Andrew Orr

In recent disturbing (but not entirely surprising), it turns out that major media outlets don’t mention climate change. Over a two-week period from late June to early July, ABC, CBS, and NBC aired a combined 127 segments or weathercasts that discussed this summer’s heat wave. But only CBS mentioned climate change as a contributing factor.

There is overwhelming scientific evidence that human-induced climate change is exacerbating both the frequency and intensity of heat waves. Heat domes like the one that caused this recent heat wave are becoming more intense and more common, scientists have found. UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain, who has studied extreme weather patterns in California, said recent heat in California was unusual.

Have you ever wanted a robot gardener? Maybe this new robot can help. It’s not a gardener per se, it’s a robot/plant hybrid that has a plant on its head and chases sunlight to keep the plant fed.

The resulting plant-robot hybrid looks like a leafy crab or a robot Bulbasaur. It moves toward the sunshine when needed, and it retreats to shade when it’s had enough. It’ll “play” with a human if you tap its carapace, and it can even make its needs known by performing a little stompy dance when it’s out of water.

Algorithms need a conscience in the public sector, according to author Virginia Eubanks. She has a book called Automating Inequality, and she argues that the poor are a testing ground for new technology that increases inequality.

To some extent, we’re used to companies making arbitrary decisions about our lives — mortgages, credit card applications, car loans, etc. Yet, these decisions are based almost entirely on straightforward factors of determination — like credit score, employment and income. In the case of algorithmic determination in social services, there is bias in the form of outright surveillance in combination with forced PII share imposed upon recipients.

The Department of Defense is looking for special AI to help with classification. The DOD issued a request for information (ROI) from the tech industry, looking for help.

Defense IT officials are seeking software that “must be able to make real-time decisions about the classification level of the information and an individual’s ability to access, change, delete, receive, or forward the information based on the credentials of the sending and/or receiving individual, facility, and system.”

Nvidia and MIT have partnered to create a photo AI that can automatically remove noise from images. The system is called Noise2Noise AI and it was trained using 50,000 photos.

In their paper, the researchers show that their AI can successfully remove enough noise to make the pictures usable again, with detail and clarity that’s remarkably close to the source images. The AI could likely find use in software for cleaning up noisy photos captured in low-light conditions on phones and cameras, as well as improving astronomical imagery and MRI scanning.