Learning
"Robots Can Learn a Range of Visual Object Manipulation Skills Entirely on Their Own"
"Humans learn object manipulation skills without any teacher through millions of interactions with a variety of objects during their lifetime. We have shown that it possible to build a robotic system that also leverages large amounts of autonomously collected data to learn widely applicable manipulation skills, specifically 'object pushing skills,' said Frederik Ebert, a graduate student in Sergey Levine's lab who worked on the project. more »
Reprising Kissing a Frog, A Math Problem for the Princess and A Mathematicians's Guide to Mating
From Prof. Billingham's essay: "I'm told that when men meet women, they sometimes rate each other on a scale of 1 to 10. Of course, mathematicians are far too intelligent and sophisticated do this. We rate people on a scale of 0 to 1. In our original mathematical model, all we could do was compare one possible frog with another. The numbers didn't mean anything in themselves; they just told the princess whether one frog was "better" than another. Let's change the fairytale slightly so that the 100 frogs are now labelled with numbers drawn randomly from those that lie between 0 and 1, with the handsome prince having the highest number. What's the princess's best strategy now?" more »
Improving People’s Relationships with Technology and With Fellow Humans
"Our primary interest was really in the patterns of people’s answers to these questions," Kara Weisman said. "So, when a certain person thought a robot could think or remember things, what else did they think it was capable of doing? By looking at the patterns in people’s responses to these questions, we could infer the underlying, conceptual structure."
Those patterns resulted in three main clusters of mental capacities: body (physiological sensations, like hunger and pain), heart (social-emotional abilities, like guilt and pride) and mind (perceptual and cognitive abilities, like memory and vision). more »
A Pew Research Center Report: Wide Partisan Gaps in US Over How Far the Country Has Come on Gender Equality
Americans across demographic and partisan groups agree that women should have equal rights with men. About eight-in-ten Americans (82%) say it is very important for women to have equal rights with men in our country, and another 14% say this is somewhat important. Just 4% of Americans say gender equality is not too or not at all important. Asked whether the country has gone too far, not gone far enough or been about right when it comes to giving women equal rights with men, half of the public says the country still has work to do, while 39% say things are about where they should be; one-in-ten Americans believe the country has gone too far in giving women equal rights with men. These views differ by gender, education and, most of all, partisanship. more »