Computer Vision News - May 2021

232 Artificial Intelligence Computer Vision News has found great new stories, written somewhere else by somebody else. We share them with you, adding a short comment. Enjoy! A I S P O T L I G H T N E W S What Robots Want? Hearing the Inner Voice of a Robot Italian researchers looked into the thoughts of a robot . Not just out of curiosity, but as a mean to understand its decision-making process , especially when it is challenged by contradicting instructions. They made the robot self-talk out loud, so that it is no longer a black box: it is now possible to look at what happens inside it and why some decisions are kept. As a result, when the robot operates with inner speech, it completes tasks with a higher ratio of success than the robot which does not talk to itself. The robot's self- dialog makes its decision processes more transparent and the robot itself more reliable. Don’t miss the cute video! Vision and Radio Frequency Combine to Detect Hidden Objects Moving even more to the West: MIT researchers combined traditional computer vision with radio sensing to enable a robot to detect occluded, or blocked objects. They had to find an additional medium because with optical vision alone, robots are unable to find items packed within boxes or hidden behind another object. Radio waves , being able to pass through walls, are an attractive option against this obstacle. As a result, the robot that the group developed, called RF Grasp, finds and grabs tagged objects, even when they’re fully blocked from the camera’s view, with great practical applications in the industry. Read More Predicting Regional Coastal Sea Level Changes with Machine Learning Let’s move West to talk about Spanish researchers’ work ! They developed a model that predicts short-term variations in regional coastal sea levels , which depend on a large combination of nearshore and offshore processes. They used advanced statistical analyses, including machine learning (ML) methods. Their model was tested in 26 coastal regions surrounding the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic basins. The study demonstrates that large temperature fluctuations (by short- term climate changes and ocean circulation) are dominating the patterns of sea level variability changes for most of the regions. Read More