ROBOTICS: Vyo Is a Fascinating and Unique Take on Social Domestic Robots
Evan Ackerman | IEEE Spectrum
“Vyo is ‘a personal assistant serving as a centralized interface for smart home devices.’ Nothing new there, but what sets Vyo apart is how you interact with it: it combines non-anthropomorphic design with anthropomorphic expressiveness and a tactile object-based control system into a social robot that’s totally, adorably different.”
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: The AI Machines Undergoing Behavioral Psychology Tests
Technology Review
“The team says the best performing AI system uses deep reinforcement learning enhanced with additional memory. These machines retrieve relevant memories based on the context in which they were stored and in which the device finds itself. That’s different from many existing memory systems that do not rely on context for memory retrieval.”
INTERNET: A Computer Tried (and Failed) to Write This Article
Adrienne Lafrance | The Atlantic
“Here I am, a human, writing a story that was assigned to a machine. If I’d published what the computer came up with, you’d be reading something like: “content that was that communications and everything that makes on a person what they’re are also to be in the Internet in the fact about it is that models are technologication of the same that its also from the most computer.'”
TRANSPORTATION: Is the Jetpack Movement Finally Taking Off?
Jack Nicas | The Wall Street Journal
“Even Google couldn’t make it work. ‘The jetpack is a death trap because the engines go off and you’re dead,’ says Astro Teller, the head of X, the so-called moonshot factory of Google parent Alphabet Inc. His team dropped the jetpack in favor of a gyrocopter—essentially a backpack helicopter that descends slowly thanks to a rotor that turns naturally, like a maple seed, as it falls.”
SPACE: Why It’s Time to Go Back to the Moon
Loren Grush | The Verge
“A Moon mission is a logical stepping stone to Mars. It can teach us about interplanetary living, just as the International Space Station has taught us about life in space.”
CYBERNETICS: Open Bionics created a real bionic arm from the hero of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Dean Takahashi | Venture Beat
“The partners say they want to create affordable 3D-printed bionic hands that could work for people who need them. This ‘Augmented Future’ initiative is eerily close the storyline of Deus Ex. Except it is happening even sooner than the original game creators predicted. In the game, the big year is 2027, but at 2016, we are even farther along than anticipated.”
Image Credit: Shutterstock
