Marco van der Hoeven

The new edition of Microsoft Flight Simulator has become a visual masterpiece, which is only possible by making smart use of AI, machine learning and the corresponding computing power in the cloud. As a result, the entire world is shown in detailed 3D image, in combination with live weather effects and other air traffic.

Spot, the well-known four-legged robot from Boston Dynamics, is now also for sale in Europe. Commercial sales of Spot had already started in the United States, following a successful Early Adopter program in which a number of companies in both Europe and North America integrated the robot into their operations.

The Robotic Process Automation (RPA) market will reach $ 1.89 billion globally by 2021, up 19.5% from this year. Despite the economic damage from the COVID-19 pandemic, the RPA market is expected to continue to grow at double digits through 2024, says research firm Gartner.

What will the workplace of the future look like? What role does AI play? What role do robots play? These questions are answered in UiPath’s Immersion Lab. The lab exists in physical form, but due to the current corona limitations, the experience of hyperautomation can also be undergone completely virtually. Visitors can experience for themselves, for example on the basis of a concrete business case, the advantages of working with a robot. The Rocking Robots team spoke about this with Chief Robotics Officer Boris Krumrey.

Stanford University researcher Mac Schwager entered the world of penguin counting through a chance meeting at his sister-in-law’s wedding in June 2016. There, he learned that Annie Schmidt, a biologist at Point Blue Conservation Science, was seeking a better way to image a large penguin colony in Antarctica. Schwager, who is an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics, saw an opportunity to collaborate, given his work on controlling swarms of autonomous flying robots.

The video Slaughterbots is now two years old, and more than two million people have watched it worldwide. This visual warning against the danger of autonomous weapons is still relevant today, and although protests against such weapons are growing, no official measures have yet been taken to ban autonomous weapons.

In the United States, more and more stores are using retail robots. For example, retail chain Schnuck Markets will expand the deployment of Simbe Robotics robot Tally with another 46 stores, using the real-time data collected by Tally at 62 locations.

A Gartner poll of roughly 200 business and IT professionals on September 24, 2020 revealed that 24% of respondents’ organisations increased their artificial intelligence (AI) investments and 42% kept them unchanged since the onset of COVID-19.  Growth – namely customer experience and retention, and revenue growth – along with cost optimisation were the top focus areas for their current AI initiatives.

Sarcos Defense, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sarcos Robotics, today announced that the company has been awarded a contract by the Air Force Technology Acceleratory Program (AFWERX) to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) platform.for the Center for Rapid Innovation (CRI) at Air Force Research Labs (AFRL), that will enable human-scale dexterous robotic systems.

The past years in the Fall San Francisco was the scene of Dreamforce, with 170,000 attendees the largest IT event in the world. Artificial Intelligence, under the name Einstein, is becoming increasingly important within the Salesforce portfolio. An important development of Einstein at Dreamforce was the offering of deep voice interaction with artificial intelligence. Carola Verschoor of Royal HaskoningDHV called this in a report by professional title Executive People at the time “ talking to data. The video above is a conversation Marco van der Hoeven had with Allison Witherspoon about the development of Einstein last year.