TIS Weekly (#98): Silly Robots That Make You Laugh And Think
[April 23rd, 2017]
Yesterday one of my friends at Hivos sent me a clip from Simone Giertz. Apparently she’s quite the YouTube hit, but I’ve never heard of my namesake before. She’s a Swedish inventor and robot enthusiast, and calls herself ‘the queen of shitty robots’. I find her and the robots she’s come up with hilarious. Watch an interview with her below.
On a completely different topic, don’t forget to let people know about our internship position!
Theme | ROBOTS & AI
The queen of shitty robots
Simone is the genius(?) behind the Toothbrush Machine, the Breakfast Machine, the Chopping Machine, the Wake-up Machine, the Applause Machine, the Lipstick Robot and the Popcorn Helmet. What are these? Watch the video above or go straight to Simone’s YouTube channel.
Theme | ROBOTS & AI
Meet Hitchbot
Drop a robot by the road and see if it can hitchhike all across Canada. Hitchbot made its first trip in 2014, which started in Halifax and 26 days, 19 rides and 10,000 kilometers later ended in Victoria. Here’s a nice video which shows you the idea behind Hitchbot, before it started on its big trip across the country.
Article | ROBOTS & AI
Human biases in robots
‘A research article instead of a video? Must be a good one.’ Judge for yourself. At Princeton, new research by Caliskan et al. (2017) has proven again that robots can copy human bias. For the study, standard machine learning was applied to a corpus of web texts, in an attempt to see whether it can learn languages by recognizing patterns in data and whether human-like semantic biases were acquired through this process.
Key findings?
- It was able to make word associations (flower — positive associations, insects — negative associations);
- It copied human biases towards race (European names — positive associations, African names — negative associations);
- It copied human biases toward gender (women — associated with family, men — associated with career).
Expert Selection | Blockchain
Amin Rafiee
We’re very happy that Blockchain expert Amin Rafiee has shared his Expert Selection on Decentralized Governance with us. Amin has been working in the Blockchain field since 2013, is an active user of bitcoin communities, often speaks at blockchain conferences and meetups and now works for BITNATION.
Theme | SMART CITIES
The top 5 Smart Cities videos
Don’t have a lot of time, but want to have a quick look at what’s going on in the world of Smart Cities? Here’s a two-minute video that highlights 5 top videos. For all Smart Cities videos, click here.
Add your own videos and maybe they will feature in the next TIS Weekly. Questions? Remarks? Ideas? hello@tis.tv is the address! From TIS with love, Simone de Bruin.
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- Humanoids Special — And We’re Hiring!
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