Bots in Society

UCL has announced a four-year research partnership with Facebook AI Research (FAIR), in which PhD students spend time at both UCL Computer Science and Facebook This new strategic partnership between UCL and FAIR is the launch of Facebook’s PhD programme in the UK.

Demand for service robots will grow at an accelerated pace in 2021, following 24% improvement in annual sales volumes in 2020. In a series of reports a research team of Strategy Analytics shows that the Covid-19 pandemic actually helped grow demand for service robots, particularly business-oriented service robots in 2020 and that growth will continue in coming years.

Argyll & Bute Health & Social Care Partnership (HSCP) has begun carrying COVID test samples and other medical materials on drone delivery flights between medical facilities in the Argyll & Bute region. Following a proof-of-concept phase last year, the three-month initiative, which aims to help improve COVID-19 related logistics to and from remote locations, has now been expanded and is fully operational.

Artificial intelligence and robotics are advancing at a rapid pace, with the number of autonomous intelligent machines making moral choices among us continuously on the rise. Knowledge in moral psychology pertaining to artificial intelligence and robotics is important when discussing the ethics of their development.

UCB and Microsoft have announced a new multi-year, strategic collaboration to combine Microsoft’s computational services, cloud, and artificial intelligence (AI) with UCB’s drug discovery and development capabilities. As several drug discovery activities require the analysis of high-dimensional data sets or multi-modal unstructured information, Microsoft’s platform can support UCB’s scientists, including its data scientists, to discover new medicines in a more efficient and innovative way.

In both Las Vegas and San Francisco more autonomous vehicles will be operating on public roads. Motional  will be testing driverless vehicles on public roads in Las Vegas, navigating intersections, unprotected turns, and interactions with other road users, including pedestrians and cyclists. And Waymo will start a pilot with autonomous taxi’s on the usy streets of San Francisco.

Klinikum Chemnitz, a leading public hospital based in Saxony, is the first German hospital to install Versius, a Surgical Robotic System by CMR Surgical. It has now been used in over 1,000 clinical cases across Europe, Australia and India. Versius will be used by Klinikum Chemnitz in a broad range of laparoscopic (minimal access or keyhole) procedures.

André Debus, Chef de projet au CNES (Centre national d’études spatiales) et ingénieur INSA Lyon en génie mécanique construction, répond aux questions de Rocking Robots sur les missions confiées à Perseverance et à sa SuperCam, conçue et fabriquée en France.

According to Russian press agency TASS the Moscow police force uses a facial recognition system to detect participants in demonstrations against the government. The system is said to detected those who had been put on a database for their repeated participation in ‘unauthorized events’.

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) – the United Nations specialized agency for information and communication technologies – has launched a new Focus Group to contend with the increasing prevalence and severity of natural disasters with the help of artificial intelligence (AI).