David Watkins

The Deer Island Marvel Wastewater treatment and engineering excellence

Your toilet works because of a $3.8 billion engineering marvel you've never thought about. @stefie10.bsky.social and I toured Deer Island, where 360 million gallons of wastewater are processed daily, egg-shaped digesters taller than a 10-story building, and workers still inspect tanks by hand.

Embodiment is a spectrum.

Intelligence is a multi-faceted concept, and embodiment is an important facet! whattotelltherobot.com/p/the-ground...

From Physics to Embodied Intelligence How Robots Are Finally Getting Interesting

Just published: “From Physics to Embodied Intelligence” - why robots are finally getting interesting with @stefie10.bsky.social
Have a read here:
whattotelltherobot.com/p/from-physics-to-embodied-intelligence

What to Tell the Robot Robots, Space, and Time

Stefanie Tellex and I wrote a book chapter for George Konidaris' forthcoming book, Designing an Intelligence. It's a recapitulation of Rod's old paper, "Elephants Don't Play Chess" for the age of LLMs.
whattotelltherobot.com/p/what-to-te...

ChatGPT cannot handle generating paint by numbers

YouTube video by Dr Waku Will robots explode in capabilities like LLMs did?

I was featured on Dr. Waku's channel about the future of robotics. Really excited how this interview turned out!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=89P2.... Thank you @drwaku.bsky.social for having me on.

The Google links changed color? Is this design helpful?

For those of you who own US businesses, don't forget to fill out your BOIR by January 1. It's a new requirement for all companies in the US that comes with potentially high fines. boiefiling.fincen.gov/fileboir

Can the US Produce Lithium-Ion Batteries Domestically? Li-Bridge Outlines a Plan Li-Bridge released 5 broad objectives to accelerate a sustainable domestic lithium battery supply chain in North America. Is it feasible?

This report on a plan for Li-ion independence in the US from 2023 is a good read. www.resilinc.com/blog/li-brid... Clearly a lot we need to do as a country to build this infrastructure.

Apparently four year olds think that Black Friday is a holiday. They would be correct.

My pet peeve is shallow invocations of neuroscience to justify a heuristic ML algorithm

Every Author as First Author We propose a new standard for writing author names on papers and in bibliographies, which places every author as a first author -- superimposed. This approach enables authors to write papers as true e...

What a clever way to handle authorship conflicts. Fighting over contributions should not get in the way of doing great scientific work. I doubt this will fundamentally fix the problem, however I am happy the authors are starting a conversation. arxiv.org/abs/2304.01393

Supreme Court allows investors' class action to proceed against microchip company Nvidia The Supreme Court is allowing a class-action lawsuit that accuses Nvidia of misleading investors about its past dependence on selling computer chips for the mining of volatile cryptocurrency to procee...

apnews.com/article/supr...

We are likely to see more of this as courts are forced to deal with more nuanced and complex AI issues. Researchers can do more to help inform legal experts about details related to these types of cases. Our highest court should be able to rule on these cases.

Tried out a Sony 200mm-600mm + 2x Telephoto with my A7RV. Got decent results but room for improvement. Ended up taking some photos with my Tamron 28-200mm instead.

From the adventofcode community on Reddit: Discussion on LLM Cheaters Explore this post and more from the adventofcode community

www.reddit.com/r/adventofco... This is incredibly disheartening. Such a cool project should not be abused like this for internet points.

Teams - Hack & Build 2024 - Columbia University Robotics Club Teams having participated in this year's Hack and Build

I had the privilege of judging the Columbia Hack & Build Hackathon. Blown away by these teams! 🚀

Standouts:
🤖 Tilting maze with IMU
✍️ Voice-to-Braille app
👁️ Human-tracking robotic eye

Projects: www.columbiarobotics.club/hack-and-bui...

Huge thanks to CURC. The future of robotics is at Columbia! 🌟

I have been known to grump from time to time

Distilling diverse vision foundation models to improve robot learning — The AI Institute Introducing Theia, a vision foundation model for robotics developed by researchers at The AI Institute. By using multiple off-the-shelf vision foundation models as a basis, Theia generates rich visual...

Excited to share our latest work presented at #CoRL2024: Theia, a vision foundation model that distills multiple VFMs to enhance robot learning. Theia achieves state-of-the-art performance with reduced training data and computational resources. Explore our paper here: theaiinstitute.com/news/theia