Showing 1 - 9 of 9
Robots get smooth moves
Life, James Hein, Published on 25/03/2026
» The subject of the week is robots. The amount of news on these keeps growing and growing. South Korea is first up here with their KAIST Humanoid. In the field test, the robot was shown running across a soccer pitch, jumping, taking shots on goal, and even doing dance moves akin to the Michael Jackson moonwalk. Many robot demonstrations still look a bit stiff but these moves were quite smooth. The robot can run at about 12kph on flat ground with the next goal at 14kph. It can climb a ladder with 40cm steps and the knees can generate 320 Newton metres of peak torque so it can push heavier objects. The current model is based on the lower human half but the goal is for a full humanoid form that can work with people in industrial environments.
Will Tesla's camera-only autonomy prove its mettle?
Life, James Hein, Published on 02/07/2025
» I'm still not convinced that Tesla's camera-only approach will work well in all situations. According to a quick AI search, Elon doesn't like Lidar based on "cost, complexity, and philosophical disagreement with its necessity". Other manufacturers seem to have no problem with the first two of these and I challenge his last reason. I would have thought that a combination of available technologies would give you the safest options for all circumstances.
Turning smart glasses into surveillance tools
Life, James Hein, Published on 23/10/2024
» I'm sure most readers are familiar with the Apple Vision Pro, and may have also been witness to someone wearing one out in the real world, because I have. Since then, there has been a new version of the Meta Ray-Bans that look like a pair of nerd glasses from the 1970s. The latter have turned into something from the TV series Person Of Interest by a couple of Harvard undergrads. The pair, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, are known for their punch-activated flamethrower. This time they built a system that allows the Ray-Bans to scan faces of people in view, pass this to an AI system that scans the internet for identification, and builds a dossier that is passed back to the glasses. It's called I-XRAY and challenges the concept of privacy because, if available, it will even provide details like address and social security number.
What's the state of AI today?
Life, James Hein, Published on 28/08/2024
» Recently, I've talked with a few people about artificial intelligence and watched a few presentations. The gap between what some people think are AI capabilities and actual capabilities is a big one.
The future of AI is LAM
Life, James Hein, Published on 14/02/2024
» After my earlier article, I realised I was somewhat scant on what a Large Action Model (LAM), also called Large Agentic Models, are. As already mentioned, these have derived from the Large Language Models (LLM), or what people now refer generically as AI, discussed before.
New chatbot can do a lot, but can you trust it?
Life, James Hein, Published on 18/01/2023
» Over the New Year break, I was digging a bit more into artificial intelligence and especially how the ChatGPT can be used and how it could affect society.
The benefits and risks of neural interfaces
Life, James Hein, Published on 17/02/2021
» This week is dedicated to the brain-computer interface, or BCI. For some time now, sci-fi movies and TV series have presented the idea of a mind-to-computer interface that controls technology, retrieves information and displays it on virtual screens. Meanwhile, in the background, a number of companies have been working on this and the technology is close to realising some of the outcomes only seen in fiction so far.
More data, more problems
Life, James Hein, Published on 01/01/2020
» It's time to make some predictions for 2020. A number were made by others a while back, most of which did not eventuate, like a Japanese base on the Moon, flying cars and a Beijing to London rail link. I'll try for a bit more realism.
Finally, an iPod replacement
Life, James Hein, Published on 20/11/2019
» Those who have known me for a while know I'm a lover of new technology. Aside from computer- and guitar-related items, I also like to listen to good quality sound playback. To further that goal I recently picked up a few FiiO devices. The M5 is a small, square, HD music player. It supports all Bluetooth protocols and when they are available up to a 2TB microSD card. While the unit will play back MP3s the focus is on the high-end codecs including FLAC. I paired this with the new FH7 in-ear headphones, which provided the broadest soundscape I have ever listened to and allowed me to follow a single instrument through the entire song. The last item was their BD3, a small unit that plugs into a cable allowing the headphones to act as a Bluetooth unit that can be paired to the M5 if I decide to wear it like a watch. As I found out when researching, you can pay some very large sums for headphones and related equipment but this set seems to be a nice sweet spot of quality and flexibility without going crazy.