Tech

Archaeologists train a neural network to sort pottery fragments for them

(credit: Pawlowicz and Downum 2021) Real archaeological fieldwork is seldom as exciting as it looks in the movies. You tend to get fewer reanimated mummies, deadly booby traps, and dramatic shootouts with Nazis. Instead, you’ll see pieces of broken pottery—a lot of them. Potsherds are ubiquitous at archaeological sites, and that’s true for pretty much […]

Tech

Programming a robot to teach itself how to move

Enlarge / The robotic train. (credit: Oliveri et. al.) One of the most impressive developments in recent years has been the production of AI systems that can teach themselves to master the rules of a larger system. Notable successes have included experiments with chess and Starcraft. Given that self-teaching capability, it’s tempting to think that […]

Tech

Apple hires yet another ex-Google AI leader

Enlarge / AI researcher Samy Bengio (left) poses with his brother Yoshua Bengio (right) for a photo tied to a report from cloud-platform company Paperspace on the future of AI. (credit: Paperspace) Apple has hired Samy Bengio, a prominent AI researcher who previously worked at Google. Bengio will lead “a new AI research unit” within […]