This is part two of a six-part series on the history of natural language processing. In 1666, the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz published an enigmatic dissertation entitled On the Combinatorial Art. Only 20 years old but already an ambitious thinker, Leibniz outlined a theory for automating knowledge production via the rule-based combination of symbols. […]
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!): IROS 2019 – November 4-8, 2019 – Macau Let us know if you have suggestions for […]
On Monday, I attended the 2019 Fall Conference of Stanford’s Institute for Human Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). That same night I watched the Season 6 opener for the HBO TV show Silicon Valley. And the debates featured in both surrounded the responsibility of tech companies for the societal effects of the technologies they produce. The […]
Medical drones carrying emergency supplies can reach 911 callers in New York City significantly faster than ambulances, according to new research. The study pitted commercial drones against emergency medical service (EMS) serving part of Brooklyn, New York. First responders from EMS arrived on the scene of emergencies in about 9.5 minutes on average during the study period, while the drones arrived in about 6.5 […]
MIT researchers have demonstrated a new kind of teleoperation system that allows a two-legged robot to “borrow” a human operator’s physical skills to move with greater agility. The system works a bit like those haptic suits from the Spielberg movie “Ready Player One.” But while the suits in the film were used to connect humans to their […]
In September of 2015, Buddy the social home robot closed its Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign more than 600 percent over its funding goal. A thousand people pledged for a robot originally scheduled to be delivered in December of 2016. But nearly three years later, the future of Buddy is still unclear. Last May, Blue Frog Robotics asked […]
This is part one of a six-part series on the history of natural language processing. We’re in the middle of a boom time for natural language processing (NLP), the field of computer science that focuses on linguistic interactions between humans and machines. Thanks to advances in machine learning over the past decade, we’ve seen vast […]
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!): ARSO 2019 – October 31-1, 2019 – Beijing, China ROSCon 2019 – October 31-1, 2019 – Macau IROS […]
Illustration: Nicholas Little Let’s face it: Robots are dumb. At best they are idiot savants, capable of doing one thing really well. In general, even those robots require specialized environments in which to do their one thing really well. This is why autonomous cars or robots for home health care are so difficult to build. They’ll […]
Last Tuesday, October 15th, was Global Handwashing Day, which I’m sure you celebrated by washing your hands every time you were supposed to. Hand washing is a skill that can be difficult for kids to learn, because there usually aren’t immediate negative consequences to not washing your hands. The not immediate consequences can be severe, […]