Category robots in business

A team of scientists has created a new shape-changing polymer that could transform how future soft materials are constructed.

A team of roboticists at the Beijing Institute of Technology, working with a pair of colleagues from the Technical University of Munich, has created a new kind of rat robot—one that was designed to interact in social ways with real rats.

Like waves sweeping through tiny stadium crowds, microscopic machines engineered by Cornell researchers can autonomously synchronize their movements, opening new possibilities for the use of microrobots in drug delivery, chemical mixing and environmental remediation, among other applications.

A Silicon Valley Maverick Steps into Washington David Sacks, a tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist, has been tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to serve as the White House’s inaugural “AI and Crypto Czar.” This unconventional appointment promises to merge the worlds of Silicon Valley innovation and Washington policymaking. Sacks, a PayPal co-founder and ally of...

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A team has developed flexible fibers with self-healing, light-emitting and magnetic properties. The scalable hydrogel-clad ionotronic nickel-core electroluminescent (SHINE) fiber is bendable, emits highly visible light, and can automatically repair itself after being cut, regaining nearly 100% of its original brightness. In addition, the fiber can be powered wirelessly and manipulated physically using magnetic forces.

A team of interdisciplinary scientists has developed flexible fibers with self-healing, light-emitting and magnetic properties. The Scalable Hydrogel-clad Ionotronic Nickel-core Electroluminescent (SHINE) fiber is bendable, emits highly visible light, and can automatically repair itself after being cut, regaining nearly 100 per cent of its original brightness. In addition, the fiber can be powered wirelessly and manipulated physically using magnetic forces.

Researchers have built a drone that can walk, hop, and jump into flight with the aid of birdlike legs, greatly expanding the range of potential environments accessible to unmanned aerial vehicles.

This year, continued economic uncertainty and geopolitical disruption are once again complicating peak season planning, compounded by the ongoing industry-wide labor shortage which makes it harder to scale the workforce fast enough to meet demand.

Claire chatted to Christos Bergeles from King’s College London about micro-surgical robots to deliver therapies deep inside the body.

Christos Bergeles received his PhD in Robotics from ETH Zurich in Switzerland in 2011. As a Professor at King’s College London, he directs the “Robotics and Vision in Medicine Lab” whose mission is to develop micro-surgical robots that deliver regenerative therapies deep inside the human body. He holds funding for the development of instrumentation that delivers stem cells to diseased retinal layers in the eye. He and his team are very active in public engagement and patient involvement activities, such as New Scientist Live and the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition.

Quadruped robots integrating manipulators could potentially tackle tasks that entail manipulating objects while swiftly moving around in their surrounding environment. These include tasks such as collecting the trash around the house, collecting specific objects and bringing them to humans or depositing target items at specific locations.

OpenAI’s unveiling of ChatGPT Pro, priced at a steep $200 per month, has sparked widespread debate about whether the premium tier justifies its cost. While the new subscription offers significant advancements in AI capabilities, including access to its o1 reasoning model and other enhanced features, the question remains: Is this new tier worth the hefty...

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This blog is a contribution from our customer, Personify Health, the first personalized health platform company. Learn how their team reduces AI model development time by 82% for personalized healthcare.

Personify Health is a global company empowering diverse and unique businesses — and diverse and unique people — to engage more deeply in health at a lower cost. We’ve brought together health plan administration, holistic wellbeing, and comprehensive navigation solutions to create the industry’s first and only personalized health platform.

We’re bridging the gap between the enormous potential of AI and the need for smarter healthcare. Our AI-powered platform helps our 19 million members across 190+ countries to proactively manage their health with highly personalized recommendations and content that spans mental health, nutrition, sleep, movement, exercise guidance, and more.

To achieve personalization at this level and drive efficiency throughout the company, we’re accelerating AI adoption with more than 15 predictive and generative AI projects currently underway. DataRobot has been essential for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of our expert team of data scientists, engineers, and data analysts. 

Why accuracy and governance are essential for AI in healthcare

Personify Health has the best and brightest data scientists, engineers, and analysts on our team. But in order for them to do their best work, they needed a toolset that would reduce daily headaches like tool overload, clunky workflows, and duplicative work. As CTO, I want my people focused on delivering results, not managing bad processes.

I’m a strong believer in eliminating silos across the organization. Our engineers, data scientists, and analysts must come together on one platform to scale our development cycles and productivity gains. But we must be thoughtful with each decision, particularly as healthcare is a highly regulated field with numerous ethical concerns.  

We need to blend AI with human expertise for a close personal touch along the entire customer journey. Our members trust us to guide their health and wellbeing through recommendations provided by advanced predictive analytics, while our health coaches rely on generative AI co-pilots to make them more effective partners to our community members. 

Internally, we also use generative AI to drive productivity with helper bots for different business functions. Trust in each of these AI applications is absolutely essential for us to do our jobs and support our member community in continuing to improve their health.

Predictive models are critical to the personalized experience we provide on our platform. To inform Personify’s predictions, we consider a dataset that encompasses approximately 275 million people with 700 features. We need to train models on constantly changing data — at scale — across hundreds of models multiplied by millions of members.

DataRobot allows our team to train multiple models simultaneously and compare outputs for the greatest possible accuracy. Their end-to-end platform means we have the tools to quickly deliver results our customers can trust. 

Supporting Personify’s model responsibility standards

Centralized tooling further supports our commitment to social and model responsibility with the right infusion of ethics, privacy, and governance. At Personify, here’s how we’re taking a thoughtful approach to AI adoption and use across the company:

A steering board

An AI executive steering board oversees all projects to help guide our decisions at the leadership level.

Research and development

An R&D team researches and builds the foundation for our generative AI-based frameworks for use cases in operations, commercial marketing, and content generation.

Governance team 

AI policy governance is critical in how we work with data. Our AI policies propagate to our 70+ sponsors on the platform so everyone understands how we protect data. Our governance team guides AI policies with input from our legal counsel. 

Privacy and bias mitigation

We work with anonymized data sets, which keep member data private. At the same time, it eliminates the possibility of bias in our models. 

A unifying platform

To reduce silos and accelerate model time, we chose DataRobot to bring all our teams and predictive models in one place. We’ve been able to rip apart those silos across the organization, which is fundamental to our success.

The platform unifies our AI analytics across teams, technologies, and data sources, and speeds our time to production. Instead of taking three weeks to get an acceptable model, we can do it in 21 hours and create multiple models in parallel.

DataRobot also supports our governance framework with essential explainability. Having visibility behind models helps us quickly understand, choose, and gain acceptance of the right models. 

Building momentum for generative AI in personalized healthcare

Looking ahead, generative AI will become a greater part of how we enable our organization. With the foundation we’ve already built in DataRobot across predictive AI and generative AI models, I’m excited for Personify Health’s future. 

We’re already unifying all of our generative and predictive AI models within DataRobot to further improve how we manage and monitor them to drive meaningful results for the business and our members. This platform is core to many of our objectives as we continue to lead the future of AI in healthcare.

For example, we foresee having our own AI conversational hub on the backend that plugs into all our products to answer questions for even greater responsiveness.

We’ve also been experimenting with DataRobot Application Templates, which will give us repeatable use-case logic that the team can adapt for specific business problems. This solves a significant headache for our team and will let us move at an even faster pace.

Together, Personify Health is empowering consumers with smarter recommendations that are held to the highest ethical and legal standards. DataRobot makes it so much easier to build and manage AI models, which means my team can focus on delivering better health and wellbeing recommendations to our customers. 

Check out Personify Health’s customer spotlight to learn more about how they reduced AI model development time by 82%.

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Advancing adaptive AI agents, empowering 3D scene creation, and innovating LLM training for a smarter, safer future

A team of roboticists at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, working with a colleague from the University of California, has designed, built and demonstrated a bird-like robot that can launch itself into flight using spring-like legs.

Stretch currently unloads boxes autonomously at the Hermes Fulfillment center, while Spot supports predictive maintenance by inspecting fire exits and structural changes and detecting air and gas leaks.