AI & Robotics

It’s estimated that over 17,500 new spinal cord injuries occur each year in the U.S., meaning 54 people out of every million Americans experience one. Recovering from those injuries predictably isn’t easy. Patients regain the majority of function within the first six months after the injury, but any remaining loss present after a year is much more likely to become permanent. (Over 30% of…

Touchscreens and swipe gestures pose a challenge for the roughly 630 million people in the world with a cognitive disability. Executing these tasks requires coordinated motor movements that some with disabilities aren’t reliably able to make. And it usually involves the recalling of some piece of information (like an address or a phone number), a step those with severely impaired memory can’t…

This weekend Mr. Robot returns for its fourth and final season on USA, but it’s not the only thing worth watching. The Walking Dead is back for season number ten, while Netflix presents a new series Raising Dion, as well as new seasons of Big Mouth and Peaky Blinders. Fleabag star Phoebe Waller-Bridge takes her turn on Saturday Night Live, while HBO airs a comedy special from Gary Gulman.

Training powerful text to speech models requires sufficiently powerful hardware. A recent study published by OpenAI drives the point home — it found that since 2012, the amount of compute used in the largest runs grew by more than 300,000 times. In pursuit of less demanding models, researchers at IBM developed a new lightweight and modular method for speech synthesis. They say it’s able to…