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robotics

Videos

  • Man-Made Minds: Living with Thinking Machines

    Full 90 Minute Program: In recent years, machines have grown increasingly capable of listening, communicating, and learning—transforming the way they collaborate with us, and...

  • Robot Learning: Rebuilding Newton

    Hod Lipson’s self-aware robot used feedback from its limbs in order to learn how to walk. He had successfully created a machine that learns like we do, with observation, modeling,...

  • Robot’s First Steps

    As infants, we had to learn how to use our limbs in order to crawl and then to walk. Always taking cues from nature, roboticists such as Hod Lipson have tapped into an important,...

  • Double Jeopardy: WATSON

    Get inside the mind of a supercomputer as it goes head-to-head against the expert panel of roboticists. David Ferrucci, lead researcher on the WATSON project, pulls back the...

  • The Ghost in the Machine

    What is a soul? Is there really something to it, or is it a product of platonic essentialism—our “human-ness”—guided by mathematical computation? As the field of robotics...

  • Cool Job: Robot Talent Agent

    What’s it like to build a giant Rube Goldberg machine? How do you book comedy gigs when your only client is a robot? Working in the areas between art and science, social...

  • The Ultimate Computer

    Can we ever build a machine like “Data” from Star Trek: The Next Generation? Is it only a matter of time before we’re living amongst artificial beings who appear to act, think,...

  • Mind Control: Introducing BrainGate

    Moving objects with one’s mind is the fodder of sci-fi, magic tricks, and futuristic visions. But John Donoghue explains how, in some ways, such dreams are a reality. He’s...

  • Mind and Machine: The Future of Thinking

    Creative thought is surely among our most precious and mysterious capabilities. But can powerful computers rival the human brain? As thinking, remembering, and innovating become...

  • Getting Intimate with Technology

    Have you ever lost a cell phone and felt like you lost a piece of yourself? It’s just a phone. Or was it? Technology—in the form of computers, cell phones, iPods,...

  • Technological Determinism

    Are we using the internet to conduct too much of our lives? Are we unknowingly eroding our “real-world” relationships of genuine meaning by maintaining them on Facebook?...

  • How to Program Intelligence?

    What is intelligence? Can computers be intelligent? The mechanisms behind human intelligence are poorly understood. Similarly, our conception of the ability of today’s computers...

  • Cool Job: The Roboticist

    Cool Jobs: Meet the people with the coolest jobs in the world. Robotics engineer Dennis Hong demonstrates some of the remarkable robots that his team has built. They include a...

Blog Posts

  • Man-Made Minds: Full Program Now Available

    All week, we've been exploring the next-generation of robots and thinking machines, hearing from the leading minds, who stand to reinvent what know as artificial intelligence. Today, we present the full program of Man-Made Minds in all its glory.

  • I, Learning Robot

    Yesterday we saw Eric Horvitz's Bayesian Medical Kiosk in action. He showed us the potential in human/robot interaction and it's potential in public health applications. Today we look at machines that interact on an interpersonal, physical level—from making eye contact and...

  • Medical Machines

    The goal of the WATSON/Jeopardy! project seen earlier this week was to demonstrate the power of natural language interfaces when connected to a trove of knowledge. Scientists like Eric Horvitz and David Ferrucci envision computers like WATSON being in hospitals worldwide to aid...

  • How Does WATSON Think?

    Building a computer capable of winning a game show such as Jeopardy! takes much more than bestowing upon it the breadth of human knowledge. It has to be a fluent English speaker, too.

  • Instant Reaction: Cool Jobs

    What happens when you take a comic-book inspired climbing device, prehistoric mammoth remains, a wisecracking robot, and a six pound frog—then wrap them in a beatboxed, lyrical package? You get some really cool jobs.

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