Artificial intelligence archive

How to interact with robots

May 4, 2018

EECS professor Anca Dragan discusses one of the big challenges in her field of human-robot interaction: getting robots to anticipate human behavior. “It’s not enough to know what people are currently doing. They need to know what’s going to happen in the future.”

AI: The revolution hasn’t happened yet

April 25, 2018

EECS and statistics professor Michael Jordan writes about the opportunity and imperative of developing a “human-centric engineering discipline” to address the ethical concerns of artificial intelligence.

Nimble robot makes strides in dexterity

March 26, 2018

The latest iteration of Dex-Net, from the lab of robotics professor Ken Goldberg, could sort through your junk drawer with unrivaled speed and skill, using machine learning to determine how to pick up even odd-looking objects with incredible efficiency.

How flight simulation tech can help turn robots into surgeons

March 2, 2018

Robotics researchers from Berkeley’s AUTOLab, led by IEOR and EECS professor Ken Goldberg, have built a heaving robotic platform – mimicking the motion of a breathing, heart-beating human patient – to help develop algorithms that robotic surgical assistants can use to guide their cutting.

Why AI researchers should be more paranoid

February 23, 2018

A new report highlights risks of artificial intelligence, such as malicious self-driving cars or assassin robots. EECS professor Ion Stoica, who recently surveyed technical challenges in AI, said Berkeley is already trying to expose students flocking to the field to concerns over AI safety and security.

Teaching AI about human values

February 8, 2018

Computer scientist and robotics engineer Anca Dragan has a cool name, an impressive CV and an important job: ensuring that our interactions with robots and other artificially intelligent agents are positive ones.

AI innovation at The House

January 17, 2018

In collaboration with several Berkeley Engineering faculty, the Berkeley-based startup institute The House has formed a new AI-focused startup accelerator.

All the buzz at AI’s big shindig

December 20, 2017

At the annual Neural Information Processing Systems conference this month, thousands of researchers flocked to Long Beach to devour algorithms, keynotes by famous speakers and all things artificial intelligence, prompting EECS associate professor Ben Recht to lament the event’s growing corporatism.

Andrew Ng says factories are AI’s next frontier

December 18, 2017

Artificial intelligence expert and Berkeley Engineering alum Andrew Ng (Ph.D.’03 EECS) is on a mission to AI-ify manufacturing, starting with partners like Foxconn.

New robots can see into the future

December 6, 2017

Berkeley researchers, led by EECS assistant professor Sergey Levine, have developed a learning technology that enables robots to imagine the future of their actions so they can figure out how to manipulate objects they have never encountered before.

Professor’s eerie lethal drone video goes viral

November 20, 2017

“Slaughterbots,” a not-so-futuristic video warning against the development of autonomous weapons, has gone viral. Co-created by EECS professor Stuart Russell and the Future of Life Institute, it was released this week at the United Nations Convention on Conventional Weapons in Geneva.

Berkeley startup to train robots like puppets

November 7, 2017

Robots today must be laboriously programmed by writing computer code, but imagine donning a VR headset and virtually guiding a robot through a task instead. That’s the vision of EECS professor Pieter Abbeel and three of his students.

Building AI that can build AI

November 6, 2017

As the tech industry hunts for new ways to quicken the development of artificially intelligent machines, Berkeley researchers are focusing on machine-learning algorithms that will help robots learn new tasks based on things they’ve learned before. “Computers are going to invent the algorithms for us, essentially,” says EECS professor Pieter Abbeel.