MIT
Researchers at MIT CSAIL and Project CETI believe that they have unlocked a kind of sperm whale alphabet with the aid of machine learning technologies. Results from the study, which…
Sometimes nature provides the best blueprints for building effective robots. It also can provide the best material. Billions of years of natural selection has built some pretty impressive machinery, so…
Finally, something that makes climate change relatable.
There are countless reasons why home robots have found little success post-Roomba. Pricing, practicality, form factor and mapping have all contributed to failure after failure. Even when some or all…
MIT professor Mike Stonebraker has been at the forefront of database technology for more than 50 years. The former Turing Award winner invented the Ingres and Postgres databases and helped…
Metal 3D printing is already a multi-billion-dollar global industry. The additive manufacturing approach is poised to disrupt many facets of construction and will only continue to grow for the foreseeable…
Will AI automate human jobs, and — if so — which jobs and when? That’s the trio of questions a new research study from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence…
MIT likens a new vibrating capsule to drinking a glass full of water prior to eating. Dieticians recommend the latter as a method for sending signals to your brain to…
Mention automation and someone will invariably (and understandably) mention its impact on jobs. There are a lot of opposing views on the subject, of course, but the one thing everyone…
Reporting on tech requires a healthy dose of skepticism, hopefully tempered by some excitement about what can be done.
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What is a liquid neural network, really?
The initial research papers date back to 2018, but for most, the notion of liquid networks (or liquid neural networks) is a new one. It was “Liquid Time-constant Networks,” published at the tail end of 2020, that put the work on other researchers’ radar. In the intervening time, the paper’s…
Why aren’t there more robots in homes? This a surprising complex question — and our homes are surprisingly complex places. A big part of the reason autonomous systems are thriving…
A refrain I hear from a lot of startups is that there’s “no need to rethink the gripper.” It’s something I appreciate from an economic standpoint. It’s expensive, resource intensive…
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Flipping is much easier than walking
I wrote about half of last week’s Actuator on Wednesday in an empty office at MassRobotics after meeting with an early-stage startup. I’m not ready to tell you about them just yet, but they’re doing interesting work and have one of the wilder founding stories of recent vintage, so stay…
Here’s a fun challenge: teaching a quadrupedal robot to successfully dribble a soccer ball. It is, in essence, a core component of RoboCup, the big international competition founded all the…
A new approach to vaccines with a machine learning twist could put an end to boosters and seasonal variant shots, according to MIT researchers. This “pan-variant” vaccine would ignore the…
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Boston’s university-to-startup pipeline defies downturn to grow and diversify
The startup economy has grown and shifted since the turn of the century, and universities — stocked with a never-ending supply of smart, ambitious young people — have increasingly taken part. Boston has always had a robust university-to-startup pipeline, but the last decade has supercharged it, as well as student…
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Autonomation
“Jidoka” is a new one to me. TRI (Toyota Research Institute) CEO Gill Pratt described the concept as “Automation with a Human Touch.” The anglicized version of the notion is “Autonomation” — both are modified forms of “ automation,” in their respective languages. The word was originally applied to Toyota’s…
Ingestible robotics has been a fascinating and growing field for the last several years. We’ve already seen a handful of startups working to commercialize a technology that could allow for…
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Hype machines
The age-old question in my industry is, “Where are we in a given hype cycle?” For now, crypto news cycle dominance has, thankfully, died now, largely through its own self-destructive tendencies. FTX obviously served as the most prominent recent example of what happens when the tech community believes its own…
Here’s an interesting comment from MIT’s Alfonso Parra Rubio, “Treating soft versus hard robotics is a false dichotomy.” For, I suppose, obvious reasons, thinking around technology tends to be a…
While artificial intelligence long ago surpassed human capability in chess, and more recently Go — and let us not forget Doom — other more complex board games still present a…
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Automating the income gap
This is going to be another one of those “let’s ask ourselves some difficult questions” newsletter introductions, so if you’re in the U.S., I certainly won’t blame you for not giving Actuator your full attention until after the holiday. I generally approach these conversations through the same basic lens: a…
Researchers at MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms are working on an ambitious project, designing robots that effectively self-assemble. The team admits that the goal of an autonomous self-building robot…
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Battlefield bots
Greetings from the bowels of Moscone Center West. As I type this, Kevin Hart just exited the stage and Serena Williams is presiding over a packed house. No exaggeration: I attempted to make my way to grab a seat in the few rows up front allotted to the TechCrunch staff,…
First Star, backer of deep tech startups like Plus One and Fyto, aims to raise as much as $40 million for its third venture fund, TechCrunch has learned. Based in…
Perceptron: AI that lights up the moon, improvises grammar and teaches robots to walk like humans
Research in the field of machine learning and AI, now a key technology in practically every industry and company, is far too voluminous for anyone to read it all. This…
Meltem Demirors hasn’t just been working in crypto for seven years — she’s been shaping its trajectory. Demirors, chief strategy officer at publicly traded European…
While using OSS is free, assembling an OSS DevOps toolset, with an average of 15 tools per company, isn’t without challenges.
Why you must build a moat around early customers, according to Benchling’s CEO and co-founder
Benchling’s unicorn status didn’t come overnight. Some 10 years after its founding, the company is worth more than $6 billion, and the founder sees the company going public in the…
