AIAR Weekly #19

AIAR Weekly

Issue #19

15.04.2016

Featured material:

• [R] Watch Google X Unleash Awesome Two-Legged Robot on Tokyo - Since beginning of Robotics Weekly (now called Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Weekly), when I was presenting robots, very often those robots were human inspired. Newest robot from Google X is slightly different. Basically, it is "just" legs with some electronics and batteries as a center of mass between them. But surprisingly, it behaves and walks quite effortless. The problem for now is that, it doesn't have any hands. Bud does it need them?

Articles and videos:

• [AI] The Pitfalls of Deep Learning - What shortcomings do you see with deep learning? This question was originally asked on Quora, and  Oren Etzioni tries to explain her view point on current limitations of Deep Learning.
• [R] What can we learn from Robot Athletes? - How to stimulate research and development in robotics? Design decathlon competitions and let people challenge them with their creations. With this approach you can develop really robust and unbreakable systems. TED talk by Jacky Baltes.
• [AI] A dummy’s guide to Deep Learning (part 2 of 3) - Continuation of simple course which has to give better view on Deep Learning.
• [R] The Quest For Lifelike robots - Never too much of good infographics. This time authors from futurism.com developed infographics dedicated to robots which are designed to look as much alike humans as possible. Worth to check.
• [AI] Neural Network Playground - Ever wanted to check out those neural networks but you were afraid of math? Fear no more! On this website, you can easily set-up simple neural network and solve simple problem with it immediately. You can also observe its progress with every iteration. Cool stuff.
• [R] How babies can inspire us to build intelligent robot - In this TED talk, Alex Pitti presents his view on idea, that to really develop intelligence, you should give it body, and some senses, so it can learn and perceive surrounding world as average toddler can.
• [AI] Announcing TensorFlow 0.8 - Latest release of open source deep learning framework adds support for distributed computing. Thanks to it, some models can be easily trained in hours vs in weeks if you only have enough computational power.
• [AI] Deep learning: the truth behind the hype - If you are not too eager to jump into deep learning hype train, this article might reinforce your feelings. It also shows advantages and disadvantages of deep learning, and some ideas how to combine it with other techniques in the future.

Crowdfunding:

• [R] PurpleKit - PurpleKit is all-in-one box, aimed to help amateur tinkers with collecting their supplies for projects. It contains various pieces of aluminum, bolts, screws and similar stuff. I assume, based on interest, that every tinker want rather to gather such components on his/her own, than just buy box with most popular parts. I'm wrong maybe on this?

Book of the week:

• [AI] Artificial Intelligence for Humans, Volume 2: Nature-Inspired Algorithms - Second book in a series. This time, author focuses on algorithms closely related to biology and nature in general, for example: genetic mutation and cellular automats.

Courses:

• [AI] Machine Learning Foundations: A Case Study Approach - "In this course, you will get hands-on experience with machine learning from a series of practical case-studies. At the end of the first course you will have studied how to predict house prices based on house-level features, analyze sentiment from user reviews, retrieve documents of interest, recommend products, and search for images. Through hands-on practice with these use cases, you will be able to apply machine learning methods in a wide range of domains."

Jobs:

• [R] Robotics Software Engineer @ Applied Minds - Applied Minds is a company which provides various consulting solutions for its clients. They aim to build interdisciplinary teams which work together towards finding best solution for targeted problems. They also looking for robotics specialist this time. Location: Burbank, USA. Tags: python, c++, ros, opencv, slam.

Humor:

• [R] Simone Giertz's Popcorn Machine! - Totally must have device for next season of Game of Thrones!

Kudos:

Michał Neonek, MrValgad, Tompul, Magdalena, Mucha

Appendix:

Do you have link to cool news, article, tutorial or video and want to share with other robot/AI fans? Send it to me and if meet quality standards I will include it in next issue of AIAR Weekly.

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License: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0