Archive for the 'Rise of the Machines' Category
DJI Launches Crop-Spraying Drone
November 27th, 201515 grand today. $499 in… three years? Via: BBC: Billion-dollar drone company DJI is expanding from consumer and camera drones into the agriculture industry. The Chinese firm’s latest model is a crop-spraying drone, which it claims is “40 times more efficient” than manual spraying, despite having just 12 minutes of flight time. It will be […]
The Next Frontier in Formula Racing: Driverless Cars
November 27th, 2015Via: Los Angeles Times: Imagine taking Google’s driverless car, mashing it up with Tesla’s zero-to-60-in-three-seconds “ludicrous mode,” and then pushing it to speeds of over 100 mph. Now imagine nearly two dozen of these souped-up robotic cars all speeding around on the same closed track and trying to outdo one another — without a human […]
Air Force Hires Civilian Drone Pilots for Combat Patrols
November 27th, 2015Via: Los Angeles Times: The Air Force has hired civilian defense contractors to fly MQ-9 Reaper drones to help track suspected militants and other targets in global hot spots, a previously undisclosed expansion in the privatization of once-exclusively military functions. For the first time, civilian pilots and crews now operate what the Air Force calls […]
Australia: Robot Bricklayer Can Build a Home in Two Days
November 19th, 2015Via: Financial Review: Australian investors have begun buying in to the rise of the machines, as a company promising to replace the humble brickie with a robot that can build a four-bedroom house in two days hit the ASX boards. Fastbrick Robotics started trading on the ASX on Wednesday, and was up almost 4 per […]
The Next Gold Rush Will Be 5,000 Feet Under the Sea
November 18th, 2015Via: Vice: And that will mean dispatching a fleet of giant remote-operated robotic miners 5,000 feet below the surface to harvest the riches scattered across ocean floor. These mammoth underwater vehicles look like they’ve been hauled off the set of a sci-fi film—think Avatar meets The Abyss. And they’ll be dredging up copper, gold, and […]
Why Human-In-The-Loop Computing Is The Future Of Machine Learning
November 16th, 2015Via: ComputerWorld: Now that machine learning is becoming more and more mainstream, some design patterns are starting to emerge. As the CEO of CrowdFlower, I’ve worked with many companies building machine learning algorithms and I’ve noticed a best practice in nearly every successful deployment of machine learning on tough business problems. That practice is called […]
Robot Audits Store Shelves
November 14th, 2015Via: ComputerWorld: An autonomous robot was unveiled this week that can make sure that when you’re hankering for Doritos, there’s a bag waiting for you at the market. Simbe Robotics, based in San Francisco, announced its first product, a 30-pound robot called Tally that can move up and down a store’s aisles checking inventory. The […]
Driverless Buses Will Hit Swiss Roads Next Year
November 14th, 2015Via: Independent: Autonomous, driverless buses will hit the streets of Switzerland in Spring next year, in one of the world’s first trials of self-driving buses on public roads. Two of the driverless buses, created by startup BestMile and launched under the banner of Swiss bus company PostBus, will enter service in the city of Sion, […]
Bank of England: Automation to Eliminate Roughly Half of U.S. and British Jobs
November 13th, 2015Via: CNBC: One central bank has some frightening predictions when it comes to job stability in the future. 80 million jobs in the United States are at risk of being taken over by robots in the next few decades, a Bank of England (BoE) official warned on Thursday. With U.S. data showing that total nonfarm […]
Toyota Makes £600m Bet on Artificial Intelligence
November 8th, 2015Via: Wired UK: Toyota will invest more than £600m in artificial intelligence and robotics for its self-driving cars and robots. Akio Toyoda, the company’s president, announced the car manufacturer is launching a research company in Silicon Valley to develop AI and robotics for use in its cars. The Toyota Research Institute will, according to a […]
