The Robot Cafe in Nairobi, Kenya, is making waves with its innovative use of technology in the hospitality industry. Customers are greeted by robots carrying plates of food on trays, alongside human waiters delivering drinks and taking orders. The robots, named Claire, R24, and Nadia, can interact with customers by saying simple phrases such as
Technology
AI researchers play a pivotal role in shaping the future of technology, but with great power comes great responsibility. The recent incident involving the LAION research dataset highlights the ethical considerations that must be taken into account when developing AI tools. The decision to delete over 2,000 web links to suspected child sexual abuse imagery
The study conducted by researchers at the University of Toronto delves into the impact of virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) on how individuals perceive and interact with the real world. One of the key findings of the study was that participants exhibited different movement patterns in VR and AR, leading to temporary errors
The use of language models in artificial intelligence has become increasingly common in various applications. However, a recent study conducted by a team of researchers has revealed a troubling aspect of popular language models – covert racism against African American English (AAE) speakers. This finding sheds light on the biases that are embedded in these
Ethiopia recently announced that it has significantly increased its electricity production from the controversial Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on the Blue Nile. The dam, a multi-billion-dollar project, is now generating 1,550 megawatts of electricity following the start of operations of two additional turbines. This development marks a significant milestone in the completion of the
Robots have the potential to greatly assist humans in various real-world settings, but in order to do so effectively, they must be able to manipulate a wide range of objects. The development of affordable robotic grippers is crucial to enabling robots to perform dexterous object manipulation tasks. Researchers at Improbable AI Lab and MIT have
The rise of the internet and social media platforms has brought about significant growth in the generation of online content. With this surge in content creation comes the issue of hate speech, which targets individuals based on their ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and other characteristics. Hate speech detection models have been developed to identify and
The recent incident involving CrowdStrike, a US-based cybersecurity technology company, has brought to light the vulnerabilities in our global technical infrastructure. On July 18, 2024, an update released by CrowdStrike caused a worldwide outage impacting millions of computers across various critical sectors. The incident has raised concerns about the fragility of our systems and the
Lithium-ion batteries have been dominating the rechargeable battery market, especially with the rise of electric vehicles. As society moves towards a more sustainable future, researchers are looking into incorporating abundant materials like manganese into high-energy and low-cost batteries that can potentially revolutionize the automobile industry. The shift from nickel and cobalt-based batteries to lithium/manganese-based batteries
Automatic bug assignment has been a significant area of research in recent years. Bug reports play a crucial role in helping engineers identify and fix software bugs. However, the presence of noise in textual bug reports can hinder automatic bug assignment due to the limitations of conventional Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. A research team