AI & Robotics

A newsy feature from the New York Times is bound to have a different tone than the average Reddit post. Indeed, the diversity of writing styles and grammatical structures makes the task of automatic text summarization highly challenging. That’s why researchers from Pittsburgh and Microsoft Researcher’s Future Social Experiences (FUSE) lab, which focuses on real-time and media-rich experiences…

The World Health Organization reports that 1.5 million people were killed in road accidents in 2018, of which more than half were pedestrians and cyclists. One of the biggest culprits is the so-called “hidden pedestrian” problem, in which people obscured by obstacles suddenly appear in front of high-speed vehicles. Sensors like lidar, radar, and cameras promise to improve the detection of…

Israeli robotics startup Intuition Robotics has raised $36 million in a series B round of funding co-led by Sparx Group and OurCrowd, with participation from Samsung Next, Toyota AI Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, iRobot, Sompo Holdings, Union Tech Ventures, Happiness Capital, and Capital Point. Founded in 2015, Intuition Robotics is creating what it calls “social companion” robots and related…

Optical sensors such as cameras and lidar are a fundamental part of modern robotics platforms, but they suffer from a common flaw: transparent objects like glass containers tend to confuse them. That’s because most of the algorithms analyzing data from those sensors assume all surfaces are Lambertian, or that they reflect light evenly in all directions and from all angles. By contrast…