AI in the News — #21

AI gas juggler (Science Daily)

Bose-Einstein condensates are ultra-cold puffs of gas with exotic quantum properties. Physicists are investigating them, but keeping them cold and stable is a very tricky job. So they’ve turned the job over to AIs, which have learned to maintain the Bose-Einstein condensates while running experiments on them.

AI legal researcher (BBC)

Ross Intelligence is developing an AI legal researcher to search libraries and answer lawyers’ natural-language questions — if “Are oil and gas leases executory contracts?” counts as “natural.”

The fine art of rummaging (Phys.org)

The real world is seldom tidy. To teach robots to cope with that, Carnegie Mellon is developing software that lets robots learn to find and retrieve objects in clutter.

Uber without drivers (Phys.org)

Uber joins the ranks of companies experimenting with self-driving cars. Which is not at all the usual cottage-industry concept of Uber, but there you are.

“Hi. How can I help?” (Cnet)

Here is an interview with Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, in which he expands on all the Google products that he intends to endow with artificial intelligence. In all these cases, the app learns about you, your current context, and your preferences.