We test grip strength and shock absorption properties of various granular material in granular jamming robotic components. The granular material comprises a range of natural, manufactured, and 3D printed material encompassing a wide range of shapes, sizes, and Shore hardness. Two main experiments are considered, both representing compelling use cases for granular jamming in soft robotics. The first experiment measures grip strength (retention force measured in Newtons) when we fill a latex balloon with the chosen grain type and use it as a granular jamming gripper to pick up a range of test objects. The second experiment measures shock absorption properties recorded by an Inertial Measurement Unit which is suspended in an envelope of granular material and dropped from a set height. Our results highlight a range of shape, size and softness effects, including that grain deformability is a key determinant of grip strength, and interestingly, that larger grain sizes in 3D printed grains create better shock absorbing materials.

Fruit harvesting has recently experienced a shift towards soft grippers that possess compliance, adaptability, and delicacy. In this context, pneumatic grippers are popular, due to provision of high deformability and compliance, however they typically possess limited grip strength. Jamming possesses strong grip capability, however has limited deformability and often requires the object to be pushed onto a surface to attain a grip. This paper describes a hybrid gripper combining pneumatics (for deformation) and jamming (for grip strength). Our gripper utilises a torus (donut) structure with two chambers controlled by pneumatic and vacuum pressure respectively, to conform around a target object. The gripper displays good adaptability, exploiting pneumatics to mould to the shape of the target object where jamming can be successfully harnessed to grip. The main contribution of the paper is design, fabrication, and characterisation of the first hybrid gripper that can use granular jamming in free space, achieving significantly larger retention forces compared to pure pneumatics. We test our gripper on a range of different sizes and shapes, as well as picking a broad range of real fruit.

粒状干扰在软机器人中的应用是最近和有希望的新技术，为创建更高的性能机器人设备提供令人兴奋的可能性。通过在含有颗粒物质内的膜内的真空压力施加真空压力来实现粒状干扰，并且从设计角度来看特别是有趣的，因为可以利用设计参数的多种设计参数来诱导各种有用的行为。迄今为止，已经研究了变量（如晶粒形状和尺寸）以及膜材料的效果作为诱导定制抓握性能的手段，但是由于其特定地，尚未研究其他主要贡献因素，膜形态膜形态学两种准确建模和制造的复杂性。该研究介绍了优化颗粒干扰夹具的膜形态，组合多材料3D打印和进化算法来搜索Materio中的各种形态设计空间的研究。在单个运行中打印整个几代，并测试夹持器保持力并用作健身测量。我们的方法是相对可扩展的，规避需要建模，并保证所考虑的夹具的真实表现。结果表明，膜形态是夹具性能的关键决定因素。可以看到常见的高性能设计以优化粒状夹持器产生抓地力的所有三种主要识别机制，与标准夹持形态有显着不同，并概括跨越一系列测试对象。

The recent increase in public and academic interest in preserving biodiversity has led to the growth of the field of conservation technology. This field involves designing and constructing tools that utilize technology to aid in the conservation of wildlife. In this article, we will use case studies to demonstrate the importance of designing conservation tools with human-wildlife interaction in mind and provide a framework for creating successful tools. These case studies include a range of complexities, from simple cat collars to machine learning and game theory methodologies. Our goal is to introduce and inform current and future researchers in the field of conservation technology and provide references for educating the next generation of conservation technologists. Conservation technology not only has the potential to benefit biodiversity but also has broader impacts on fields such as sustainability and environmental protection. By using innovative technologies to address conservation challenges, we can find more effective and efficient solutions to protect and preserve our planet's resources.

As various city agencies and mobility operators navigate toward innovative mobility solutions, there is a need for strategic flexibility in well-timed investment decisions in the design and timing of mobility service regions, i.e. cast as "real options" (RO). This problem becomes increasingly challenging with multiple interacting RO in such investments. We propose a scalable machine learning based RO framework for multi-period sequential service region design & timing problem for mobility-on-demand services, framed as a Markov decision process with non-stationary stochastic variables. A value function approximation policy from literature uses multi-option least squares Monte Carlo simulation to get a policy value for a set of interdependent investment decisions as deferral options (CR policy). The goal is to determine the optimal selection and timing of a set of zones to include in a service region. However, prior work required explicit enumeration of all possible sequences of investments. To address the combinatorial complexity of such enumeration, we propose a new variant "deep" RO policy using an efficient recurrent neural network (RNN) based ML method (CR-RNN policy) to sample sequences to forego the need for enumeration, making network design & timing policy tractable for large scale implementation. Experiments on multiple service region scenarios in New York City (NYC) shows the proposed policy substantially reduces the overall computational cost (time reduction for RO evaluation of > 90% of total investment sequences is achieved), with zero to near-zero gap compared to the benchmark. A case study of sequential service region design for expansion of MoD services in Brooklyn, NYC show that using the CR-RNN policy to determine optimal RO investment strategy yields a similar performance (0.5% within CR policy value) with significantly reduced computation time (about 5.4 times faster).

The combination of conduct, emotion, motivation, and thinking is referred to as personality. To shortlist candidates more effectively, many organizations rely on personality predictions. The firm can hire or pick the best candidate for the desired job description by grouping applicants based on the necessary personality preferences. A model is created to identify applicants' personality types so that employers may find qualified candidates by examining a person's facial expression, speech intonation, and resume. Additionally, the paper emphasises detecting the changes in employee behaviour. Employee attitudes and behaviour towards each set of questions are being examined and analysed. Here, the K-Modes clustering method is used to predict employee well-being, including job pressure, the working environment, and relationships with peers, utilizing the OCEAN Model and the CNN algorithm in the AVI-AI administrative system. Findings imply that AVIs can be used for efficient candidate screening with an AI decision agent. The study of the specific field is beyond the current explorations and needed to be expanded with deeper models and new configurations that can patch extremely complex operations.

Correct scoring of a driver's risk is of great significance to auto insurance companies. While the current tools used in this field have been proven in practice to be quite efficient and beneficial, we argue that there is still a lot of room for development and improvement in the auto insurance risk estimation process. To this end, we develop a framework based on a combination of a neural network together with a dimensionality reduction technique t-SNE (t-distributed stochastic neighbour embedding). This enables us to visually represent the complex structure of the risk as a two-dimensional surface, while still preserving the properties of the local region in the features space. The obtained results, which are based on real insurance data, reveal a clear contrast between the high and low risk policy holders, and indeed improve upon the actual risk estimation performed by the insurer. Due to the visual accessibility of the portfolio in this approach, we argue that this framework could be advantageous to the auto insurer, both as a main risk prediction tool and as an additional validation stage in other approaches.

As language models (LMs) scale, they develop many novel behaviors, good and bad, exacerbating the need to evaluate how they behave. Prior work creates evaluations with crowdwork (which is time-consuming and expensive) or existing data sources (which are not always available). Here, we automatically generate evaluations with LMs. We explore approaches with varying amounts of human effort, from instructing LMs to write yes/no questions to making complex Winogender schemas with multiple stages of LM-based generation and filtering. Crowdworkers rate the examples as highly relevant and agree with 90-100% of labels, sometimes more so than corresponding human-written datasets. We generate 154 datasets and discover new cases of inverse scaling where LMs get worse with size. Larger LMs repeat back a dialog user's preferred answer ("sycophancy") and express greater desire to pursue concerning goals like resource acquisition and goal preservation. We also find some of the first examples of inverse scaling in RL from Human Feedback (RLHF), where more RLHF makes LMs worse. For example, RLHF makes LMs express stronger political views (on gun rights and immigration) and a greater desire to avoid shut down. Overall, LM-written evaluations are high-quality and let us quickly discover many novel LM behaviors.

We present Azimuth, an open-source and easy-to-use tool to perform error analysis for text classification. Compared to other stages of the ML development cycle, such as model training and hyper-parameter tuning, the process and tooling for the error analysis stage are less mature. However, this stage is critical for the development of reliable and trustworthy AI systems. To make error analysis more systematic, we propose an approach comprising dataset analysis and model quality assessment, which Azimuth facilitates. We aim to help AI practitioners discover and address areas where the model does not generalize by leveraging and integrating a range of ML techniques, such as saliency maps, similarity, uncertainty, and behavioral analyses, all in one tool. Our code and documentation are available at github.com/servicenow/azimuth.

Machine learning (ML) has found broad applicability in quantum information science in topics as diverse as experimental design, state classification, and even studies on quantum foundations. Here, we experimentally realize an approach for defining custom prior distributions that are automatically tuned using ML for use with Bayesian quantum state estimation methods. Previously, researchers have looked to Bayesian quantum state tomography due to its unique advantages like natural uncertainty quantification, the return of reliable estimates under any measurement condition, and minimal mean-squared error. However, practical challenges related to long computation times and conceptual issues concerning how to incorporate prior knowledge most suitably can overshadow these benefits. Using both simulated and experimental measurement results, we demonstrate that ML-defined prior distributions reduce net convergence times and provide a natural way to incorporate both implicit and explicit information directly into the prior distribution. These results constitute a promising path toward practical implementations of Bayesian quantum state tomography.