A few months after getting FDA approval for human trials, Neuralink is looking for its first test subjects. The Verge reports: The six-year initial trial, which the Elon Musk-owned company is calling "the PRIME Study," is intended to test Neuralink tech designed to help those with paralysis control devices. The company is looking for people (PDF) with quadriplegia due to vertical spinal cord injury or ALS who are over the age of 22 and have a "consistent and reliable caregiver" to be part of the study.

The PRIME Study (which apparently stands for Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface, even though that acronym makes no sense) is set to research three things at once. The first is the N1 implant, Neuralink's brain-computer device. The second is the R1 robot, the surgical robot that actually implants the device. The third is the N1 User App, the software that connects to the N1 and translates brain signals into computer actions. Neuralink says it's planning to test both the safety and efficacy of all three parts of the system.

Those who participate in the PRIME Study will first participate in an 18-month study that involves nine visits with researchers. After that, they'll spend at least two hours a week on brain-computer interface research sessions and then do 20 more visits over the next five years. Neuralink doesn't say how many subjects it's looking for or when it plans to begin the study but does say it only plans to compensate "for study-related costs" like travel to and from the study location. (Also not clear: where that location is. Neuralink only says it has received approval from "our first hospital site.")

Agility Robotics is wrapping up construction of a factory in Salem, Oregon, where it plans to mass produce its first line of humanoid robots, called Digit. Each robot has two legs and two arms and is engineered to maneuver freely and work alongside humans in warehouses and factories. CNBC reports: The 70,000-square-foot facility, which the company is calling the "RoboFab," is the first of its kind, according to Damion Shelton, co-founder and CEO of Agility Robotics. COO Aindrea Campbell, who was formerly Apple's senior director of iPad operations and an engineering manager at Ford, told CNBC that the facility will have a 10,000 unit annual max capacity when it's fully built out and will employ more than 500 people. For now, though, Agility Robotics is focused on the installation and testing of its first production lines.

Funded by DCVC and Playground Global among venture investors, Agility Robotics beat would-be competitors to the punch, including Tesla with its Optimus initiative, by completing development of production prototype humanoid robots and standing up a factory where it can mass produce them. Shelton told CNBC that his team developed Digit with a human form factor so that the robots can lift, sort and maneuver while staying balanced, and so they could operate in environments where steps or other structures could otherwise limit the use of robotics. The robots are powered with rechargeable lithium ion batteries.

One thing Digit lacks is a five-fingered hand -- instead, the robot's hands look more like a claw or mitten. [...] Digit can traverse stairs, crouch into tight spaces, unload containers and move materials onto or off of a pallet or a conveyor, then help to sort and divide material onto other pallets, according to Agility. The company plans to put the robots to use transporting materials around its own factory, Campbell said. Agility's preferred partners will be first to receive the robots next year, and the company is only selling -- not renting or leasing -- the systems in the near term.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the New York Times: It is powered into flight by a rocket engine. It can fly a distance equal to the width of China. It has a stealthy design and is capable of carrying missiles that can hit enemy targets far beyond its visual range. But what really distinguishes the Air Force's pilotless XQ-58A Valkyrie experimental aircraft is that it is run by artificial intelligence, putting it at the forefront of efforts by the U.S. military to harness the capacities of an emerging technology whose vast potential benefits are tempered by deep concerns about how much autonomy to grant to a lethal weapon.

Essentially a next-generation drone, the Valkyrie is a prototype for what the Air Force hopes can become a potent supplement to its fleet of traditional fighter jets, giving human pilots a swarm of highly capable robot wingmen to deploy in battle. Its mission is to marry artificial intelligence and its sensors to identify and evaluate enemy threats and then, after getting human sign-off, to move in for the kill... The emergence of artificial intelligence is helping to spawn a new generation of Pentagon contractors who are seeking to undercut, or at least disrupt, the longstanding primacy of the handful of giant firms who supply the armed forces with planes, missiles, tanks and ships. The possibility of building fleets of smart but relatively inexpensive weapons that could be deployed in large numbers is allowing Pentagon officials to think in new ways about taking on enemy forces.

It also is forcing them to confront questions about what role humans should play in conflicts waged with software that is written to kill...
The article adds that the U.S. Air Force plans to build 1,000 to 2,000 AI drones for as little as $3 million apiece. "Some will focus on surveillance or resupply missions, others will fly in attack swarms and still others will serve as a 'loyal wingman' to a human pilot....

"A recently revised Pentagon policy on the use of artificial intelligence in weapons systems allows for the autonomous use of lethal force — but any particular plan to build or deploy such a weapon must first be reviewed and approved by a special military panel."

Firefighters are training a robot to scan the horizon for fires. It turns out a lot of things look like smoke. From a report: For years, firefighters in California have relied on a vast network of more than 1,000 mountaintop cameras to detect wildfires. Operators have stared into computer screens around the clock looking for wisps of smoke. This summer, with wildfire season well underway, California's main firefighting agency is trying a new approach: training an artificial intelligence program to do the work. The idea is to harness one of the state's great strengths -- expertise in A.I. -- and deploy it to prevent small fires from becoming the kinds of conflagrations that have killed scores of residents and destroyed thousands of homes in California over the past decade.

Officials involved in the pilot program say they are happy with early results. Around 40 percent of the time, the artificial intelligence software was able to alert firefighters of the presence of smoke before dispatch centers received 911 calls. "It has absolutely improved response times," said Phillip SeLegue, the staff chief of intelligence for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, the state's main firefighting agency better known as Cal Fire. In about two dozen cases, Mr. SeLegue said, the A.I. identified fires that the agency never received 911 calls for. The fires were extinguished when they were still small and manageable.

After an exceptionally wet winter, California's fire season has not been as destructive -- so far -- as in previous years. Cal Fire counts 4,792 wildfires so far this year, lower than the five-year average of 5,422 for this time of year. Perhaps more important, the number of acres burned this year has been only one-fifth of the five-year average of 812,068 acres. The A.I. pilot program, which began in late June and covered six of Cal Fire's command centers, will be rolled out to all 21 command centers starting in September. But the program's apparent success comes with caveats. The system can detect fires only visible to the cameras. And at this stage, humans are still needed to make sure the A.I. program is properly identifying smoke. Engineers for the company that created the software, DigitalPath, based in Chico, Calif., are monitoring the system day and night, and manually vetting every incident that the A.I. identifies as fire.

"Italian producers of parmesan cheese have been fighting against imitations for years," writes the Wall Street Journal, adding "Their latest trick to beat counterfeiters is edible microchips.

"Now, makers of Parmigiano-Reggiano, as the original parmesan cheese is officially called, are slapping the microchips on their 90-pound cheese wheels as part of an endless cat-and-mouse game between makers of authentic and fake products." New methods to guarantee the origin of products are being used across the EU. Some wineries are putting serial numbers, invisible ink and holograms on their bottles. So-called DNA fingerprinting of milk bacteria pioneered in Switzerland, which isn't in the EU, is now being tested inside the bloc as a method for identifying cheese. QR codes are also proliferating, including on individual portions of pre-sliced Prosciutto di San Daniele, a raw ham similar to Prosciutto di Parma. A smartphone can be used to show information such as how long the prosciutto has been aged and when it was sliced... The new silicon chips, made by Chicago-based p-Chip, use blockchain technology to authenticate data that can trace the cheese as far back as the producer of the milk used.

The chips have been in advanced testing on more than 100,000 Parmigiano wheels for more than a year. The consortium of producers wants to be sure the chips can stand up to Parmigiano's aging requirement, which is a minimum of one year and can exceed three years for some varieties... The p-Chips can withstand extreme heat or cold, can be read through ice and can withstand years of storage in liquid nitrogen. They have outperformed RFID chips, which are larger, can be more difficult to attach to products, are more fragile and can't survive extreme temperatures, according to p-Chip Chief Technology Officer Bill Eibon. Parmigiano producers also use QR codes, but the codes are easily copied and degrade during the cheese's aging process.

A robot heats the Parmigiano wheel's casein label — a small plaque made of milk protein that is widely used in the cheese industry — and then inserts the chip on top. A hand-held reader can grab the data from the chips, which cost a few cents each and are similar to the ones that some people have inserted under the skin of their pets. The chips can't be read remotely. In lab tests, the chips sat for three weeks in a mock-up of stomach acid without leaking any dangerous material. Eibon went a step further, eating one without suffering any ill effects, but he isn't touting that lest p-Chip face accusations it is tracking people, something that isn't possible because the chips can't be read remotely and can't be read once they are ingested.

"We don't want to be known as the company accused of tracking people," said Eibon. "I ate one of the chips and nobody is tracking me, except my wife, and she uses a different method."
Merck KGaA will soon be using the same chips, the article points out, and the chips "are also being tested in the automotive industry to guarantee the authenticity of car parts.

"The chips could eventually be used on livestock, crops or medicine stored in liquid nitrogen."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: The Associated Press published standards today for generative AI use in its newsroom. The organization, which has a licensing agreement with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, listed a fairly restrictive and common-sense list of measures around the burgeoning tech while cautioning its staff not to use AI to make publishable content. Although nothing in the new guidelines is particularly controversial, less scrupulous outlets could view the AP's blessing as a license to use generative AI more excessively or underhandedly.

The organization's AI manifesto underscores a belief that artificial intelligence content should be treated as the flawed tool that it is -- not a replacement for trained writers, editors and reporters exercising their best judgment. "We do not see AI as a replacement of journalists in any way," the AP's Vice President for Standards and Inclusion, Amanda Barrett, wrote in an article about its approach to AI today. "It is the responsibility of AP journalists to be accountable for the accuracy and fairness of the information we share." The article directs its journalists to view AI-generated content as "unvetted source material," to which editorial staff "must apply their editorial judgment and AP's sourcing standards when considering any information for publication." It says employees may "experiment with ChatGPT with caution" but not create publishable content with it. That includes images, too. "In accordance with our standards, we do not alter any elements of our photos, video or audio," it states. "Therefore, we do not allow the use of generative AI to add or subtract any elements." However, it carved an exception for stories where AI illustrations or art are a story's subject -- and even then, it has to be clearly labeled as such.

Barrett warns about AI's potential for spreading misinformation. To prevent the accidental publishing of anything AI-created that appears authentic, she says AP journalists "should exercise the same caution and skepticism they would normally, including trying to identify the source of the original content, doing a reverse image search to help verify an image's origin, and checking for reports with similar content from trusted media." To protect privacy, the guidelines also prohibit writers from entering "confidential or sensitive information into AI tools." Although that's a relatively common-sense and uncontroversial set of rules, other media outlets have been less discerning. [...] It's not hard to imagine other outlets -- desperate for an edge in the highly competitive media landscape -- viewing the AP's (tightly restricted) AI use as a green light to make robot journalism a central figure in their newsrooms, publishing poorly edited / inaccurate content or failing to label AI-generated work as such. Further reading: NYT Prohibits Using Its Content To Train AI Models

A recent comprehensive study reveals that automated bots are substantially more efficient than humans at cracking Captcha tests, a widely used security measure on over 100 popular websites. The Independent reports: In the study, scientists assessed 200 of the most popular websites and found 120 still used Captcha. They took the help of 1,000 participants online from diverse backgrounds -- varying in location, age, sex and educational level -- to take 10 captcha tests on these sites and gauge their difficulty levels. Researchers found many bots described in scientific journals could beat humans at these tests in both speed and accuracy.

Some Captcha tests took human participants between nine and 15 seconds to solve, with an accuracy of about 50 to 84 per cent, while it took the bots less than a second to crack them, with up to near perfection. "The bots' accuracy ranges from 85-100 per cent, with the majority above 96 per cent. This substantially exceeds the human accuracy range we observed (50-85 per cent)," scientists wrote in the study. They also found that the bots' solving times are "significantly lower" or nearly the same as humans in almost all cases.

After a hurricane hit Florida, 484 buildings just at the Tyndall Air Force base were destroyed or damaged beyond repair. Five years later, it's part of a $5 billion, nine-year rebuilding effort the Washington Post describes as rare "blank slate." The plan is "not merely to rebuild it, but to construct what the U.S. military calls 'the installation of the future,' which will be able to withstand rising seas, stronger storms and other threats..." The rebuild at Tyndall, which is expected to continue into 2027, marks the largest military construction project undertaken by the Pentagon. "Think of it as the Air Force throwing its Costco card down on the table and buying buildings in bulk," said Michael Dwyer, deputy chief of the Natural Disaster Recovery Division. A dizzying array of new technologies and approaches have been incorporated into the effort, from semiautonomous robot dogs patrolling the grounds to artificial intelligence software designed to detect and deter any armed person who enters the base.

But the most robust funding is aimed at making Tyndall more efficient, connected and resilient in the face of a warming world. Structures under construction — from dormitory complexes to a child care center to hangars that will house three new squadrons of the F-35A Lightning II later this year — are being built to withstand winds in excess of 165 mph. Steel frames, high-impact windows, concrete facades and roofing with additional bracing are among the features meant to weather the stronger storms to come.

At nearby Panama City, sea level rise has accelerated in recent years, with federal data showing seas have risen there more than 4 inches since 2010. Planners factored in the potential for as much as 7 feet of sea level rise by the end of the century, and as a result placed the "vast majority" of new buildings at elevations that should be safe from storm surges for decades, Dwyer said. In addition, sensors placed near the low spots of buildings will send alerts the moment a flood threatens. The Air Force also has created a "digital twin" of Tyndall — essentially, a virtual duplicate of the base that allows officials to simulate how roads, buildings and other infrastructure would hold up in different scenarios, such as a hurricane or historic rainfall events.
Other efforts include restoring the beach's 10-foot sand dunes and its rocky shoreline, along with "the installation of submerged oyster reef breakwater that can reduce wave energy and erosion."

But the article points out that the Air Force also has a second hope for their base: "that the lessons unfolding here can be replicated at other bases around the world that will face — or already are facing — similar threats...

Google's newest proposed web standard is... DRM? Over the weekend the Internet got wind of this proposal for a "Web Environment Integrity API. " From a report: The explainer is authored by four Googlers, including at least one person on Chrome's "Privacy Sandbox" team, which is responding to the death of tracking cookies by building a user-tracking ad platform right into the browser. The intro to the Web Integrity API starts out: "Users often depend on websites trusting the client environment they run in. This trust may assume that the client environment is honest about certain aspects of itself, keeps user data and intellectual property secure, and is transparent about whether or not a human is using it."

The goal of the project is to learn more about the person on the other side of the web browser, ensuring they aren't a robot and that the browser hasn't been modified or tampered with in any unapproved ways. The intro says this data would be useful to advertisers to better count ad impressions, stop social network bots, enforce intellectual property rights, stop cheating in web games, and help financial transactions be more secure. Perhaps the most telling line of the explainer is that it "takes inspiration from existing native attestation signals such as [Apple's] App Attest and the [Android] Play Integrity API." Play Integrity (formerly called "SafetyNet") is an Android API that lets apps find out if your device has been rooted.

Root access allows you full control over the device that you purchased, and a lot of app developers don't like that. So if you root an Android phone and get flagged by the Android Integrity API, several types of apps will just refuse to run. You'll generally be locked out of banking apps, Google Wallet, online games, Snapchat, and some media apps like Netflix. [...] Google wants the same thing for the web. Google's plan is that, during a webpage transaction, the web server could require you to pass an "environment attestation" test before you get any data. At this point your browser would contact a "third-party" attestation server, and you would need to pass some kind of test. If you passed, you would get a signed "IntegrityToken" that verifies your environment is unmodified and points to the content you wanted unlocked. You bring this back to the web server, and if the server trusts the attestation company, you get the content unlocked and finally get a response with the data you wanted.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: An open letter signed by more than 1,300 experts says AI is a "force for good, not a threat to humanity." It was organized by BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, to counter "AI doom." Rashik Parmar, BCS chief executive, said it showed the UK tech community didn't believe the "nightmare scenario of evil robot overlords." In March, tech leaders including Elon Musk, who recently launched an AI business, signed a letter calling for a pause in developing powerful systems. That letter suggested super-intelligent AI posed an "existential risk" to humanity.

But the BCS sees the situation in a more positive light, while still supporting the need for rules around AI. Richard Carter is a signatory to the BCS letter. Mr Carter, who founded an AI-powered startup cybersecurity business, feels the dire warnings are unrealistic: "Frankly, this notion that AI is an existential threat to humanity is too far-fetched. We're just not in any kind of a position where that's even feasible." Signatories to the BCS letter come from a range of backgrounds -- business, academia, public bodies and think tanks, though none are as well known as Elon Musk, or run major AI companies like OpenAI.

Those the BBC has spoken to stress the positive uses of AI. Hema Purohit, who leads on digital health and social care for the BCS, said the technology was enabling new ways to spot serious illness, for example medical systems that detect signs of issues such as cardiac disease or diabetes when a patient goes for an eye test. She said AI could also help accelerate the testing of new drugs. Signatory Sarah Burnett, author of a book on AI and business, pointed to agricultural uses of the tech, from robots that use artificial intelligence to pollinate plants to those that "identify weeds and spray or zap them with lasers, rather than having whole crops sprayed with weed killer." The letter argues: "The UK can help lead the way in setting professional and technical standards in AI roles, supported by a robust code of conduct, international collaboration and fully resourced regulation." By doing so, it says Britain "can become a global byword for high-quality, ethical, inclusive AI."

Chipotle has developed a robot that can cut the 50-minute process of making guacamole in half. "The fast-casual chain developed the collaborative robot, or cobot, in partnership with Vebu Labs, a California-based robotics startup," reports CNBC. "Chipotle also announced Wednesday that its $50 million venture arm, Cultivate Next, is investing in Vebu. Financial terms weren't disclosed." From the report: To prepare avocados using the Autocado, Chipotle employees load up the device with a full case of the ripe fruit. The Autocado can hold up to 25 pounds at one time. Then, the machine vertically orients the avocados, slices them in half and removes their cores and skin. A bowl at the bottom collects the fruit, which employees can then hand mash and mix with the rest of the guacamole ingredients.

Chipotle still wants employees to have a hand in making their guacamole. "There's no plan to test automated guac made in our restaurant," Curt Garner, Chipotle's chief technology officer, told CNBC. Employees don't have to monitor the Autocado while it prepares the avocados and can even use the top of the device as more counter space to prepare other ingredients. The prototype is "very close" to design for manufacture, according to Garner. Chipotle expects to test the Autocado in restaurants later this year.

Eventually, Vebu plans to add machine learning capabilities and sensors to the Autocado that will help it evaluate the quality of avocados. Preparing avocados for guacamole routinely ranks as one of employees' least favorite tasks, Garner said. It's also one of the most dangerous duties in Chipotle kitchens, sometimes resulting in knife injuries. On top of saving time and labor costs, the robot could also cut food waste. If the chain deploys the Autocado across its footprint of more than 3,200 locations, it could help save millions of dollars on avocados annually, the company said. Despite those savings, guacamole will probably still cost customers extra. "It's worth it," Garner said.

Popular Science describes how NASA's Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) will use a pair of ramps to become the first rover to explore the Moon's south pole when it arrives in late 2024. From the report: "We all know how to work with ramps, and we just need to optimize it for the environment we're going to be in," says NASA's VIPER program manager Daniel Andrews. A VIPER test vehicle recently descended down a pair of metal ramps at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, as seen in the agency's recently published photos, with one beam for each set of the rover's wheels. Because the terrain where VIPER will land -- the edge of the massive Nobile Crater -- is expected to be rough, the engineering team has been testing VIPER's ability to descend the ramps at extreme angles. They have altered the steepness, as measured from the lander VIPER will descend from, and differences in elevation between the ramp for each wheel. "We have two ramps, not just for the left and right wheels, but a ramp set that goes out the back too," Andrews says. "So we actually get our pick of the litter, which one looks most safe and best to navigate as we're at that moment where we have to roll off the lander."

VIPER is a scientific successor to NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS mission, which in 2009 confirmed the presence of water ice on the lunar south pole. "It completely rewrote the books on the moon with respect to water," says Andrews, who also worked on the LCROSS mission. "That really started the moon rush, commercially, and by state actors like NASA and other space agencies." The ice, if abundant, could be mined to create rocket propellant. It could also provide water for other purposes at long-term lunar habitats, which NASA plans to construct in the late 2020s as part of the Artemis moon program.

But LCROSS only confirmed that ice was definitely present in a single crater at the moon's south pole. VIPER, a mobile rover, will probe the distribution of water ice in greater detail. Drilling beneath the lunar surface is one task. Another is to move into steep, permanently shadowed regions -- entering craters that, due to their sharp geometry, and the low angle of the sun at the lunar poles, have not seen sunlight in billions of years. The tests demonstrate the rover can navigate a 15-degree slope with ease -- enough to explore these hidden dark spots, avoiding the need to make a machine designed for trickier descents. "We think there's plenty of scientifically relevant opportunities, without having to make a superheroic rover that can do crazy things," Andrews says.

Developed by NASA Ames and Pittsburgh-based company Astrobotic, VIPER is a square golf-cart-sized vehicle about 5 feet long and wide, and about 8 feet high. Unlike all of NASA's Mars rovers, VIPER has four wheels, not six. "A problem with six wheels is it creates kind of the equivalent of a track, and so you're forced to drive in a certain way," Andrews says. VIPER's four wheels are entirely independent from each other. Not only can they roll in any direction, they can be turned out, using the rover's shoulder-like joints to crawl out of the soft regolith of the kind scientists believe exists in permanently shadowed moon craters. The wheels themselves are very similar to those on the Mars rovers, but with more paddle-like treads, known as grousers, to carry the robot through fluffy regolith. [...] Together with Astrobotic, Andrews and his team have altered the ramps, and they now include specialized etchings down their lengths. The rover can detect this pattern along the rampway, using cameras in its wheel wells. "By just looking down there," the robot knows where it is, he says. "That's a new touch." Andrews is sure VIPER will be ready for deployment in 2024, however many tweaks are necessary. After all, this method is less complicated than a sky crane, he notes: "Ramps are pretty tried and true."

We've just had the world's first press conference with AI-enabled, humanoid social robots. Click here to jump straight to Slashdot's transcript of all the robots' answers during the press conference, or watch the 40-minute video here.

It all happened as the United Nations held an "AI for Good" summit in Geneva, where the Guardian reports that the foyer was "humming with robotic voices, the whirring of automated wheels and limbs, and Desdemona, the 'rock star' humanoid, who is chanting 'the singularity will not be centralised' on stage backed by a human band, Jam Galaxy."

But the Associated Press describes how one UN agency had "assembled a group of robots that physically resembled humans at a news conference Friday, inviting reporters to ask them questions in an event meant to spark discussion about the future of artificial intelligence. "The nine robots were seated and posed upright along with some of the people who helped make them at a podium in a Geneva conference center... Among them: Sophia, the first robot innovation ambassador for the U.N. Development Program, or UNDP; Grace, described as a health care robot; and Desdemona, a rock star robot."

"I'm terrified by all of this," said one local newscaster, noting that the robots also said they "had no intention of rebelling against their creators."

But the Associated Press points out an important caveat: While the robots vocalized strong statements - that robots could be more efficient leaders than humans, but wouldn't take anyone's job away or stage a rebellion - organizers didn't specify to what extent the answers were scripted or programmed by people. The summit was meant to showcase "human-machine collaboration," and some of the robots are capable of producing preprogrammed responses, according to their documentation.
Two of the robots seemed to disagree on whether AI-powered robots should submit to stricter regulation. (Although since they're only synthesizing sentences from large-language models, can they really be said to "agree" or "disagree"?)

There were unintentionally humorous moments, starting right from the beginning. Click here to start reading Slashdot's transcript of the robots' answers:

European Union regulators have opened an official investigation into Amazon's proposed $1.7 billion acquisition of iRobot, the company behind the popular Roomba lineup of robot vacuum cleaners. The Verge reports: In a press release, the European Commission said it's concerned that "the transaction would allow Amazon to restrict competition in the market for robot vacuum cleaners ('RVCs') and to strengthen its position as online marketplace provider." The European Commission is also looking at how getting access to iRobot users' data may give Amazon an advantage "in the market for online marketplace services to third-party sellers (and related advertising services) and / or other data-related markets." The European Commission will make a decision about if it will block the deal by November 15th. Amazon announced plans to acquire iRobot for $1.7 billion in August last year.

Amazon spokesperson Alexandra Miller said in a statement: "We continue to work through the process with the European Commission and are focused on addressing its questions and any identified concerns at this stage. iRobot, which faces intense competition from other vacuum cleaner suppliers, offers practical and inventive products. We believe Amazon can offer a company like iRobot the resources to accelerate innovation and invest in critical features while lowering prices for consumers."

An android robot, EveR 6, took the conductor's podium in Seoul on Friday evening to lead a performance by South Korea's national orchestra, marking the first such attempt in the country. From a report: The two-armed robot, designed by the Korea Institute of Industrial Technology, made its debut at the National Theater of Korea, leading musicians in the country's national orchestra. The robot, with a humanoid face, first bowed to the audience and started waving its arms to control the tempo of the live show. "Movements by a conductor are very detailed," Choi Soo-yeoul, who led Friday's performance alongside the robot, said. "The robot was able to present such detailed moves much better than I had imagined."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from OPB: Out near the far end of Washington's Long Beach Peninsula, 83-year-old Jan Worrell has a new, worldly sidekick in her living room. "This is ElliQ. I call her my roommate," the grandmother said as she introduced her companion robot almost as if it were human. Artificial intelligence is all the rage, and now it's helping some Pacific Northwest seniors live in their own homes for longer. Worrell joined a pilot project that is trialing how AI-driven companion robots could reduce loneliness and social isolation among seniors -- especially those living alone. This "roommate" is a chatty one with a vaguely humanoid head and shoulders. "I talk a lot and I love it. I need someone to interact with and she does," Worrell said.

ElliQ is a smart speaker, tablet computer, video phone and artificial intelligence portal all wrapped into one by the maker Intuition Robotics. The stationary table-top device is among the most versatile of a flurry of new tech devices geared to help you or your parents continue to live independently. ElliQ gives Worrell health tips and schedule reminders. It can recite the news and weather. They play memory games. The care bot tells a lot of corny jokes and it can lead an exercise class on command, too. [...] Worrell is among 20 rural seniors living along Washington's Pacific coast selected to receive one of these Israeli-designed robot companions. She gets it for free for a year as part of a pilot project overseen by the Olympic Area Agency on Aging. O3A, as it is known, serves Pacific, Grays Harbor, Jefferson and Clallam counties. [...]

On the Long Beach Peninsula, Jan Worrell's son Jeff Whiting watched his mom take to her new robot companion. He said he is impressed by it too, but at the same time is aware there is a creepy side to AI. "They are collecting data on everything that happens in this room," Whiting said in an interview at his mom's house where he is living temporarily. "They know her sleep patterns and they know what time she is up and what time she goes to bed. That would be my only concern." Whiting says the people who came to set up ElliQ gave assurances that users' personal data would be protected. In the case of Whiting's mom, the combo of the companion robot and a medical alert wristwatch changed how long she plans to stay in her own home. Worrell said she felt confident enough last month to cancel her deposit to move into an assisted living facility near her daughter in Eugene, Oregon. Universities and medical schools have generally found that age-tech "decreased loneliness, increased well-being and spurred mental activity and optimism," notes the report.

"[T]he 20 Washington seniors selected to receive a free ElliQ companion (a $249 value, plus a monthly subscription of $30-$40) were given a health assessment at the beginning of this pilot project in April. They will be reevaluated in one year."

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: Over the past few years, restaurants from White Castle to Wendy's have been investing in artificial intelligence tech for drive-thrus... [E]fforts have ramped up recently, with two announcements in May. CKE Restaurants (owner of Hardee's and Carl's Jr.) said it will roll out AI ordering capability more broadly after a successful pilot. Soon after, Wendy's said it had expanded its partnership with Google Cloud to include an AI ordering tool at the drive-thru. The chain is piloting the program in Columbus, Ohio this month.
Fast food restaurants "say it's a way to ease the burden placed on overworked employees, and a solution to bogged down drive-thrus overwhelmed by a surge of customers," according to the article. "But customers — and workers — may not be thrilled with the technology... " Frustrated customers have already documented cases of AI getting their orders wrong, and experts warn the noisy drive-thru is a challenging environment for the technology. And AI may swipe hours or even entire jobs away from fast-food workers... Out of ten orders placed by customers at an Indiana White Castle that uses AI in its drive-thru, three people asked to speak with a human employee, because of either an error or a desire to simply talk to a person, the Wall Street Journal recently reported.

That said, AI inherently improves as it collects more data. The experience may improve after tools take more orders and learn to better recognize voices.

For companies, a hiccup-y start seems to be well worth the potential boost to sales. One of the main benefits of using AI in the drive-thru is that it upsells relentlessly — leading customers to spend more, according to Presto Automation, an AI company that works with restaurants and has partnered with CKE... Some analysts are similarly bullish. "We believe that AI voice recognition and digital only lanes could speed up the average drive through service time by at least 20-30%," analysts wrote in a Bernstein Research note published in March. "We expect AI to augment the competitive advantages of restaurants with digital culture."

Short-staffed restaurants may see AI as a way to fill in the gaps... Some restaurants are still struggling to find staff. Meanwhile, dining trends have changed. The pandemic sent customers to drive-thrus in droves and some have kept the habit, contributing to slower drive-thru times.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google Search's dominance has created a cottage industry of SEO professionals who promise to share their lucrative tricks to climb to the top of search results. From YouTubers to firms peddling proprietary tools, SEO hustlers propagate a never-ending stream of marketing content that floods Search. Some companies sell tools that allow marketers to mass-produce and distribute blog posts, press releases, and even robot-narrated podcast materials, with the purpose of creating backlinks -- a signal that Google uses to rank content in Search. Small businesses must decide if they'll try to learn SEO practices themselves or pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars to have a marketing firm do it for them.

While other platforms are still nowhere close to overtaking Search, entrepreneurs like Dziura, who sells feminist gifts, are taking note of how people are (or aren't) using Google. Now, any retailer, big or small, can add more text to their website without a team of copywriters, and given AI's tendency to generate falsehoods, there's even less guarantee that what consumers are reading is real. It's why people append "reddit" to the end of searches -- they want an actual answer or opinion, not one mediated by a search ranking algorithm. Dziura specifically notes the trend of young people using TikTok for Google-able things and has seen shoppers flocking to TikTok, Reels, or live shopping events. People like videos and product shots with hands holding items. If shoppers want candid shots and videos of products, Dziura will give them that.

Zume, a Silicon Valley-based robotic pizza-making and delivery startup, has shut down and is liquidating its assets. From a report: The company had raised $445 million in venture capital funding, including $375 million from SoftBank in 2018 at a $2.25 billion valuation. That's a whole lotta pepperoni. And cheese, which Zume apparently couldn't stop from sliding off its pies.

The international space station is equpped with four 39-foot blankets (11.8-meters), reports CBS News. The first one was delivered in December of 2000 — and now it's time for some changes: Two astronauts ventured outside the International Space Station Friday and installed the fifth of six roll-out solar array blankets — iROSAs — needed to offset age-related degradation and micrometeoroid damage to the lab's original solar wings.

Floating in the Quest airlock, veteran Stephen Bowen, making his ninth spacewalk, and crewmate Woody Hoburg, making his first, switched their spacesuits to battery power at 9:25 a.m. EDT, officially kicking off the 264th spacewalk devoted to ISS assembly and maintenance and the seventh so far this year. NASA is in the process of upgrading the ISS's solar power system by adding six iROSAs to the lab's eight existing U.S. arrays. The first four roll-out blankets were installed during spacewalks in 2021 and 2022. Bowen and Hoburg installed the fifth during Friday's spacewalk and plan to deploy the sixth during another excursion next Thursday.

The two new iROSAs were delivered to the space station earlier this week in the unpressurized trunk section of a SpaceX cargo Dragon. The lab's robot arm pulled them out Wednesday and mounted them on the right side of the station's power truss just inboard the starboard wings... As the station sailed 260 miles above the Great Lakes, the 63-foot-long solar array slowly unwound like a window shade to its full length. Well ahead of schedule by that point, the spacewalkers carried out a variety of get-ahead tasks to save time next week when they float back outside to install the second new iROSA.

They returned to the airlock and began re-pressurization procedures at 3:28 p.m., bringing the 6-hour three-minute spacewalk to a close. With nine spacewalks totaling 60 hours and 22 minutes under his belt, Bowen now ranks fifth on the list of the world's most experienced spacewalkers.
"Combined with the 95-kilowatt output of the original eight panels, the station's upgraded system will provide about 215,000 kilowatts of power."