philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Here are the robots taking the virtual stage at CES 2021

Robots to keep us safe

One such droid is Coro-Bot, an "antivirus disinfection robot" created by Hills Engineering from South Korea. The robot has autonomous driving capabilities, allowing it to move independently around environments. It uses its flexible arms to identify the areas in need of cleaning, and sterilizes them using ultraviolet. It also contains an air circulator that it says kills airborne coronavirus and other viruses using a far-Infrared ceramic filter. It's easy to imagine robots such as these being used in hospitals and other environments in which it's imperative to ensure there's no sign of coronavirus.

Robots to entertain and educate

If you've been keeping an eye on the robotics world, you might have already spied Moxie around over the past year. This friendly-faced teal robot made by startup Embodied was recently announced as one of Time's best inventions of 2020. Plus, it was listed as a CES 2021 Innovation Award Honoree.

From Japan, Yukai Engineering always brings the fun to CES with its cute home robots -- one of which is famously a cushion with a robotic tail. This year at the show, the company is introducing the Petit Qoobo, an identical but smaller sibling to its much-enjoyed animated cusion, along with an updated version of its Bocco Emo emotional home companion robot.

Each Moflin develops an individual personality over time and can express emotion through movement and sound.

Robots that take the manual out of manual labor

One of the biggest names in agriculture, John Deere has been a big presence in recent years at CES by bringing its iconic and eye-catching green machinery to the show floor. This year, the company has been given a CES Innovation Award for the robotic capabilities of its X Series combine harvesters. With cameras that allow farmers to see directly inside grain tanks, computer vision, autonomous driving capabilities and in-field machine-to-machine communication, the X Series must be among the biggest robots to ever win the award. The company is already giving select reporters a virtual experience of its CES wares. 

See the full story here: https://www.cnet.com/news/here-are-the-robots-taking-the-virtual-stage-at-ces-2021/

2020 Survey of Artificial General Intelligence Projects for Ethics, Risk, and Policy

From the Abstract:

This paper presents a survey of AGI R&D projects that are active in 2020 and updates a previous survey of projects active in 2017. Both surveys attempt to identify every active AGI R&D project and characterize them in terms of relevance to ethics, risk, and policy, focusing on seven attributes:

•   The type of institution in which the project is based
•   Whether the project publishes open-source code
•   Whether the project has military connections
•   The nation(s) in which the project is based
•   The project’s goals for its AGI
•   The extent of the project’s engagement with AGI safety issues
•   The overall size of the project 

Regarding policy, several conclusions can be drawn. First, the concentration of projects in the US and its allies could greatly facilitate the establishment of international public policy for AGI. Second, the large and growing number of corporate projects suggests an urgent need to attend to the corporate governance and political economy of AGI R&D. Third, the smaller but still significant number of academic projects suggests that research policy institutions, such as review boards that evaluate risky research, have an important role to play. Fourth, the large number of projects with open-source code presents a policy challenge because it makes it AGI R&D accessible to anyone anywhere in the world. Fifth, the large difference in size between the largest and smallest projects suggests that policymaking may benefit from a focus on larger projects. Finally, the absence of large government projects suggests that the primary role of governments may be as regulators of private-sector AGI R&D rather than as drivers of AGI R&D.

This study has some limitations, meaning that the actual state of AGI R&D may differ from what is presented here. The survey is based exclusively on openly published information and projects were sought out primarily using the English language. It is possible that this survey missed some AGI R&D projects. ...

PhilNote: The appendices describe every project that they found. The authors acknowledge that their report could be incomplete because it only includes publicly available data.

See the full 150 page report here: http://gcrinstitute.org/papers/055_agi-2020.pdf

How to Make Artificial Intelligence More Democratic

a study from Western University suggests, there has been a "de-democratization" in AI: the number of researchers able to contribute to cutting-edge developments is shrinking. This narrows the pool of people who are able to define the research directions for this pivotal technology, which has social implications. It may even be contributing to some of the ethical challenges facing AI development, including privacy invasion, bias and the environmental impact of large models.

To combat these problems, researchers are trying to figure out how to do more with less. One such recent advance is called “less than one”–shot learning (LO-shot learning), developed by Ilia Sucholutsky and Matthias Schonlau from the University of Waterloo.[Office1] [RK2]  The principle behind LO-shot learning is that it should be possible for an AI to learn about objects in the world without being fed an example of each one.

Allowing AIs to learn with considerably less data is important for several reasons. First, it better encapsulates the actual process of learning by forcing the system to generalize to classes it has not seen. By building in abstractions that capture the relationships between objects, this technique also reduces the potential for bias. 

Next, the less extensive the data one needs to use, the less incentive exists to surveil people to build better algorithms. For example, soft distillation techniques have already impacted medical AI research, which trains its models using sensitive health information. In one recent paper, researchers used soft distillation in diagnostic x-ray imagery based on a small, privacy-preserving data set.

Finally, allowing AIs to learn with less plentiful data helps to democratize the field of artificial intelligence. With smaller AIs, academia can remain relevant and avoid the risk of professors being poached by industry. 

See the full story here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-make-artificial-intelligence-more-democratic/

Shanghai Disneyland Tops Out Its New Zootopia Ride

Zootopia will be the eighth themed land at Shanghai Disneyland.

See the full story here: https://www.themeparkinsider.com/flume/202012/7941/?

You can’t go to a concert any time soon. Can a pair of wooden speakers bring the show to you?

Oda’s creators never meant for the speakers to replace live music, even if the timing seems prescient. They say the service is an alternative to the Instagram Live and Facebook gigs that have been popping up during the pandemic as well as the seemingly endless scroll of virtual meetings. You cannot listen to an Oda concert on your phone, laptop or your Sonos speakers. The shows are transmitted through an illuminated box, or “lighthouse,” that connects to the specially designed speakers, which cost $299 a pair. Oda’s business model is to earn most of its income off subscriptions. The first season, which runs through March, will be free as a kind of dress rehearsal. After that, subscribers will pay $79 per season.

“We have so many ways to get distracted, and we’re already seeing people looking for more minimalist experiences,” Ohanian says. “What Oda does is it forces you to be present and just paying attention with your ears.”

See the full story here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/road-to-recovery/oda-speakers-music-service/2020/12/29/4b46dd8c-439c-11eb-a277-49a6d1f9dff1_story.html

Augmented reality is eating the real-world! The substitution of physical products by holograms

Thus, we still do not know if consumers can imagine replacing real products – and if so, what products and why.

See the full story here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026840122031478Xhttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026840122031478X

Welcome To Hyperreality: Where The Physical And Virtual Worlds Converge

TheFor kids growing up today, it’s hard to imagine a time without computers, smartphones, Google, Netflix or Instagram. A time when boredom existed, where we needed to memorize phone numbers and ask complete strangers for directions. Today, the ubiquitous use of social media and digital devices has made the web look and feel like the real world. The division between reality and imagery has collapsed.

global pandemic has further blurred the lines between the physical and digital world. We are now seeing the virtual world compete with the physical for resources. In the next decade, the two worlds will converge, creating a state of hyperreality: a simulation of reality without origin. Although it can be easy to dismiss hyperreality as some kind of sci-fi fantasy. We only have to look at the radical changes in human behavior and technological adoption during the current lockdown. In truth, elements of the hyperreal have already entered mainstream culture. This point takes on extra significance considering the leaders of the new world—Gen-Z—are equally, if not more comfortable living online. To quote Marshall McLuhan, “We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”

See the full story here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kianbakhtiari/2021/12/30/welcome-to-hyperreality-where-the-physical-and-virtual-worlds-converge/?sh=437f3fe50283

New AI Tool Can Predict Movie Rating Before Any Scene Is Shot

Shrikanth Narayanan, University Professor and Niki & C. L. Max Nikias Chair in Engineering, and a team of researchers from the Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab (SAIL) at USC Viterbi, demonstrated that linguistic cues can efficiently indicate violent behavior, drug abuse, and sexual content about to be taken by a film's characters.

The AI tool processes the script through a neural network and scans it for semantics and sentiment expressed. By classifying the sentences as positive, negative, aggressive, and other descriptors, it churns out a rating at the end.

Victor Martinez, the lead researcher on the study, said, "Our model looks at the movie script, rather than the actual scenes, including e.g. sounds like a gunshot or explosion that occur later in the production pipeline. This has the benefit of providing a rating long before production to help filmmakers decide e.g. the degree of violence and whether it needs to be toned down."

Tools like these will help raise societally-meaningful awareness, for example, through identifying negative stereotypes."

See the full story here: https://interestingengineering.com/new-ai-tool-can-predict-movie-rating-before-any-scene-is-shot

IMVU: Making the coin of the realm for the metaverse

IMVU has been a relatively quiet and unnoticed company in the online gaming and social media worlds. But the company did something recently that could benefit the whole industry: It received approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to enable payments in its virtual world through a blockchain-based cryptocurrency dubbed VCoin.

With its ruling in November 2020, the SEC enabled IMVU to allow users to buy and sell goods with VCoin and also to cash out and convert it to Ethereum, a well-known cryptocurrency, or into U.S. dollars. 

Having something like VCoin is important because the metaverse isn’t expected to be a single world operated by a single company. It will likely be a collection of virtual worlds, all interconnected in a way that makes travel between the worlds easy and seamless. If you buy something in a virtual world from a company or from another user, you want to be able to trust that transaction and take the object to another world. If you sell an item, you want to be able to get paid and then cash out. And from the viewpoint of companies, creating a marketplace where users can supply the digital items could be far easier than one company’s own developers trying to populate a metaverse full of digital items.

Like other virtual worlds like Second Life, over the past 16 years IMVU has built a flourishing economy, with a marketplace driven by creators. 

With IMVU, any Ethereum wallet will be able to hold VCoin.

“That’s what we’re leveraging,” Tsui said. “Most gaming companies wouldn’t go out and secure all those licenses because it’s not their core business. Secondly, if IMVU were ever to go out of business, you could still have the Ethereum.

See the full story here: https://venturebeat.com/2020/12/28/imvu-making-the-coin-of-the-realm-for-the-metaverse/?fbclid=IwAR3WVoaVWdKpxsDHWBIj3WGpldxQKgd_Vc9P469K3Lzu4caz2TBUqh_FKb0

India’s first artificial intelligence community center launched in Hyderabad

Hyderabad: Hexagon Capability Center India (HCCI), the largest product development unit of the technology major Hexagon AB, on Monday, has launched the nation’s first Artificial Intelligence Community Centre, HexArt, was launched in Hyderabad.

Established at a cost of INR 64 Lakhs, the institute incorporates state-of-the-art infrastructure, IT hardware & software and a well-designed curriculum. HCCI will invest a further 30 Lakhs YoY to manage the AI community center.  The center will train more than 350 students every year across multiple batches.

See the full story here: https://www.siasat.com/indias-first-artificial-intelligence-community-center-launched-in-hyderabad-2055889/