While vacationing and experiencing a major family milestone, a hidden news story about a local-born scientist caught my eye. Dr. Avi Loeb, chairman of Harvard University’s astronomy department, controversially proposed that Oumuamua (the mysterious elongated asteroid-like object that was discovered in 2017) could be an interstellar alien visitor. The scout from the Vega Galaxy “may be a fully operational […]
Cheer The Year Of Co-Bots By Correcting Human Blunders
The ball is just days away from dropping in Times Square with revelers anticipating 2019 by making resolutions to act better in the coming year. The most human of all traits is to make mistakes. Correcting our wrongs is often a long, arduous task; however, machines are far more capable at avoiding mistakes by isolating […]
The Viability of Toilet Cleaning Robots
The 1996 discovery of Allan Hills 84001 changed the world of science, and by extension robotics. I am referring to the meteorite that Dave McKay of NASA found on Earth, which hinted at life on Mars. Fast forward to the AI Summit two weeks ago, when I sat down with Stephen Gorevan of HoneyBee Robotics to discuss NASA’s Mars […]
The Metaphysical Impact Of Automation
Earlier this month, I crawled into Dr. Wendy Ju‘s autonomous car simulator to explore the future of human-machine interfaces. Dr. Ju recently moved to the Roosevelt Island campus from Stanford University. While in California, the roboticist was famous for making videos capturing people’s reactions to self-driving cars using students disguised as “ghost-drivers” in seat costumes. Professor […]
The End Of Parking As We Know It
A day before snow decapacitated New York commuters, researchers at the University of Iowa and Princeton demurred the growth of urbanization as the leading cause for catastrophic storm damage. Wednesday’s report stated that the $128 billion wake of Hurricane Harvey was 21 times greater due to the population density of Houston, one of America’s fastest growing cities. […]
Accessing The Power Of Quantum Computing, Today
Two weeks ago, I participated on a panel at the BCI Summit exploring the impact of quantum computing. As a neophyte to the subject, I marveled at the riddle posed by Grover’s Algorithm. Imagine you are assigned to find a contact in a phonebook with a billion names, but all you are given is a telephone number. A […]
Preparing For The Third Wave
The Internet scion also suggests that the innovations leading this revolution would most likely be launched outside of the hallowed office buildings of Silicon Valley, Boston, and New York. In starting Revolution Ventures, Case set out to find disruptive technologies in America’s heartland often ignored by typical venture investors.
The Race For Robot Clairvoyance
This week a Harvard Business School student challenged me to name a startup capable of producing an intelligent robot – TODAY! At first, I did not understand the question, as artificial intelligence (AI) is an implement like any other in a roboticist’s toolbox. The student persisted, she demanded to know if I thought that the […]
YouTube Is Making Machines Really Smart
As the playoffs are in full swing, everyone is littering their speech with baseball apologies, “We are only at the bottom of the first inning for all these technologies,” declared Pano Anthos at last week’s RoboLab forum. When illustrating his point, Anthos deconstructed one of XRC Labs‘ portfolio companies which utilizes computer vision to identify store merchandise. “Right […]
The New Restaurant Experience: Robot Servers, Cooks And Hostesses
Rising labor costs and rents worldwide are driving retail establishments toward a mechanical future, potentially leaving 66 million human workers in jeopardy.