Tag: university of Texas

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Science & Technology News

AI used to “fill in the blanks”

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New AI sees like a human, filling in the blanks

Computer scientists at The University of Texas at Austin have taught an artificial intelligence agent how to do something that usually only humans can do—take a few quick glimpses around and infer its whole environment, a skill necessary for the development of effective search-and-rescue robots that one day can improve the effectiveness of dangerous missions. The team, led by professor Kristen Grauman, Ph.D. candidate Santhosh Ramakrishnan and former Ph.D. candidate Dinesh Jayaraman (now at the University of California, Berkeley) published their results today in the journal Science Robotics.

Most AI agents—computer systems that could endow robots or other machines with intelligence—are trained for very specific tasks—such as to recognize an object or estimate its volume—in an environment they have experienced before, like a factory. But the agent developed by Grauman and Ramakrishnan is general purpose, gathering visual information that can then be used for a wide range of tasks.

“We want an agent that’s generally equipped to enter environments and be ready for new perception tasks as they arise,” Grauman said. “It behaves in a way that’s versatile and able to succeed at different tasks because it has learned useful patterns about the visual world.”

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Engineering, New Inventions, Robotics, Robots

Robot masters human balancing act

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Mercury, a biped robot developed in Cockrell School of Engineering professor Luis Sentis’ Human Centered Robotics Lab, is able to maintain balance when hit unexpectedly or when force is applied without warning.

AUSTIN, Texas — When walking in a crowded place, humans typically aren’t thinking about how we avoid bumping into one another. We are built to use a gamut of complex skill sets required to execute these types of seemingly simple motions.

Now, thanks to researchers in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, robots may soon be able to experience similar functionality. Luis Sentis, associate professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, and his team in the Human Centered Robotics Laboratory have successfully demonstrated a novel approach to human-like balance in a biped robot.

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Alzheimer's Disease, Healthcare, Medical Breakthrough, Medicine

Senolytic therapies seem to stop Alzheimer’s disease ‘in its tracks’

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Scientists at the University of Texas have implicated a type of cellular stress for the first time as a player in Alzheimer’s disease. And their discovery could lead to treatments for more than 20 human brain diseases including Alzheimer’s and traumatic brain injury. One author of the study went as far as to say the treatment that researchers used on mice to rid them of the stressed cells actually stopped Alzheimer’s disease “in its tracks.”

Researchers at the The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, now called UT Health San Antonio® established a link between tau tangles and the stressed or senescent cells they found in Alzheimer’s-diseased tissue. Senescence is the process by which cells irreversibly stop dividing or growing without actually dying. Already proven to be involved in cancer and aging, tau protein accumulation is known to exist in 20 human brain diseases. “Tau protein accumulation is the most common pathology among degenerative brain diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease, progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), traumatic brain injury (TBI) and over twenty others,” the research paper notes.

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