series of BBC MasterChef. Andersons cooking techniques were captured in 3D and translated into elegant digital movement using bespoke algorithms.

Anderson and fellow chefs Nicole Pisani and Andrew Clarke have created 30 dishes to showcase the systems capabilities at launch, with new recipes added every month. The company said that ultimately customers will be able to select from a digital menu of more than 5,000 choices, as well as having the option to record their own favourite dishes.

The technology features two robotic arms with fully articulated hands, developed in collaboration with world-leading German robotic company Schunk. Said to reliably reproduce the movements of human hands, they allow the robot to retrieve ingredients from the smart fridge, adjust hob temperature, use the sink to fill pans and pour, mix and plate up just as a human cook would.

And if youre worried about how much mess a mechanical cook can possibly make dont. The robot even cleans up after itself without complaint, Oleynik said.

Here is the original post:

The robot kitchen that will make you dinner and wash up too - The Guardian

As the staff at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon was planning for an expected surge in COVID-19 cases last spring, some worried about delivering care for patients in isolation.

I hate the idea of having to minimize contact, but in certain circumstances thats the right thing to do, said Dr. Meredith MacMartin, medical director at the Jack Byrne Center for Palliative & Hospice Care.

Patients in isolation are already provided iPads on mobile stands so they can visit with family members virtually, or meet with their care team. But bringing tablets into patient rooms required at least one staffer wearing personal protective equipment.

Theres where the robots come into the picture.

MacMartin started talking to an engineer friend who put her in touch with James Cole-Henry, a mechanical engineer at Fujifilm Dimatix in Lebanon. He is coach of the Hartford Area Career and Technology Center FIRST Robotics Team #95, known as the Grasshoppers.

The Grasshoppers are composed of students from Hartford High School in Vermont as well as Hanover High School, Lebanon High School, Mascoma Regional High School and home-schoolers.

Cole-Henry and the Grasshoppers worked quickly to develop the robots, which can bring the iPad stands into the patient rooms, with minimal contact between the patient and staff.

This was an extremely fast product development cycle, just like the FIRST Robotics Competitions we participate in every year, Cole-Henry said.

Cole-Henry and the team worked through several prototypes before settling on the final design, a 26-inch by 19-inch, triangle-shaped robot operated by a remote control. The robot can move at a pace of 5 feet per second and features a magnet that attaches to the metal iPad stands.

Cole-Henry said part of the challenge for the team was to develop a robot that would not spread COVID-19. That meant a tight design with no gaps and no porous materials to trap germs.

The robot has to be able to be easily cleaned after each use, Cole-Henry said.

With the help of local businesses, the team was able to put together the robots for DHMC.

The Grasshoppers robot design, bill of materials, and code have all been left as open-source, meaning others can use the work done by this team. Dartmouth-Hitchcock is already planning to use the robot and iPad system throughout its health care network.

See the original post here:

DHMC deploys robots to help in COVID surge - The Union Leader

ISKANDAR PUTERI: Johor is set to become a major player in the drone and robotics sectors with the first specific zone in South-East Asia.

Mentri Besar Datuk Hasni Mohammad (pic) said the Drone and Robotic Zone (DRZ) Iskandar was a collaboration between Iskandar Investment Berhad (IIB), together with global logistics company DHL and Malaysian Global Innovation and Creativity Centre (MaGIC).

"Johor needs an integrated digital ecosystem to further boost our digital economy to the next level, especially in the South-East Asia region.

In line with the Johor Digital Masterplan to transform Johor into a smart state and accelerate its digital economy, the launch of DRZ Iskandar brings us one step closer in creating a digital hub in Iskandar Malaysia, as announced recently in the state Budget 2021, he added.

He stressed that the DRZ was projected to bring in over RM351mil of investments and generate 1,000 high-value jobs by 2025 in drone and robotics.

Hasni said this in his speech virtually during the official launch of DRZ Iskandar on Tuesday (Dec 8).

Also present at the event virtually was Science, Technology and Innovation Minister Khairy Jamaluddin.

Meanwhile, Khairy said that DRZ Iskandar was timely with Asia and North America the largest drone markets currently.

He added that according to the 2020 industry report produced by Drone Industry Insights, Asia was expected to experience growth from US$8.6bil (RM34.9bil) in 2020 to US$17.9bil (RM72.8bil) in 2025 in revenue.

As for robotics, Asia Pacific accounts for 54% of the global market, and is the leading market for robotics. This is set to double in five years with the increasing global demand for automation in various industries.

According to the Global Startup Ecosystem Report 2020 (GSER2020), Malaysia was ranked in the Top 10 of Emerging Ecosystems in Performance, and in the Top 20 for Emerging Ecosystems in Talent with an ecosystem valuation of US$15.3bil (RM63.5bil), he added.

He also said that Malaysia retains its 35th position out of 129 countries in the Global Innovation Index 2019 and remains among the middle-income economies that were bridging the innovation divide.

I am confident that with these indicators, coupled with our strategic location, ready infrastructure and a growing community of drone and robotics enthusiasts, Malaysia is set to become the drone and robotics hub of South-East Asia, he added.

Original post:

Johor set to be major player in drone, robotics sectors with new zone - The Star Online

Karakuri,the world leading food robotics company, is bringing the future of food to life as it lifts the lid to unveil the worlds first automated canteen to make meals, the DK-One.

Karakuris robotic system will revolutionise how and what we eat in restaurants, canteens, buffets, hotels and supermarkets as demand for personalised nutrition grows and the industrys looks for new ways to operate in a post-Covid world.

Today the company is showcasing a pre-production version of their DK-One robot, the next exciting stage in Karakuris journey to creating an entirely new category of made-to-order healthy convenience food. In order to accelerate the companys growth, Karakuri has also closed a 6.3million investment, led by firstminute capital and which includes funding from Hoxton Ventures, Taylor Brothers, Ocado Group and the Future Fund, which was developed by the UK government and is being delivered by the British Business Bank. This investment will be used to further accelerate the development of Karakuris technologies and create new products beyond the DK-One.

Todays announcement shows Karakuris first pre-production machine which uses the latest innovation in robotics, sensing and control technologies to offer freshly prepared, high quality hot and cold meals, which maximise nutritional benefits, restaurant performance and minimise food waste.

The pre-production version of the DK-One is being demonstrated and evaluated by customers in Karakuris facility in Hammersmith, London.

Post-COVID restrictions, further on-customer-site trials of the DK-One are expected to take place in the first half of 2021.

Key features of this version of the DK-One include:

Barney Wragg, CEO and co-founder of Karakuri, said,This is one of the most highly-anticipated stages of our business and a really important step. Weve spent time talking to our customers and industry specialists, and seen huge enthusiasm for DK-Ones potential. Now up and running, this will be the first time we can use a pre-production machine to demonstrate the DK-Ones commercial and nutritional benefits in the real world and thus demonstrate our vision for the future of food. I am proud of our amazing team for the work theyve done to get this far this quickly, despite the challenges of the pandemic. We are all really excited to begin fulfilling our customers expectations.

Professor David Lane, CBE, Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics and Co-Chair of the UK Government Robotics Growth Partnership, added,Even before the pandemic, it was clear there were many opportunities to increase sustainability, resilience and productivity in the catering industry, and to better address changing consumer tastes and lifestyles while reducing the huge amount of wastage. The pandemic has thrown up further challenges of distancing and remote working that can now readily be addressed through robotic innovation. This is why there has been a huge interest in the developments Barney and his team are innovating at Karakuri and its a pleasure to be supporting them in the next stage of the business

The DK-One is the worlds first robotic solution for high throughput, fast turnaround, completely personalised, portion-controlled, volume catering. Customers are able to customise and place their order from their phone or an in-store tablet. The robot will individually prepare each meal, selecting from 18 hot or cold ingredients with precise accuracy. The DK-One prepares multiple orders at the same time, ensuring it meets the demand of the busiest restaurants.

Karakuri is a UK robotics startup established in February 2018. It emerged from the Founders Factory venture studio with the goal of utilising groundbreaking intelligent robotics, to transform and improve ready to eat catering and, at the same time, reduce the associated food wastage. Karakuri was founded by Barney Wragg, Simon Watt and Brent Hoberman and has closed 13.5m funding including investments from Ocado, Hoxton Ventures, firstminute capital, Taylor Brothers and the Future Fund.

More:

Karakuri unveils its first robotic canteen set to change the global food and hospitality industry - Robotics Tomorrow

08/12/2020 Panasonic System Solutions Europe

Panasonic announces its R&D strategy for its next generation of robots. Based on its broad expertise in sensor as well as drives technology, and derived from its leading technologies in industrial robots, Panasonic will tackle the needs of aging societies from healthcare add-ons to labour shortages in retail and logistics.

The companys approach is on pragmatic solutions that work with people, and this can be defined within three core pillars: augmented solutions, stand-alone solutions, and complete robotics automation solutions. The company introduced six robot models aligned with its new Robotics strategy during a virtual press conference.

Utilizing the Advantage in Industrial Robots & Sensory

Panasonic is a tier-one producer of industry robots due to its development of cutting-edge sensors and drives. The company predicts that the general market trends in the components sector such as the focus on miniaturization, the combination of multiple intelligent sensors in one device, and the reduction of mass, enable new applications to be explored.

Johannes Spatz, President of Panasonic Industry in Europe comments, We believe the knowledge and technology in these areas along with our know-how in industrial robots prepare a reliable and tested pathway for successful applications of robotics in other areas.

One of the examples highlighting the transference of industrial applications to the healthcare industry is the usage of lidar sensors within delivery robots that had originally been developed for automated guided vehicles in production sites. This semi-automated robotics application is enabling the outsourcing of standard tasks to meet the needs of staff shortage within busy hospitals.

Increasing Value Depth & Adaption Speed for Robotics

Panasonic has pointed out that two key trends are on the rise: customers expect turnkey solutions from one supplier, and the adaption time decreases significantly. During the press conference, the company highlighted the engineering solution for the Continental factory in Regensburg as an example for the demand for holistic solutions. Delivered this year, the solution included process analysis, re-designing the layout of the loading area, physical process optimization, and the technical hardware. Alongside this was the installation of a Visual Sort Assist solution with direct integration into the SAP warehouse management system. As an example for the reduction in adaptation time, Panasonic presented a project of equipping a 3,000sm retail store in the UK within one working day with Electronic Shelf Labels including the connection to the warehouse system.

Academic Partnerships & Open Source Solutions

Central to the new strategy is a strategic change. Panasonic now has cooperation and joint offices with eight universities two in Europe and six in Japan. Among the partnerships in Europe are those with the Technical University in Munich, Germany, and the ETH in Zurich, Switzerland. Takeshi Ando, head of the Global Robotics R&D activities at Panasonic summarizes: Panasonic has evolved from pushing proprietary systems to an open technology platform. The new platform combines elemental technologies such as sensing, system integration, planning and computing, locomotion, object handling, communication and power source and battery.

Process and Control Today are not responsible for the content of submitted or externally produced articles and images. Click here to email us about any errors or omissions contained within this article.

See the rest here:

Panasonic's Robotics Solutions: The Importance of Functional over Fun - Process & Control Today

Deep learning is great, but no, it won't be able to do everything. The only way to make progress in AI is to put together building blocks that are there already, but no current AI system combines. Adding knowledge to the mix, getting over prejudice against "good old AI", and scaling it up, are all necessary steps in the long and winding road to reboot AI.

This is a summary of the thesis taken by scientist, best-selling author, and entrepreneur Gary Marcus towards rebooting AI. Marcus, a cognitive scientist by training, has been doing interdisciplinary work on the nature of intelligence -- artificial or otherwise -- more or less since his childhood.

Marcus, known in AI circles among other things for his critique on deep learning, recently published a 60-page long paper titled "The Next Decade in AI: Four Steps Towards Robust Artificial Intelligence." In this work, Marcus goes beyond critique, putting forward concrete proposals to move AI forward.

As a precursor to Marcus' recent keynote on the future of AI in Knowledge Connexions, ZDNet engaged with him on a wide array of topics. We set the stage by providing background on where Marcus is coming from, and elaborated on the fusion of deep learning and knowledge graphs as an example of his approach.

Today we wrap up with a discussion on how to best use structured and unstructured data, techniques for semantics at scale, and future-looking technologies.

Marcus acknowledges that there are real problems to be solved to pursue his approach, and a great deal of effort must go into constraining symbolic search well enough to work in real-time for complex problems. But he sees Google's knowledge graph as at least a partial counter-example to this objection.

Knowledge graphs are a rebranding of the semantic web approach and technology stack, introduced by Sir Tim Berners Lee 20 years ago. Marcus emphasized there is a lot of knowledge which is not picked up by AI on the web, and adding more semantics and metadata using standards like RDF would help.

A prime example is Wikipedia. People can read it it, and advance their knowledge by doing so. Wikipedia has been targeted by knowledge and data engineers too, in order to achieve what Marcus described. One of the first knowledge graphs, established before the term was even coined, and still one of the biggest ones today, is DBpedia.

DBpedia is one of the biggest and oldest knowledge graphs around. It is populated by extracting data from Wikipedia

What the people behind DBpedia have done is they have created sophisticated mechanisms to extract structured knowledge from Wikipedia. Imagine having all the knowledge in Wikipedia, but being able to query it like you would query a database. Marcus noted the content in Wikipedia boxes is what is most accessible to current techniques:

They're already somewhat useful for things like disambiguation and what a particular use of a word is going to be. There's a lot of knowledge in Wikipedia that's in the form of unstructured text that doesn't go in those boxes and we're not nearly as good as leveraging that. So if you have a historical description of what somebody did during some particular war, the system's probably not going to be able to understand that at this moment.

But it will be able to like look up that this person's title was captain. They were alive during these years. They were they died in this year. The names of their children were this and that. So the latter is data that's more structured, and is more easily leveraged by the current techniques. And there's a whole lot of other data that we're not using.

I'm glad to see that we're starting to use at least some of it. I don't think we're using it as well as one could in principle, because if you don't understand the conceptual relations between all these entities, it's hard to maximize the use that you get out of it.

The people in DBpedia get that apparently. This is why they have created the DBpedia Ontology: a shallow, cross-domain ontology, which has been manually created based on the most commonly used infoboxes within Wikipedia. Ontologies, in the context of knowledge graphs, can be thought of as the schema used to populate the knowledge graph with facts.

In addition, we also have Wikidata. Wikidata is in a way the reverse of DBpedia: where DBpedia creates a structured version of unstructured knowledge in Wikipedia, Wikidata acts as central storage for the structured data of its Wikimedia sister projects, including Wikipedia. It's a free and open knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines.

Another way to leverage semantics and knowledge in machine learning which is gaining in popularity is embeddings. This is a way of representing complex structure in simpler ways, in order to speed up calculations. As graphs are increasingly being recognized as a rich structure to represent knowledge, graph embeddings are gaining in popularity too.

Graph embeddings are the transformation of graphs to a vector or a set of vectors. Embedding should capture the graph topology, edge-to-edge relationships, and other relevant information about graphs, subgraphs, and edges. There are specific techniques developed for knowledge graphs, too.

When asked about embeddings, Marcus replied with a quote from computational linguist Ray Mooney: "You can't cram the meaning of a whole $&!#* sentence into a single $!#&* vector."

"Vectors, at least as we understand them right now, often take a lot of different things, make a similarity measure around that, but don't really represent things with precision. And so they're often a mixed bag. You get something out of them, but you don't know exactly what. And sometimes it works, but it's not really all that reliable. I've yet to see that kind of architecture be supremely reliable".

Embedding is a method for reducing data dimensionality. Sometimes it works, but its reliability is not great, according to Gary Marcus

In his paper, Marcus mentioned something else which piqued our interest. Being someone who has studied human cognition, Marcus does not believe that the way to artificial intelligence necessarily goes through trying to mimic the human brain. We wondered what is his take on neuromorphic chips, i.e. AI chips that claim to mimic the human brain:

We should not be imitating human brains -- we should be learning from them, or from human minds. The best AI systems will have some of the properties of human minds and some properties of machines. They will put them together in new ways that exceed either what we could do with current machines or with current human brains.

In the case of neuromorphic chips, the idea is to learn from how the brain works in order to make better chips. So far, I'm totally sympathetic in principle. The reality is we don't know enough about neuroscience yet to make that work all that well. And I worry about people like Jeff Hawkins who try to stick only to the things we already know about the brain. I think we just don't know enough about the brain to really do that effectively yet.

You know, maybe 20 years from now we will be able to do that. But right now, our understanding of brain operation is pretty limited. And as a consequence, I think that the neuromorphic chips field has been more promise than results. There's not a lot of concrete applications from it yet.

We may have some reasons to think that it might lead us, for example, to lower power alternatives to the technologies that we're using right now. So far, I haven't seen anything really that useful come out of that literature. It will, but maybe we need to know a little bit more about how the brain works before we can really leverage that.

Another forward-looking idea, this time from software, is so-called Software 2.0. The traditional approach to software has been to build algorithms that encode in a really detailed way what software does. The idea behind Software 2.0 is that for really complex processes, it's very hard or even impossible to do that.

Instead of specifying how software works, the Software 2.0 approach is to use data from existing processes and machine learning to figure out a pattern, and produce something that we can use. There are some issues with the approach: not all processes have enough data we can use, and the machine learning development lifecycle is work in progress. Marcus, however, questions the approach altogether:

Nobody tries to build a Web browser by taking supervised learning over a bunch of logs of what users typed and what they saw on their screens. That's what the machine learning approach would be -- rather than sit there and laboriously code, you would just induce it from the data. And that doesn't really work. Nobody's even trying to make that work.

It's nice that we have some new techniques available. But if people think we're not going to need anybody to code..well, certainly in the short term, that's just not true. I think that the real revolution might come, but it's going to be a long time from what Charles Simoni called intentional programming.

Instead of writing all the lines of code that you want, have the machine figure out what is the logic of what you want to do. Maybe you do that with some machine learning, and some classical logic-driven programming, but we're not anywhere close to being able to do that.

Robots are really interesting because they force us beyond approximation, towards systems that really can cope with the real world, says Gary Marcus

Some people may be trying to get the Software 2.0 approach to work. As for Marcus, his focus is on Robust.ai, the company he founded. Rather than just being operated and working the assembly lines, Robust AI wants to build robots that work in a wide range of environments -- homes, retail, elder care, construction and so forth.

When asked why focus on robotics, Marcus' answer was similar to Facebook's Yann LeCun, one of Deep Learning's most vocal proponents. Facebook is also doubling down on robotics, and LeCun believes we're missing something in terms of how humans can learn so fast. The best ideas so far, he went on to add, have come out of robotics.

Marcus said he sees things somewhat similarly, but not entirely similar. He thinks robots are really interesting because they force us beyond approximation, towards systems that really can cope with the real world:

If you're dealing with speech recognition, you can solve the problem by just gathering a lot of data because words don't change that much from one day to the next. But if you want to build a robot that can say, wander the streets and clean them up, it has to be able to deal with the fact that every street is going to be different every hour, every day.

Robots have to be as resourceful as people, if we're going to put them out in the real world. Right now, robots mostly work in very well controlled environments with either no humans or humans limited to a particular place. Robots are very restricted in what they can do right now. And that allows us to sidestep the question of how do you make robots that are really autonomous and able to deal with things on their own.

This is part of the definition of a robot. I think that's a fascinating intellectual problem, and one that will push the field of AI forward considerably as we move robots more and more into the real world as a function of the business. This will be a huge opportunity -- not that much of the world is automated with robots right now.

Marcus said that robotics right now is maybe a 50 billion dollar industry, but it could be much bigger. In order to get to that place, we need to make robots safe, reliable, trustworthy, and flexible. Robust AI just raised $15 million, so apparently progress is under way.

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Getting there: Structured data, semantics, robotics, and the future of AI - ZDNet