Category Technology/Electronics

AI infiltrates the rat world: New Robot can Interact Socially with Real Lab Rats

A robot rat that interreacts socially with real lab rats
Robot–rat social interaction paradigm: a rat-like robot plays the role of a rat conspecific to interact with another rat via multiple interaction patterns.Nature Machine Intelligence (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s42256-024-00939-y

A team of roboticists at the Beijing Institute of Technology, working with a pair of colleagues from the Technical University of Munich, has created a new kind of rat robot—one that was designed to interact in social ways with real rats.

In their paper published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, the group describes how they used artificial intelligence to train their robot rat to behave like a real rat...

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Experiment verifies a Connection between Quantum Theory and Information Theory

A connection between quantum theory and information theory proved
With the help of a new experiment, researchers at Linköping University, among others, have succeeded in confirming a 10-year-old theoretical study that connects one of the most fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics—the complementarity principle—with information theory. Credit: Magnus Johansson

Researchers from Linköping University together with colleagues from Poland and Chile have confirmed a theory that proposes a connection between the complementarity principle and entropic uncertainty. Their study is published in the journal Science Advances.

“Our results have no clear or direct application right now. It’s basic research that lays the foundation for future technologies in quantum information and quantum computers...

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Why Timekeeping is Now on the Verge of a Giant Leap Forward in Accuracy

The equipment to precisely measure the energy needed to excite the thorium-229 nucleus, which is the core of a future nuclear clock.
The equipment to precisely measure the energy needed to excite the thorium-229 nucleus, which is the core of a future nuclear clock. Chuankun Zhang/JILA

Time is vital to the functioning of our everyday lives: from the watches on our wrists to the GPS systems in our phones. Communication systems, power grids, and financial transactions all rely on precision timing. Seconds are the vital units of measurement in timekeeping.

Surprisingly, there is still debate over the definition of the second. But recent advances in the world’s most accurate forms of timekeeping may have just changed the game.

Accurate timekeeping has always been part of humankind’s social evolution...

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Shrinking AI for Personal Devices: An efficient small language model that could perform better on smartphones

An Android demo of PhoneLM capability. (Left) Chatting; (Right) Device control through intent invocation. Demo and code are available at https://github.com/UbiquitousLearning/mllm. Credit: Yi et al.

Large language models (LLMs), such as Open AI’s renowned conversational platform ChatGPT, have recently become increasingly widespread, with many internet users relying on them to find information quickly and produce texts for various purposes. Yet most of these models perform significantly better on computers, due to the high computational demands associated with their size and data processing capabilities.

To tackle this challenge, computer scientists have also been developing small language models (SLMs), which have a similar architecture but are smaller...

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