[Popular STEM] Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for November 14, 2020

remlaps (74)adminFounder - PS🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥in Popular STEM • 3 years ago

Video Friday: Aquanaut Robot Takes to the Ocean; Robotics researchers borrow tricks from dog trainers; A new paper proposes Physical Artificial Intelligence to facilitate lifelike artificially intelligent robots; A floating spaceport may be on the way for Japan's Tokyo Bay; and Researchers find evidence for ideological bias in the social sciences and argue that it may be doing harm to the field

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Video Friday: Aquanaut Robot Takes to the Ocean - This week's weekly selection of awesome robot videos includes the following:
- A video showing the preparations for landing the Perseverence Mars Rover when it travels to the red planet. These preparations include parachute testing in the world's largest wind tunnel and practicing obstacle avoidance in Death Valley.
- HMI's Aquanaut, an underwater transformer, takes to the water.
- A soft fabric gripping robot from UNSW Sydney that can grab fragile objects without breaking them.
- A heterogeneous human/robotic cheerleading squad from RobotStart includes a herd of Spot robotic dogs and a crew of humanoid automatons.
- And more!
Here is a protototype robotic hand, RBO Hand 3 from TU Berlin.

Dog training methods help JHU teach robots to learn new tricks - Elsewhere in robotics, Johns Hopkins researchers are borrowing positive reinforcement techniques from dog trainers in order to speed training times from months to days. The team says that these techniques may make robotic training into a more feasible activity.

Here is the video:

-h/t Communications of the ACM

Researchers Propose ‘Physical AI’ As Key To Lifelike Robots - A new paper, Skills for Physical Artificial Intelligence in Nature Machine Intelligence, proposes a new multi-disciplinary area of research termed, "physical artificial intelligence". The authors argue for, "teaching materials science, mechanical engineering, computer science, biology and chemistry as a combined discipline" in order to facilitate advances in developing lifelike artificially intelligent robotic devices. It seems that the team believes that this could be a missing link for creating robots that look and behave like humans, or perhaps a bridge across the uncanny valley. This may be especially important in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, when people are seeking ways to perform every day tasks from remote locations. The article describes the potential benefits like this:
If developed, lifelike autonomous robots could potentially help humans at work and in daily living, performing tasks that would otherwise be dangerous, onerous or tedious. They could, for example, assist in health care and social care, helping to plug the global shortage of healthcare workers.
In addition to creating the new research field, physical artificial intelligence, the authors also suggest that collaboration with researchers in other fields will still be necessary. -h/t Communications of the ACM

This floating spaceport in Japan could bring space travel to the city - As businesses and venture capitalists anticipate a boom in the space industry, space ports are popping up around the world in locations from Houston and Colorado to the UK, Sweden, New Zealand, and Kazakhstan. One possible location is being designed as a floating island in Japan's Tokyo Bay. The spaceport would be host to space flights that would launch tourists into space to view the curvature of the Earth and to experience 0 gravity. The design includes mixed use space such as
research and business facilities, an education academy, shops, a hotel, an astronaut-food restaurant, a 4D IMAX movie theatre, an art museum, a gym, an aquarium and a disco -- all space-themed, of course.
The plan is to accommodate space vehicles that function like airplanes, with horizontal takeoff and landing instead of rockets that takeoff and land vertically. It is hoped that the floating island design will overcome "Not in my backyard" (NIMBY) objections from residents and make the project appealing to city dwellers in Tokyo, and eventually in other locations. -h/t The Seasteading Institute

A Model of Political Bias in Social Science Research - In a new paper, Nathan Honeycutt and Lee Jussim examine evidence relating to the debate over the question of political bias in the social sciences. Noting that it would be difficult to determine whether an absence of evidence of bias in the field stems from tribalistic defense of moral values or from an actual absence of bias, the pair starts with two arguments from prior research:
1. there are no reasons to believe that social scientists are immune to the biases, errors, and social processes that can lead to distortions that stem from tribal loyalties; 2. these tribal tendencies, combined with extreme ideological homogeneity, work to create significant problems for the pursuit of scientific truth.
and goes on to develop a model and examine evidence pertaining to those arguments. In particular, they look for and find evidence of ideologically based self-suppression, suppression by others, citation counts, and imbalanced canonization - the process whereby scientific corrections supersede faulty beliefs. In their conclusion, the authors note:
The existence of political bias in academic research can damage the reputation and credibility of individual researchers, whole fields, and academia itself. It increases skepticism among key consumers such as policymakers, judges, and the public
and
We further note that the phenomena reviewed herein likely synergistically combine to undermine the credibility of science with all but the liberal members of the lay public (though possibly with some of them as well). The lack of conservatives in the social sciences, combined with explicit endorsement of discrimination against conservatives, gives lay conservatives ample reasons to doubt the validity of conclusions seeming to support liberal, equalitarian, social justice narratives.
-h/t Daniel Lemire

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