I manage TED’s online community from my home on the West Coast, and while many of my interactions are with people based all over the world, the majority of my colleagues are based across the country at TED HQ in New York City. As anyone who works remotely knows, attending meetings as a giant videoconferencing head-on-the-wall isn’t […]
Gil Weinberg creates musically included robots so good they can improvise. The founder of the Music Technology program at Georgia Tech, he also creates innovative music apps and has contributed his technologies to many a band and ensemble. Sam Roth, an 11th grader in New York City, was excited to interview Weinberg about his experience speaking at […]
Techno-illusionist and veteran speaker Marco Tempest returns to the TED stage with a new friend: EDI (pronounced “Eddie”) the robot. EDI, which stands for Electronic Deceptive Intelligence, is Tempest’s latest techno-aide, a friendly Baxter robot who ponders the difference between artificial and human intelligence. “Robot,” the newly awakened EDI interrupts, was coined in 1921 in […]
Illusionist Marco Tempest (watch his cyber card trick and his electric take on Nikola Tesla) has a new assistant — Baxter the Robot. The star of this talk from roboticist Rodney Brooks, Baxter is a life-sized robot that has eyes that glance where he is about to move and arms that react to human touch, […]
Roy Amara’s classic quote goes: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” In today’s talk from TED2013, Rodney Brooks invokes this law to talk about robots. While people panic about robots taking their jobs over the course of the next few […]
Technology thriller author, most recently of the book Kill Decision, Daniel Suarez has been thinking about drones for some time. But as he says, as he stands onstage at TEDGlobal 2013, he’s not here to talk fiction. “I’m here to talk about very real autonomous combat drones,” he says, adding that he doesn’t mean remotely piloted […]
“Athletic” is a term we use to describe human beings. But could it also be used to describe a machine? In a demo recorded yesterday in his robot lab at TEDGlobal 2013, systems engineer Raffaello D’Andrea shows us that the answer is yes. He demonstrates with quadcopters, mechanically simple flying robots with four propellers. Their […]
Daniel Suarez is a former systems consultant turned novelist who will speak in session two at TEDGlobal 2013. Officially subtitled “Those Flying Things,” this is unofficially known as the drone session, and it will feature various speakers tackling the topic of unmanned aerial vehicles. For his part, Suarez will expound on some of the themes he […]
[ted id=1908] Guy Hoffman isn’t just a roboticist — he’s also an animator and a jazz musician. And so as he set out to build robots that communicate with people, he took inspiration from what he learned in animation school and focused on subtle, fluid movements — the kind created by going frame-by-frame. He also […]
Here, some staff picks of smart, funny, bizarre and cool stuff on the interwebs this week. First, happy (late) World Poetry Day! Celebrate the occasion with 8 talks from spoken-word poets. Just when you thought Vijay Kumar’s robots that fly and cooperate were creepy enough, he and his team have developed a drone that can […]
Today, TED Radio Hour asks two questions many of us are scared to pose: will human beings have a purpose as robots become more adept at performing tasks and projecting emotions? And as technology gets more advanced, how does interaction between human beings change? In this episode — the third in season two — Sherry […]
This week, TEDx took a break from posting talks as the team recovered from TED2013. However, their blog kept rolling with some wonderfully unique spins on the conference and more. Here, find some great pieces from the TEDx Blog. Dance, tiny robots, dance! The best moments, in GIFS Just now, session 1 of TED2013 ended, […]
Sometimes, it feels like your smartphone is your friend. But if Keller Rinaudo has his way, your phone may be more like a pet. Rinaudo, the co-founder and CEO of Romotive, has created Romo, a smartphone robot. Your phone docks into a robotic base that looks a bit like a powdery blue tank. When you download the Romo app, […]
We’ve heard a lot about robots at TED over the years. Demos of amazing specialized robots … talk about what robots can and can’t do … and will they take jobs from humans and is that a good or a bad thing? What’s missing is a concrete example of a multi-purpose robot that can indeed […]
[ted id=1677] In session 1 of TED2013, we are meeting many new robots. First, we watched the amazing clip above of a troupe of tiny humanoid Nao robots dancing intricate choreography in unison. (They were presented by Bruno Maisonnier of Aldebaran Robotics at TEDxConcorde and beamed straight to the TED stage.) Next, Rodney Brooks unveiled Baxter, […]
Dennis Hong shared seven species of robots in his talk at TEDxNASA 2009, from the soccer-playing DARwIn to the cliff-gripping CLIMBeR. In this new video, Hong — the director of the Virginia Tech robotics lab RoMeLa — introduces us to CHARLI, a lightweight robot designed to walk and move like a human. Or, you know, […]