Smart Robots: Out of the Lab, Into the World For being one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence (AI) roboticists, Professor Pieter Abbeel doesn’t watch much sci-fi. Pieter is the Director of the UC Berkeley Robot Learning Lab and co-director of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence ( BAIR ) Lab. In a recent podcast with host Abigail Hing Wen , Pieter said he first became enamored with robots not from popular depictions in the media, but when he thought, “What if I write a piece of code and it beats me in chess? How can I write a piece of code that beats me, even though I wrote the piece of code?” Though many people have since developed chess-playing robots that can beat most humans, Pieter included, that thought inspired him to eventually research and build ever more intelligent systems, setting up a research group at Berkeley to advance reinforcement learning, hoping eventually to found a robotics company. Today, while he continues to work at Berkeley,...
AI Is Throwing Battery Development Into Overdrive Improving batteries has always been hampered by slow experimentation and discovery processes. Machine learning is speeding it up by orders of magnitude INSIDE A LAB at Stanford University’s Precourt Institute for Energy, there are a half dozen refrigerator-sized cabinets designed to kill batteries as fast as they can. Each holds around 100 lithium-ion cells secured in trays that can charge and discharge the batteries dozens of times per day. Ordinarily, the batteries that go into these electrochemical torture chambers would be found inside gadgets or electric vehicles, but when they’re put in these hulking machines, they aren’t powering anything at all. Instead, energy is dumped in and out of these cells as fast as possible to generate reams of performance data that will teach artificial intelligence how to build a better battery. In 2019, a team of researchers from Stanford, MIT, and the Toyota Research Institute used AI tr...