How Disney Imagineering Crammed a Humanoid Robot Into a Groot Suit

From what I’ve seen of humanoid robotics, there’s a fairly substantial divide between what folks in the research space traditionally call robotics, and something like animatronics, which tends to be much more character-driven. There’s plenty of technology embodied in animatronic robotics, but usually under some fairly significant constraints—like, they’re not…

Too Perilous For AI? EU Proposes Risk-Based Rules

As part of its emerging role as a global regulatory watchdog, the European Commission published a proposal on 21 April for regulations to govern artificial intelligence use in the European Union. The economic stakes are high: the Commission predicts European public and private investment in AI reaching €20 billion a year this decade, and that was before…

Andrew Ng X-Rays the AI Hype

“Those of us in machine learning are really good at doing well on a test set,” says machine learning pioneer Andrew Ng, “but unfortunately deploying a system takes more than doing well on a test set.” Speaking via Zoom in a Q&A session hosted by DeepLearning.AI and Stanford HAI, Ng…

10 Best-Paying Jobs in Tech

.netNeutral tr:nth-child(odd){ background: #d7c5b1; } .netNeutral tr:nth-child(even){ background: #e9dfd3; } .netNeutral tr th { font-family: "Theinhardt-Medium",sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.25em; vertical-align: top; border: 2px solid white; text-align: left; background: #392622; color: #fff; letter-spacing: 1px; } .netNeutral tr .types { font-family: "Theinhardt-Medium",sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.25em; vertical-align: top; border: 2px solid…

Building an AI That Feels

Illustration: Eddie Guy In the past year, have you found yourself under stress? Have you ever wished for help coping? Imagine if, throughout the pandemic, you’d had a virtual therapist powered by an artificial intelligence (AI) system, an entity that empathized with you and gradually got to know your moods…