Personified Systems

Sanbot, (TechXplore)

Sanbot is a general-purpose domestic robot, made in China. It looks rather neotenous, as now seems standard for helper ‘bots, keeps its general intelligence on cloud servers, but has a suite of local apps as well. For some reason, it has flippers for arms that appear…

Chatbots: common sense vs. Turing (Techxplore)

The Winograd Schema Challenge is a contest to see who can build the best chatbot. It’s not like the Turing test, which is about fooling a human into mistaking a computer for a fellow human. Instead, it’s about designing…

Google gives up and sells off Boston Dynamics (Discover)

Boston Dynamics is the research company that brought us BigDog, the robot pack mule, and Atlas, a bipedal robot. These were very interesting and photogenic, but never real commercial successes. Therefore…

Nurses’ Aide (TechXplore)

MIT has produced an AI to help nurses in a maternity ward with their scheduling. It comes up to speed by watching the nurses do their own scheduling, but it doesn’t just copy, nor does it take instruction. It uses a technique called…

Recently, a number of news sources have run stories lauding the ability of AIs to crack prisoners use of “code words” to conduct illicit business. The International Business Times (IBT) declared that “Artificial intelligence has helped detect secret code words used by…