Accel Robotics Gets $30 Million Investment for AI-Enabled Cashierless Storeshttps://techxplore.com/news/2019-12-startup-cashierless-storesand-30m.htmlA technology startup in San Diego has just raised $30 million from investors to continue building out its software for cashier-less, "grab-and-go" stores. The model, popularized by Amazon Go, allows shoppers to simply walk into a store, grab items from the shelves, and walk out—with the receipt sent directly to their mobile device.
The startup, Accel Robotics, is developing computer vision software—along with cameras, sensors and store equipment—to make this concept work. In fact, the startup can build out an entire modular store for its customers, preloaded with the computer brains to enable a "checkout-free" experience.
Accel has a lot of competition in the world of grab-and-go retail tech. Technology titan Amazon recently announced big ambitions for the cashier-less store model, with plans to expand to larger formats and license the technology out to other retailers. Plus, Amazon is joined by a slew of technology startups looking to create cashier-less checkout systems, including Trigo, Grabango and Standard Cognition.
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AI-Enabled Assistant Robot Returning to the Space Station with Improved Emotional Intelligencehttps://techcrunch.com/2019/12/05/ai-enabled-assistant-robot-will-return-to-the-space-station-with-improved-emotional-intelligence/The Crew Interactive Mobile Companion (or CIMON, for short) recorded a number of firsts on its initial mission to the International Space Station, which took place last November, including becoming the first-ever autonomous free-floating robot to operate aboard the station, and the first-ever smart astronaut assistant. But CIMON is much more than an Alexa for space, and CIMON-2, which launched aboard today’s SpaceX ISS resupply mission, will demonstrate a number of ways the astronaut support robot can help those working in space — from both a practical and an emotional angle.
... So for example, on the artificial intelligence side, we have something called emotional intelligence, based on our IBM Watson Tone Analyzer, with we’re trying to understand and analyze the emotions during a conversation between CIMON and the astronauts to see how they’re feeling — if they’re feeling joyful, if something makes them angry, and so on.”
That, Biniok says, could help evolve CIMON into a robotic countermeasure for something called “groupthink,” a phenomenon wherein a group of people who work closely together gradually have all their opinions migrate toward consensus or similarity. A CIMON with proper emotional intelligence could detect when this might be occurring, and react by either providing an objective, neutral view — or even potentially taking on a contrarian or “Devil’s advocate” perspective, Biniok says.
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Facebook Taught an AI the 'Theory of Mind'https://www.engadget.com/2019/12/06/facebook-taught-an-ai-the-theory-of-mind/When it comes to competitive games, AI systems have already shown they can easily mop the floor with the best humanity has to offer. But life in the real world isn't a zero sum game like poker or Starcraft and we need AI to work with us, not against us. That's why a research team from Facebook taught an AI how to play the cooperative card game Hanabi (the Japanese word for fireworks), to gain a better understanding of how humans think.
Specifically, the Facebook team set out to instill upon its AI system the theory of mind. "Theory of mind is this idea of understanding the beliefs and intentions of other agents or other players or humans," Noam Brown, a researcher at Facebook AI, told
Engadget. "It's something that humans developed from a very early age. But one AIs have struggled with for a very long time."
"It's trying to put itself in the shoes of the other players and ask why are they taking these actions," Brown continued, "and being able to infer something about the state of the world that it can't directly observe."
"What we're looking at is artificial agents that can reason better about cooperative interactions with humans and chatbots that can reason about why the person they're chatting with said the thing they did," ... "Chatbots that can reason better about why people say the things they do without having to enumerate every detail of what they're asking for is a very straightforward application of this type of search technique."
“One of the really exciting things about this is that the improvement we’re observing is really orthogonal to the improvements that are being observed with deep reinforcement learning: You can add this on top of any strategy, and it will make it much stronger,” Brown said
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Intel’s Neuromorphic Loihi Processor Scales to 8M Neurons, 64 Coreshttps://www.extremetech.com/computing/295043-intels-neuromorphic-loihi-processor-scales-to-8m-neurons-64-coresIntel has announced a significant advance for its neuromorphic research processor, codenamed Loihi. The company has now scaled up its Loihi implementation to the 64-processor level, allowing it to create a system with more than 8M neurons (8.3M). This new configuration (codenamed Pohoiki Beach) delivers 1,000x better performance than conventional CPUs
... Neuromorphic computing is a subset of computing that attempts to mimic the brain’s architecture using modern technological analogues. Instead of implementing a typical CPU clock, for example. Loihi is based on a spiking neural network architecture. The basic Loihi processor contains 128 neuromorphic cores, three Lakefield (Intel Quark) CPU cores, and an off-chip communication network. In theory, Loihi can scale all the way up to 4,096 on-chip cores and 16,384 chips.