Computer Science

“How did you find me?” specialty coffee roaster Dajo Aertssen asked. He’d just handed me a bag of single-origin cascara, the dried flesh of coffee cherries, in his shop, Cafés Muda in Lille, France.“The AI sent us,” I replied.He looked puzzled, so I explained that my companion Dawn and I had asked an app called Perplexity AI to name a “coffee roaster in central Lille,” and that it suggested four places, including Muda. It had linked to a Web page that mentioned Aertssen’s French and world cup tasting championships and that he sources the kinds of beans I enjoy, like Muda’s sidra from Colombia, which tastes like raspberry jam. When I alluded to his status as a supertaster, ..

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.Eurobot Open 2024: 8–11 May 2024, LA ROCHE-SUR-YON, FRANCEICRA 2024: 13–17 May 2024, YOKOHAMA, JAPANRoboCup 2024: 17–22 July 2024, EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDSCybathlon 2024: 25–27 October 2024, ZURICHEnjoy today’s videos! DARPA’s Robotic Autonomy in Complex Environments with Resiliency (RACER) program recently conducted its fourth experiment (E4) to assess the performance of off-road unmanned vehicles. These tests, conducted in Texas in late 202..

The Labour Party has announced its plan for rail should it be elected to government.

Early on a June morning in 2023, my colleagues and I drove down a bumpy dirt road north of Kyiv in Ukraine. The Ukrainian Armed Forces were conducting training exercises nearby, and mortar shells arced through the sky. We arrived at a vast field for a technology demonstration set up by the United Nations. Across the 25-hectare field—that’s about the size of 62 American football fields—the U.N. workers had scattered 50 to 100 inert mines and other ordnance. Our task was to fly our drone over the area and use our machine learning software to detect as many as possible. And we had to turn in our results within 72 hours. The scale was daunting: The area was 10 times as large as anything w..

What’s a secret to getting more students to participate in an IEEE society? Give them a seat at the table so they have a say in how the organization is run. That’s what the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society has done. Budding engineers serve on the RAS board of directors, have voting privileges, and work within technical committees. “They have been given a voice in how the society runs because, in the end, students are among the main beneficiaries,” says Enrica Tricomi, chair of the RAS’s student activities committee. The SAC is responsible for student programs and benefits. It also makes recommendations to the society’s board about new offerings.A Guide for Inspiring the Next..

On 18 April 2024, Meta released the next big thing in “open” AI models: Llama 3. It’s the latest AI model to be offered by Meta free of charge and with a relatively open (though not open-source) license that lets developers deploy it in most commercial apps and services.Announced less than a year after Llama 2, the new model in many ways repeats its predecessor’s playbook. Llama 3’s release provides models with up to 70 billion parameters, the same as its predecessor. It was also released under a similar license which, although not fully open source, allows commercial use in most circumstances.Look closer, however, and Llama 3’s advancements come into focus. Meta’s new model sc..

Join us today and learn more about the proposals to government to regulation drivers that will define the future of space exploration

The DRCF sets its agenda for the year ahead, amidst another busy year for the tech sector and its digital regulators.

Programming course for incarcerated people boosts digital literacy and self-efficacy, highlighting potential for reduced recidivism.

The advance offers a way to characterize a fundamental resource needed for quantum computing.

Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick famously said, after experiencing New Delhi’s chaotic roads, that India will be the last place in the world to get self-driving cars. But a handful of startups think the country could be the perfect testbed for creating autonomous vehicles that can handle anything. A recent video from Bhopal-based startup Swaayatt Robots suggests they’re making progress. In the 6-minute long clip, a sensor-laden SUV weaves through narrow unmarked streets, dodging pedestrians, dogs, cows, slow-moving tractors, and a constant stream of scooters overtaking, cutting across, and even driving on the wrong side of the road. A video from Swaayatt Robots shows the company’s self-..

A month ago, Richard Slayman became the first living person to receive a kidney transplant from a gene-edited pig. Now, a team of researchers from NYU Langone Health reports that Lisa Pisano, a 54-year-old woman from New Jersey, has become the second. Her new kidney has just a single genetic modification—an approach that researchers hope…

Almost all keyboard apps used by Chinese people around the world share a security loophole that makes it possible to spy on what users are typing.  The vulnerability, which allows the keystroke data that these apps send to the cloud to be intercepted, has existed for years and could have been exploited by cybercriminals and…

This is today’s edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Introducing: the Build issue Building is a popular tech industry motif—especially in Silicon Valley, where “Time to build” has become something of a call to arms. Yet the future is built brick by…

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China.Sign upto receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. I’ve wanted to learn more about the world of solar panels ever since I realized just how dominant Chinese companies have become in this field. Although much of the technology involved was…

Today’s climate-change kraken may have been unleashed by human activity—which has discharged greenhouse-gas emissions into Earth’s atmosphere for centuries—but reversing course and taming nature’s growing fury seems beyond human means, a quest only mythical heroes could fulfill. Yet the dream of human-powered flight—of rising over the Mediterranean fueled merely by the strength of mortal limbs—was…

As Climax Foods CEO Oliver Zahn serves up a plate of vegan brie, feta, and blue cheese in his offices in Emeryville, California, I’m keeping my expectations modest. Most vegan cheese falls into an edible uncanny valley full of discomforting not-quite-right versions of the real thing. But the brie I taste today is smooth, rich,…

The role of AI prompt engineer attracted attention for its high-six-figure salaries when it emerged in early 2023. Companies define it in different ways, but its principal aim is to help a company integrate AI into its operations.  Danai Myrtzani of Sleed, a digital marketing agency in Greece, describes herself as more prompter than engineer.…