AI & Robotics

High-beam headlights cut through thick precipitation like a knife cuts through butter, but they’re a literal eyesore to oncoming drivers. That’s because most commercially available systems don’t automatically adjust to compensate for daytime brightness, and because they have a habit of producing glare. The problem spurred a team at Nvidia’s Drive Labs division to investigate an AI…

What might be the key to chatbots or voice-enabled assistants that respond in more natural, human-like ways? Researchers at Rasa, a Berlin, Germany-based startup developing a standard infrastructure layer for conversational AI, believe selective attention might play an outsized role. In a preprint paper published this week on Arxiv.org, they detail a system that can selectively ignore or attend to…

Border gateway protocol (BGP), a routing protocol used to transfer data and information between different host gateways, is fundamental to the internet’s design. Unfortunately, it’s flawed in two respects: It lacks route authentication and basic origin validation. That makes BGP liable to cause connectivity issues in the event of misconfigurations, and worrisomely opens the door to malicious…

Rovio’s Angry Birds, a title that tasks players with slingshotting colorful fowl toward ill-intentioned, egg-stealing swine, has been characterized by one reviewer as “one of the most mainstream games out right now.” It’s spawned dozens of graphic novels and books (including cookbooks), two movies, and four animated series, not to mention countless spinoff games on mobile and other…