Advanced Concepts Team

Finish him!

Meet Salto-1P

almost cute!

Taking out the trial and error network design and adding ensembles.

We can finally start building space elevators

Prediction-based method for encouraging reinforcement learning agents to explore their environments through curiosity (reward for unfamiliar states). Learns some games without any extrinsic reward!

Fun failure case: agent gets stuck in front of TV.

Not read this article but on a related note: Curiosity and various metrics for it have been explored for some time in robotics (outside of RL) as a framework for exploring (partially) unfamiliar environments. I came across some papers on this topic applied to UAVs when prep'ing for a PhD app. This one (http://www.cim.mcgill.ca/~yogesh/publications/crv2014.pdf) comes to mind - which used a topic modelling approach.

I'm afraid I take some issue with this rather glorious title. I've only skimmed this paper but looking at the experimental details, their 'imagined universes' comprise of a ball confined in a 2D space as well as a double pendulum. Work along this area is nothing new - it's known in the control community as Inverse Reinforcement Learning - learning dynamics of some system from demonstration trajectories. The paper title ('Toward an AI Physicist for Unsupervised Learning') is more moderate so yet again the issue is how AI is reported in the media...

A new study from Harvard reveals that open plan offices decrease rather than increase face-to-face collaboration.

I vote for a silent booth for everyone in ACT

Great study! If something goes wrong Leo and Dario could always blame the "open office".

This is the future of publishing .... thinking to submit something there!! Anyone interested?

After a series of rapid developments, the researchers claim their fluid can now hold 250 watt-hours of energy per kilogram, which is double the the energy capacity of Tesla's Powerwall batteries, according to the NBC.

Interesting research. Bit hyped in the article though. The actual paper says the promising stuff is in the 83-160Wh range. So maybe not double Tesla's Powerwall batteries?

Seems like those particles have some use...

This is an interesting and easily digestible article that sheds some light on why and how (some) insects undergo metamorphosis.

GANs are striking again...

Do you lack inspiration? Feeling not creative (enough)? How about doing something really really boring?

We should apply this also for space habitats

Yeah, put everything in a computer and let it think about it.

They are developing so-called "Avatar" technology which will allow people to control robots remotely, as in the movie "Avatar." With Avatar X, they hope to revolutionize space exploration, resource extraction, and other space-based activities. On the Avatar X website, it says, "AVATAR X aims to capitalize on the growing space-based economy by accelerating development of real-world Avatars that will enable humans to remotely build camps on the Moon, support long-term space missions and further explore space from afar."

Why not power an airplane with an ion thruster?

"We construct a novel large-scale, multi-modal dataset by pairing geo-referenced Wikipedia articles with satellite imagery of their corresponding locations."

NVIDIA published around 154 talks focussed on AI from their conference this year...

There we go: Deep Learning predicts disruptions in plasmas. The paper related to this article is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.02242