And for 25-year-old Shamima Khatoon, her job annotating cars, lane markers and traffic lights at an all-female outpost of data-labelling company iMerit in Metiabruz, India, represents the only chance she has to work outside the home in her conservative Muslim community.”Aria Khrisna, a 36-year-old father of three in Tegal, Indonesia, says doing things like adding word tags to clothing pictures on websites such as eBay and Amazon pays him about $100 a month, roughly half his income.Researchers have tried to find workarounds to human-labelled data, but the results are often inadequate. It learns from their response and tries the technique out on the next call, freeing up human employees to do other things.That information feeds back into the system.But the product shots didn’t look anything like the car images in Street View, and the program couldn’t recognise them.

"We want to be the ones that can label any image without any human involvement,” says Ian Parnes, CloudSight’s head of business development.

More recently, investors have poured tens of millions of dollars into startups like Mighty AI and CrowdFlower, which are developing software that makes it easier to label photos and other data, even on smartphones. Humans will be in the loop "for a long, long, long time to come,” he says.But it’s not just a fancy computer program spitting back responses. "How long that will take is anyone’s guess. "You can’t trust the algorithm 100 per cent.The need for human labellers is "enormous” and "dynamic,” says Robin Bordoli, CEO of labelling technology company CrowdFlower.She earns about 50 cents an hour, but in a crisis-wracked country with runaway inflation, just a few hours’ work can pay a month’s rent in bolivars. "Soma” Somasegar says he sees "billions of dollars of opportunity” in servicing the needs of machine learning algorithms.”.There’s a dirty little secret about artificial intelligence: It’s powered by hundreds of thousands of real people.These repetitive tasks pay pennies apiece. In the end, she says, she spent $35,000 to hire auto dealer experts to label her data.At InterContinental Hotels Group, every call that its digital assistant Amelia can take from a human saves $5 to $10, says information technology director Scot Whigham.

When Amelia fails, the program listens while a call is rerouted to one of about 60 service desk workers.In a project that used Google Street View images of parked cars to estimate the demographic makeup of neighbourhoods, then-Stanford researcher Timnit Gebru tried to train her AI by scraping Craigslist photos of cars for sale that weft feeder parts were labelled by their owners.

Many such technologies wouldn’t work without massive quantities of this human-labelled data.Such data feeds directly into "machine learning” algorithms that help self-driving cars wind through traffic and let Alexa figure out that you want the lights on.There, while the customer waits on the phone, one of a roomful of headphone-wearing "intent analysts”transcribe everything from misheard numbers to profanities and quickly directs the computer how to respond.’s Waymo are paying reams of labellers, often through third-party vendors. "You can imagine how important it is for me getting paid in US dollars.Shamima Khatoon’s job is to annotate cars, lane markers and traffic lights at an all-female outpost of data-labeling company iMerit in Metiabruz, India.The benefits of greater accuracy can be immediate.CloudSight, for instance, offers website and app developers a handy tool for uploading a photo and getting a few words back describing it. If the algorithm doesn’t have a good answer, one of its 800 employees in places like India, Southeast Asia or Africa type in the answer in real time.

"Right now, if you’re selling a product and you want perfection, it would be negligent not to invest the money in that kind of annotation,” he says. The retailer Kohl’s uses the service for a "Snap and Shop” visual search feature on its app. His firm, Madrona Venture Group, invested in Mighty AI.Several companies like Alphabet’s Waymo and game-maker Unity Technologies are developing simulated worlds to train their algorithms in controlled scenarios where every object comes pre-defined.This human input industry has long been nurtured by search engines Google and Bing, who for more than a decade have used people to rate the accuracy of their results."We’re not building a system to play a game, we’re building a system to save lives,” says Mighty AI CEO Daryn Nakhuda.For the most part, even companies trying to push humans out of the loop still rely on them.From makeup artists in Venezuela to women in conservative parts of India, people around the world are doing the digital equivalent of needlework — drawing boxes around cars in street photos, tagging images, and transcribing snatches of speech that computers can’t quite make out.Venture capitalist S.When a computer can’t make out a customer call to the Hyatt Hotels chain, an audio snippet is sent to AI-powered call centre Interactions in an old brick building in Franklin, Massachusetts.Accurate labelling could make the difference between a self-driving car distinguishing between the sky and the side of a truck — a distinction Tesla’s Model S failed in the first known fatality involving self-driving systems in 2016. But in bulk, this work can offer a decent wage in many parts of the world — even in the US."We’ve transformed those jobs,” Whigham says.”At the moment, figuring out how to get computers to learn without so-called "ground truth” data provided by humans remains an open research question.

"It doesn’t sound like a lot of money, but for me, it’s pretty decent,” she says. "Next time through, we’ve got a better chance of being successful,” says Robert Nagle, Interactions’ chief technology officer.Marjorie Aguilar, a freelance makeup artist in Maracaibo, Venezuela, spends four to six hours a day drawing boxes around traffic objects to help train self-driving systems for Mighty AI.Trevor Darrell, a machine learning expert at the University of California Berkeley, says he expects it will be five to 10 years before computer algorithms can learn to perform without the need for human labelling. Since 2005, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, which matches freelance workers with temporary online jobs, has also made crowd-sourced data entry available to researchers worldwide.Major automakers like Toyota, Nissan and Ford, ride-hailing companies like Uber and other tech giants like Alphabet Inc.His group alone spends hundreds of thousands of dollars a year paying people to annotate images."It’s a good platform to increase your skills and support your family,” she says. This burgeoning but largely unseen cottage industry represents the foundation of a technology that could change humanity forever: AI that will drive us around, execute verbal commands without flaw, and, possibly, one day think on its own

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The new origami-inspired muscles are both soft and strong, and can be made for less than 1."Vacuum-based muscles have a lower risk of rupture, failure, and damage, and they do not expand when they are operating, so you can integrate them into closer-fitting robots on the human body," said Daniel Vogt, from the Harvard University."It is like giving these robots superpowers," said Daniela Rus, from the MIT, in the study published in the journal PNAS. They can perform a Projectile looms greater variety of tasks and are safer than other models, according to researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University.

"A vacuum applied to the inside of the bag initiates the muscle's movement by causing the skin to collapse onto the skeleton, creating tension that drives the motion.US scientists have created affordable artificial muscles that add strength to soft robots, allowing them to lift objects that are up to 1,000 times their own weight.

The muscles, also known as actuators, can generate about six times more force per unit area than mammalian skeletal muscle.They experimented with different skeleton shapes to create muscles that can contract down to 10 per cent of their original size, lift a delicate flower off the ground, and twist into a coil, all simply by sucking the air out of them.They are also incredibly lightweight, a 2.6-gram muscle can lift a three-kilogramme object, which is the equivalent of a mallard duck lifting a car.The researchers constructed dozens of muscles using materials ranging from metal springs to packing foam to sheets of plastic.No other power source or human input is required to direct the muscle's movement, it is determined entirely by the shape and composition of the skeleton.Each artificial muscle consists of an inner "skeleton" that can be made of various materials surrounded by air or fluid and sealed inside a plastic or textile bag that serves as the "skin

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His remarks, carried live on Iranian state television, came a day after Tehran’s nuclear program chief said the country had doubled the number of advanced IR-6 centrifuges in operation.There was no immediate reaction from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog now monitoring Iran’s compliance with the deal.The development is significant as the centrifuges previously spun empty, without gas injection, under the landmark 2015 nuclear accord.The centrifuges at Fordo are IR-1s, Iran’s first-generation centrifuge.In his announcement, President Hassan Rouhani did not say whether the centrifuges, which are at its nuclear facility in Fordo, would be used to produce enriched uranium.

The centrifuges would be injected with the uranium gas as of Wednesday, Rouhani said.Rouhani stressed the steps taken so far, including going beyond the deal’s enrichment and stockpile limitations, could be reversed if Europe offers a way for it to avoid US sanctions choking off its crude oil sales abroad.

It also increases pressure on European nations that remain in the accord, which at this point has all but collapsed.Tehran: Iran’s president announced on Tuesday that Tehran will begin injecting uranium gas weft accumulator into 1,044 centrifuges, the latest step away from its nuclear deal with world powers since President Donald Trump withdrew from the accord over a year ago. The nuclear deal allowed those at Fordo to spin without uranium gas, while allowing over 5,000 at its Natanz facility to enrich uranium

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