MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
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Teaming humans with robotic AI will remake modern manufacturing
Your public school education exists, in large part, thanks to the Second Industrial Revolution. When the revolution took hold of America in the 1870s, 30 years after the end of the first, half of the US population still spent their days toiling in fields. Education was typically voluntary, assuming the family was wealthy enough to afford tutors or school fees, and usually reserved for boys. With the development of commercial fertilizer and the internal combustion engine, productivity exploded while the number of farmers dropped to less than two percent of the population. It lessened the demand for child labor which in turn led to increased support for compulsory education for both sexes.
IBM is installing a Watson AI lab at MIT
Both MIT and IBM are leaders in the field of Artificial Intelligence and now they're teaming up. IBM announced on Thursday that it had reached a 10-year research partnership agreement with the university worth nearly a quarter of a billion dollars. That investment will see more than 100 researchers from both organizations collaborating to advance four key focus areas within the AI field.
MIT’s new AI can keep streaming video from buffering
Buffering and pixelation are the scourge of streaming video. It ruins the experience for viewers, robs advertisers of revenue as said viewers tune out, and causes technical headaches for streaming services which have to engineer solutions. But a new neural network AI from MIT CSAIL may be just what the internet needs for velvety smooth streaming services.
MIT team gets us one step closer to robot bartenders
Sure, we've seen machines that can mix drinks with the help of an app and robot bartenders that can create cocktails out of Keurig-esque pods, but they all require you to actually push the control buttons and carry your own beverages. The horror! Fortunately for lazy drinkers everywhere, members of the CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) team at MIT recently presented a system of robots working together in a "bar" scenario that consisted of a PR2 robot "bartender" and two four-wheeled open-source "Turtlebot" kits acting as waiters. That... must have been a mighty tough day at work.
Kinect Hacks: MIT gets Minority Report UI to work, look at those fingers go!
A full Minority Report interface is one of the endgame dreams of Kinect hackers. We've seen plenty of brilliant Kinect hacks so far, but this latest one by members of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory is the closest thing we've seen to the dream. The hack uses several components to distinguish fingers, allowing hand detection of 60,000 points at 30 frames a second. If you want to go down the rabbit hole of techno-babble gobbledygook (yes, it's a scientific term), you can go here. For those who just want to see something cool, go past the break.
