While the broader virtual reality industry earnestly waits for Meta’s next announcements around new VR products at its Connect event next week, Google’s venture arm GV is placing an interesting bet in a startup building up an ecosystem around some of Meta’s hardware. GV has led a $12 million Series A investment in SideQuest, the…
Juncal Arbelaiz Mugica is a native of Spain, where octopus is a common menu item. However, Arbelaiz appreciates octopus and similar creatures in a different way, with her research into soft-robotics theory. More than half of an octopus’ nerves are distributed through its eight arms, each of which has some degree of autonomy. This distributed…
Meta has today unveiled an AI system that generates short videos based on text prompts. Make-A-Video lets you type in a string of words, like “A dog wearing a superhero outfit with a red cape flying through the sky,” and then generates a five-second clip that, while pretty accurate, has the aesthetics of a trippy…
Digital twins capture the physical look and expressions of real humans. Increasingly these replicas are showing up in the entertainment industry and beyond. It gives rise to some interesting opportunities as well as thorny questions. We speak to: Greg Cross, CEO and co-founder of Soul Machines Sounds from: 2PAC HOLOGRAM | LIVE Coachella Recording | High…
Virtual Reality (VR) has struggled to transition too far beyond gaming circles and specific industry use-cases such as medical training, but with the burgeoning metaverse movement championed by tech heavyweights such as Meta, there has been a renewed hope (and hype) around the promise that virtual worlds bring. Just yesterday, Los Angeles-based AmazeVR announced a…
The MIT School of Engineering and Pillar VC today announced the MIT-Pillar AI Collective, a one-year pilot program funded by a gift from Pillar VC that will provide seed grants for projects in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science with the goal of supporting translational research. The program will support graduate students and postdocs…
Neurodegenerative diseases — like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease), Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s — are complicated, chronic ailments that can present with a variety of symptoms, worsen at different rates, and have many underlying genetic and environmental causes, some of which are unknown. ALS, in particular, affects voluntary muscle movement and is always…
Posted by Srivatsan Krishnan, Student Researcher, and Aleksandra Faust, Senior Staff Research Scientist, Google Research, Brain Team Deep reinforcement learning (RL) continues to make great strides in solving real-world sequential decision-making problems such as balloon navigation, nuclear physics, robotics, and games. Despite its promise, one of its limiting factors is long training times. While the…
To receive The Algorithm in your inbox every Monday, sign up here. Welcome to the Algorithm! Some technologists hope that one day we will develop a superintelligent AI system that people will be able to have conversations with. Ask it a question, and it will offer an answer that sounds like something composed by a human…
The AI Policy Forum (AIPF) is an initiative of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing to move the global conversation about the impact of artificial intelligence from principles to practical policy implementation. Formed in late 2020, AIPF brings together leaders in government, business, and academia to develop approaches to address the societal challenges posed by…