H+ Weekly - Issue #81

Dec 23, 2016

Inside - Mark Zuckerberg shows his Jarvis. Hacking AI systems. Korean mech and a human flying drone. Holographic AI servant from Japan and more!

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MORE THAN A HUMAN

Hyundai wants to make exoskeletons cheaper
Hyundai is joining the exoskeletons club with two models - one designed for medical uses and a second one designed for industrial lifting. They claim that they can make the exoskeletons cheaper than other, mostly smaller, companies because they have the experience and assets from the automotive industry. We will see if they are right in a couple of years.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

The Great AI Awakening
A quite long article from The New York Times Magazine on how Google used artificial intelligence to transform Google Translate, one of its more popular services — and how machine learning is poised to reinvent computing itself.

Watch Mark Zuckerberg’s Morgan Freeman-voiced Jarvis AI in action
A year ago, Mark Zuckerberg said he is building a Jarvis like system to automate his home. Year later, Mark posted the results.

How Long Before AI Systems Are Hacked in Creative New Ways?
Some researchers have proven that hacking AI systems are easy and argue it is just a matter of time when someone will exploit them. By sending false or misleading data, the attackers can trick the system to do what they want or to train it to pass through the thing they want to go inside the system. Researchers are developing countermeasures, but defending against these attack is hard.

What DeepMind brings to Alphabet
According to this article from The Economist, DeepMind brings talents, prestige and a unique approach to AI.

Types of AI: From Reactive to Self-Aware
Four types of AIs - from purely reactive to self-aware machines - explained with an infographic.

Watch Arago’s HIRO Beat Out Human Gamers in Freeciv
Another game where machine beats humans? Arago's HIRO artificial intelligence (AI) has proven to be able to beat 80 percent of human players in the game of Freeciv.

ROBOTICS

"METHOD-1" manned robot project by "Korea Future Technology"
METHOD-1 is a big bipedal manned robot from Korea. It looks like it was taken from anime and brought into our world. It can move its arms and walk, and it's quite impressive.

Human Flying Drone
No one in the world is selling big enough drones to lift a human, so some guys decided to build one. And it's huge.

Delivery robots are showing up on city sidewalks
Some time ago, the flying delivery drones were seen as the future of delivery. There was a big hope and hype around them. Time has passed and instead of flying drones dropping the packages from the air we might get delivery robots looking like beer coolers on wheels scooting along the sidewalks. There a couple of companies experimenting with the idea and already rolling the robots out in selected cities around the world.

Taking a leap in bioinspired robotics
In the not so distant future, first responders to a disaster zone may include four-legged, dog-like robots that can bound through a fire or pick their way through a minefield, rising up on their hind legs to turn a hot door handle or punch through a wall. Sangbae Kim, associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, hopes this vision will become a reality in the next 10 years. He and his team in the Biomimetic Robotics Laboratory are working toward that goal, borrowing principles from biomechanics, human decision-making, and mechanical design to build a service robot that Kim says will eventually do “real, physical work,” such as opening doors, breaking through walls, or closing valves.

VIRTUAL WORLDS

This Is the Holographic AI Servant of Your Dreams…or Maybe Your Nightmares
Oh, Japan, only you could come up with this. Azuma Hikari is a 58-cm hologram and virtual assistant created by Japanese tech company Gatebox that comes with a $2,600 price tag. According to the promo video, Azuma can learn her master's voice and his sleeping patterns, send cute text messages and wait impatiently for him to come back home. Oh, and Azuma manifests itself as a cute anime girl.

BIOTECHNOLOGY

DNA Biohackers Are Giving The FDA A Headache With Glow-In-The-Dark Booze
The story of Josiah Zayner, a founder of a startup called Odin who is selling a DIY DNA kits with which you can make a genetically modified yeast able to produce a beer glowing in the dark. He thought we would not have any legal problems with the kit, but FDA thought differently. The result of their dispute might define the emerging biohacking community.

New CRISPR Technique Lets Us Probe the Darkest Corners of Biology
Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science have developed a new technique to help them understand the body’s complex and often chaotic processes, and it actually combines two technologies that are cutting-edge on their own: CRISPR and single-cell RNA sequencing. Combining these tools gives researchers the ability to alter multiple target genes at once and identify the resulting changes within the cell. According to the researchers, a single experiment using this method can yield results that would require thousands of experiments using previous techniques, and these are results that neither method could’ve yielded on its own.

The Bioethics Dilemma
Here's an interesting article discussing the role of bioethicists in research. It explains why bioethics supposed to be and what is have become. Their role is going to be more and more important as we start to boldly modify humans.

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Conrad Gray (@conradthegray)

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