Automate turns one today, and we've been celebrating all week by dropping a new episode of the podcast each day.
What do we want for our birthday, you ask? Oh, just a quick follow of thepodcastandnewsletterso that you can join the growing Automated community and hear directly from the people building the future of robotics and AI.
Get the future of automation delivered to your inbox every Thursday. Interviews with the top minds in robotics and AI, the week’s biggest news, the latest job openings, and more, written and curated by Brian Heater, A3 managing editor, and the A3 news team.
I’ve written a fair bit about the need to deploy technology for good. Early in my career, it was a focus on sustainability, and as I moved into more consumer tech, health wearables played an increasingly important role. That story became a sharper focus after a friend’s doctor essentially prescribed an Apple Watch in the wake of a heart scare.
Transitioning into robotics has deepened that connection. With the right energy and focus, this technology offers tremendous opportunity to effect positive change. Exoskeletons, in particular, highlight the human connection. They were central to two of the most profound moments of my career in tech journalism. In one instance, a man paralyzed from the waist down walked across the stage during an event I was hosting. The other involved a video shoot, wherein a wife was in tears as her husband — an officer injured in the line of duty — walked again. Continue Reading >
"Faced with information overload,” Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1969, “we have no alternative but pattern-recognition."
Patterns are how we find signal within the universe’s overwhelming noise. The ability to recognize them is among the world’s most transferable skills. It’s no doubt one of the reasons so many professionals have made successful transitions to robotics from other fields. Just the other day, we spoke to a physical AI founder for a forthcoming interview with a background in biochemistry and molecular biology.
While Carolina Parada’s own CV doesn’t present quite the same level of whiplash, it does illustrate a kind of non-linear throughline. Before stepping into her current role in May, Google DeepMind’s VP and head of robotics transformed a deep background in language modeling, search, and speech into a principal deep learning engineer role on NVIDIA’s self-driving team.
In a recent conversation with Automated, she was quick to recognize a pattern connecting her own seemingly disparate focuses. “If you notice in each one of them, I was there trying to change the way the current community was solving the problem,” Parada explains. Continue Reading >
Startups like Panthalassa are looking to the ocean for inspiration. It is an inspiring place to look, to be fair. Get yourself to the nearest coastline, stare for long, unbroken stretches, and just wait for the startup ideas to start pouring in. For Panthalassa, it’s wave energy that fuels their work. The company is looking to build floating AI data centers powered by the motion of the ocean. That, it turns out, is a hard problem. Really hard. Unsolved, according to some. Matthew chats with some key researchers about how far the community has gotten in wave energy — and how much is still left to go. Continue Reading >
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