CNET | Robots are widely used now, and they’re only spread even farther into daily life. The sci-fi future may be closer than you think. The Fraunhofer Institute usually uses this robot for gauging the quality of new reflective materials, but at the CeBIT show in Hanover, Germany, it used it to draw portraits. The robot took a digital photo of a person, processed it digitally, drew a line-art portrait,… read more

Microsoft Research | Deep Neural Networks for Speech and Image Processing: Neural networks are experiencing a renaissance, thanks to a new mathematical formulation, known as restricted Boltzmann machines, and the availability of powerful GPUs and increased processing power.

Unlike past neural networks, these new ones can have many layers and thus are called “deep neural networks”; and because they are a machine-learning technique, the technology is also known as… read more

The New York Times | Bina48 was designed to be a “friend robot,” as she later told me in one of her rare (but invariably thrilling) moments of coherence. Per the request of Martine Rothblatt, the self-made millionaire who paid $125,000 for her last March, her personality and appearance are based on those of Bina Rothblatt, Martine’s living, breathing spouse. [...]

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Wikipedia | Martine Rothblatt