Exploring the Frontier of Embodied AI: Virtual and Real Worlds Collide

There has been a significant amount of recent news regarding embodied AI. In the realm of artificial intelligence, an embodied agent refers to an intelligent entity that interacts with its environment through a physical body within said environment. Agents represented graphically with a body, such as a digital avatar or… Continue reading

Embodied AI: The Next Wave of Artificial Intelligence and the Metaverse

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang delivered an inspiring video message at the recent ITF World conference in Antwerp, Belgium. He explained that the first wave of AI focused on learning perception, while the second wave revolves around understanding and generating information. According to Huang, this new wave is revolutionary due to its… Continue reading

How will the intersection of metaverse, web3 and generative AI look like?

After a period of dormancy, this long-standing blog, founded in 2008, is being resurrected. In the past, our focus centered on the exploration of virtual worlds, with particular attention paid to Second Life and the burgeoning field of online education epitomized by the advent of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)…. Continue reading

What and how to learn and teach in times of Artificial Intelligence?

The education theorists, practitioners and technologists George Siemens and Stephen Downes united again for the course E-Learning 3.0. Stephen was in a hotel room in Toronto and George somewhere in Australia, but the wonders of YouTube made them unite (after a search for the light switches). In my earlier posts… Continue reading

Kurzweil: Brains will extend to the cloud – Computerworld

“Human brains will someday extend into the cloud, futurist and computer pioneer Ray Kurzweil predicted at the DEMO conference here on Tuesday. Moreover, he said, it will become possible to selectively erase pieces of our memories, while retaining some portions of them, to be able to learn new things no… Continue reading

From Self-Flying Helicopters to Classrooms of the Future – The Chronicle of Higher Education

“What do self-piloting helicopters have to do with the growing movement to transform education online? A day spent with Mr. Ng here at Coursera’s offices, with the aim of getting a sense of the company’s culture and the ideas that make up its DNA, helped answer that question. It turns… Continue reading

Mimicry beats consciousness in gaming’s Turing test – tech – 25 September 2012 – New Scientist

“The idea is to design more realistic virtual characters, which, in turn, should make video games more compelling and software simulations used for training more useful. In the future, the software could drive physical robots capable of navigating the real world in a human-like manner.” Okay, the bots are not… Continue reading

How artificial intelligence is changing our lives – CSMonitor.com

“The idea that AI must mimic the thinking process of humans has dropped away. “Creating artificial intelligences that are like humans is, at the end of the day, paving the cow paths,” Mr. Saffo argues. “It’s using the new technology to imitate some old thing.”” via Diigo http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Tech/2012/0916/How-artificial-intelligence-is-changing-our-lives/(page)/3