Hospital staffs are already stretched thin during the coronavirus pandemic, so why not call in some robo-assistance to help? That’s what the renowned Mayo Clinic in Florida is doing by using autonomous vehicles to transport vital medical supplies and COVID-19 tests from a nearby drive-thru testing site to a processing laboratory on Mayo Clinic’s campus.
The round trip is just under 0.8 miles (1,200 meters) in length, with between five and six journeys taking place each day. Four vehicles are currently operating along the route, driving with Level 4 autonomy (meaning that they can handle the majority of driving situations independently), without safety drivers or other human passengers on board. The route is not one that is regularly used by other vehicles or pedestrians, and the vehicles are monitored from a mobile command center to make sure they operate safely.
“Using artificial intelligence enables us to protect staff from exposure to this contagious virus by using cutting-edge autonomous vehicle technology, and frees up staff time that can be dedicated to direct treatment and care for patients,” Dr. Kent Thielen, CEO of Mayo Clinic in Florida, said in a statement.
The Mayo Clinic is working alongside several partners for the endeavor. These include the Jacksonville Transportation Authority (JTA), autonomous shuttle bus company Beep, and autonomous mobility company NAVYA.
“As you can imagine, [the] COVID-19 pandemic was unplanned,” Bernard Schmidt, JTA’s vice president of automation, told Digital Trends. “However, the JTA Automation Division had been in discussions with Mayo on other projects, and had established an existing relationship. The ability to leverage the technology and to show its usefulness and purpose was mutually beneficial to providing the service and us doing our part to assist in the COVID-19 crisis.”
Even with existing relationships, though, the project came together impressively quickly. It’s proof positive of how different entities can join forces quickly in a crisis such as this.
“The planning for this operation occurred only a week before the official launch on March 30,” Jérôme Rigaud, chief operating officer of NAVYA, told Digital Trends. “Typically, this sort of project takes several weeks to outline the viability of, including the time needed to analyze site feasibility, deployment mapping, and other technical details. In this case, it was all made possible by the short-notice proactivity and commitment from numerous teams across many organizations, all of whom came together to use their shared technology base and expertise to help in any way they could during the ongoing pandemic.”
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.