Researchers at Siegen University and Würzberg University, in Germany, have recently carried out a study investigating the user experience and acceptability associated with the use of social robots in religious contexts. Their paper, published in Springer's...
Researchers at NTT Corporation in Japan have recently developed a user-centered reinforcement learning approach that could be used to teach 'manners' to social robots. Their method, outlined in a paper pre-published on arXiv, allows a robot to greet or attract the...
In recent years, sex dolls have become increasing sophisticated and realistic in their resemblance to human beings, including mechanized components, and are thus now referred to as humanoid sex robots. Some media outlets have gone as far as to suggest that sex robots...
Researchers at Colorado State University (CSU) have developed an approximate dynamic programming approach to improve the food security of communities affected by natural disasters. Their work exploring methods to aid community recovery spans several papers. Their most...
Over the past decade or so, advances in machine learning have paved the way for the development of increasingly advanced speech recognition tools. By analyzing audio files of human speech, these tools can learn to identify words and phrases in different languages,...
Water and energy are closely linked, as current electricity generation methods often require water, and extracting water typically consumes energy. This connection between water and energy, also known as the "water-energy nexus," has been the focus of several...
Accurately predicting the arrival times of buses is of key importance, particularly in hectic urban environments. Providing people with efficient and timely transportation can discourage them from using private vehicles, consequently reducing both fuel consumption and...
Some experts in the field of electronics engineering have suggested that the use of silicon complementary metal-oxide semiconductors (CMOS) will start declining rapidly by the end of 2020. Despite their predictions, a class of alternative materials that can...
In recent years, researchers have developed deep neural networks that can perform a variety of tasks, including visual recognition and natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Although many of these models achieved remarkable results, they typically only perform well...
Researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) have recently carried out a study investigating the interactions among different world leaders and influential political figures on social media. Their findings, pre-published on arXiv, provide interesting new...