MORE Interesting things about robotics - Issue #1

March 15 - 11am - Govt Funding for Startups

March 17 - 7pm - Online Robotics Job Fair

March 19 - 5pm GST - Ross Mead CEO of Semio "Bringing Robots To Life"

March 23 - 6pm - Society, Robots and Us - Prosthetics, Powered Clothing and Exoskeletons

March TBC - CTO Network, Agricultural Robotics Roundtable

The reddit r/robotics subreddit is a global online community of 138,000 users, ranging from hobbyists and students to academics and industry professionals. This year, we have invited our community to share their work as part of an online showcase. No matter how big or small, all projects are welcome, and a work in progress is […]

Research is all about being the first, but commercialization is all about repeatability, not just many times but every single time. This was one of the key takeaways from the Transitioning Research From Academia to Industry panel during the National Robotics Initiative Foundational Research in Robotics PI Meeting on March 10 2021. I had the […]

The Final Report ... on AI&Robotics

A new report (link to summary) from the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence urges the federal government to dramatically scale up its spending on artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies to tens of billions of dollars annually.

Silicon Valley Robotics is pleased to announce that we are a Connector organization for the E-ROBOT Prize, and other DOE competitions on the American-Made Network. There is $2 million USD available in up to ten prizes for Phase One of the E-ROBOT Prize, and $10 million USD available in Phase Two. Individuals or teams can […]

New case studies series examines social, ethical, and policy challenges of present-day computing activities.

Kajima and PFN Develop Autonomous Navigation System for Construction Site Robots (Preferred Networks). The company started out doing reinforcement learning for robots, set a new ImageNet training-speed record in 2017 (Import AI 69) and has been doing advanced research collaborations on areas like meta-learning (Import AI 113). This is a slightly long-winded way to say: PFN has some credible AI researchers and is generally trying to do hard things. Therefore, it's cool to see the company apply its technology in a challenging, open-ended domain, like construction.

Are We Ready for Unmanned Surface Vehicles in Inland Waterways? The USVInland Multisensor Dataset and Benchmark (arXiv). USVInland is a dataset of inland waterways in China "collected under a variety of weather conditions" via a little robotic boat. The dataset contains information from stereo cameras, a lidar system, GPS antennas, inertial measurement units (IMUs), and three millimeter-wave radars. The dataset was recorded from May to August 2020 and the darta covers a trajectory of more than 26km. It contains 27 continuous raw sequences collected under different weather conditions.

"Global positioning system (GPS) signals are sometimes attenuated due to the occlusion of riparian vegetation, bridges, and urban settlements," the Orca Tech authors write. "In this case, to achieve reliable navigation in inland waterways, accurate and real-time localization relies on the estimation of the vehicle’s relative location to the surrounding environment".

MIT researchers find that people are becoming fine with seeing the doctor via robot.

CMTA's flagship legislation has arrived. Our ultimate Manufacturing "Maker" bill, AB 904 by Assemblymember Tim Grayson, seeks a more competitive environment by requiring a manufacturing exemption from California's existing $5 million equipment and R&D tax credit cap.

Investors see opportunities in mobility-as-a-service ventures and fleet management, continued demand for delivery and the push for electrification and batteries. They even see tailwinds for eVTOLs.

SPACs have been good news for investors but not so for Velodyne, or David Hall who owns 54.7% of the company's shares but has been 'forced' to leave the Board.

Plus, an autonomous truck startup splitting its operations between the U.S., China and Europe, has entered into a partnership with Nvidia to develop its new self-driving system.

Silicon Valley-based Toyota AI Ventures fund, with $200 million under management, has so far invested in 36 early-stage startups, including self-driving car software firm Nauto, factory video analytics company Drishti and air mobility firm Joby Aviation.

Acorn is a precision farming rover, developed in house by Twisted Fields in San Gregorio near Silicon Valley, to aid in farming automation research. Acorn is solar powered, lightweight, and completely open source 

Neuralink claims to have developed a surgical robot capable of inserting an array of up 1,000 electrodes into a person's brain with pin-point accuracy.

Insect sentience provides some ideas for roboticists.

AI Index 2021: AI has industrialized. Now what?

Read more about the report here: The 2021 AI Index: Major Growth Despite the Pandemic (Stanford HAI blog)

...Diversity data is still scarce, it's hard to model ethical aspects over time, and more…

The AI Index, an annual project to assess and measure AI progress, has published its fourth edition. (I co-chaired this years report and spent a lot of time working on it, so if you have questions, feel free to email me).

 This year's ~200-page report includes analysis of some of the big technical performance trends of recent years, bibliometric analysis about the state of AI research in 2020, information about national investments into AI being made by governments, and data about the diversity of AI researchers present in university faculty (not good) and graduating PhDs (also not good). Other takeaways include data relating to the breakneck rates of improvement in AI research and deployment (e.g, the cost to train an ImageNet model on a public cloud has fallen from ~$2000 in 2017 to $7.43 last year), as well as signs of increasing investment into AI applications, beyond pure AI research.

Ethics data - and the difficulty of gathering it: One thing that stuck out to me about the report is the difficulty of measuring and assessing ethical dimensions of AI deployment - specifically, many assessments of AI technologies use one-off analysis for things like interrogating the biases of the model, and few standard tests exist (let's put aside, for a moment, the inherent difficulty of building 'standard' tests for something as complex as bias).

What next? The purpose of the AI Index is to prototype better ways to assess and measure AI and the impact of AI on society. My hope is that in a few years governments will invest in tech assessment initiatives and will be able to use the AI Index as one bit of evidence to inform that process. If we get better at tracking and analyzing the pace of progress in artificial intelligence, we'll be able to deal with some of the information asymmetries that have emerged between the private sector and the rest of society; this transparency should help develop better norms among the broader AI community.

Read the 2021 AI Index here (AI Index website)

Partners for Automated Vehicle Education Panel

On February 17, PAVE (Partners for Automated Vehicle Education) hosted a panel titled "Understanding AI Bias and How It Could Affect AVs" with panelists Leslie Nooteboom -Co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Humanising Autonomy- and Nandita Mangal -Platform Function Owner at HMI Autonomous Driving at Aptiv. You can view the full recording of the panel here or sign up for PAVE's newsletter to receive notification of future panels here. Registration is always free and open to the public.

PAVE's virtual panels assemble prominent voices in the automated vehicle space to discuss all aspects of the technology and its potential societal effects. Previous panels from 2021 include topics such as AVs on rural roadways, older adults and AVs, and infrastructure. Of particular note, Intel's Jack Weast participated in a January panel titled "Making the Case for Safety Cases" where he discussed his IEEE P2846 standard for safety-related automated vehicle behavior.

The Re-Think Health Podcast

As individuals we want better health – accessible, more precise, efficient, safe, and most importantly highly effective. There are new tools out there that have the opportunity to satisfy some, if not all, of our wish list for better health. However, these tools require a lot of re-thinking of the approach to monitoring, diagnosis, therapeutic development, and care delivery while proving that the tools can be trusted and validated in their use. 

In the five-part Re-Think Health Season 1 that is now complete, we shared expert insights into the latest technology applications, vetted stakeholders’ unresolved concerns, and motivated progressive committed thinkers to take an action to collaborate, build consensus and develop solutions for trusted and validated adoption.

Season 2 of the Re-Think Podcast series will be focused on Federated Machine Learning and AI in the use of Epidemiology and Drug Discovery. If you have any case studies or "cool happenings" focused on these areas, please email Maria Palombini and stay tuned for the launch of Season 2 coming this May.

To stay up to date on the RETHINK HEALTH series, sign up here.

Good reading this week is S. B. Divya's Machinehood

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