27 March 2024

Common Sense Robots

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) engineers are developing software for household robots that uses large language models (LLM) to help them acquire common sense. They believe integrating LLM could help plug this gap, making such robots more useful in the real world. Including robot motion data with LLMs should give such robots common sense knowledge.

MIT’s new technique allows a robot to break down various household tasks into smaller sub-tasks and adapt to any disruptions within a sub-task. This enables the robot to continue a task without starting from the beginning or requiring engineers to manually program solutions for every possible failure.

More information:

https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/household-robots-common-sense

26 March 2024

3D Reconstructions of Museum Animals

The openVertebrate (oVert) project involved 18 institutions over the past five years creating 3D reconstructions of museum specimens, which are now available freely online. The animals on display behind glass at the museum are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to museum collections, which contain thousands of specimens that have been collected and carefully preserved over the decades.

But the physical limits to accessing these specimens have always hindered scientific collaboration and education. Already, the process of scanning specimens has given scientists new perspectives on subjects they've been studying for years. While scanning spiny mice for the project, researchers noticed their tails were covered in internal bony plates called osteoderms, previously thought to be unique to armadillos.

More information:

https://www.sciencealert.com/stunning-tool-lets-you-digitally-dissect-museum-animals-with-x-ray-vision

24 March 2024

Brain-Chip Patient Plays Online Chess

Elon Musk’s brain-chip startup Neuralink live streamed its first patient implanted with a chip playing online chess. A 29-year-old patient who was paralyzed below the shoulders after a diving accident, was playing chess on his laptop and moving the cursor using the Neuralink device.

He had received an implant from the company in January and could control a computer mouse using his thoughts. It is still in the very early days post-implantation, and there is a lot of learning to maximize the amount of information for control that can be achieved.

More information:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/20/elon-musk-neuralink-brain-chip-patient-chess