Video Friday: Harvard’s Peacock Spider Robot, and More

Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!): ISR 2018 – August 24-27, 2018 – Shenyang, China BioRob 2018 – August 26-29, 2018 – University of Twente, Netherlands RO-MAN 2018 – August 27-30, 2018 – Nanjing, China ELROB 2018 – September 24-28, 2018 – Mons, Belgium ARSO 2018 – September 27-29, 2018 – Genoa, Italy ROSCon 2018 – September 29-30, 2018 – Madrid, Spain IROS 2018 – October 1-5, 2018 – Madrid, Spain Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

Artificial intelligence model “learns” from patient data to make cancer treatment less toxic

MIT researchers are employing novel machine-learning techniques to improve the quality of life for patients by reducing toxic chemotherapy and radiotherapy dosing for glioblastoma, the most aggressive form of brain cancer. Glioblastoma is a malignant tumor that appears in the brain or spinal cord, and prognosis for adults is no more than five years. Patients must endure a combination of radiation therapy and multiple drugs taken every month. Medical professionals generally administer maximum safe drug doses to shrink the tumor as much as possible. But these strong pharmaceuticals still cause debilitating side effects in patients. In a paper being presented next week at the 2018 Machine Learning for Healthcare conference at Stanford University, MIT Media Lab researchers detail a model that could make dosing regimens less toxic but still effective. Powered by a “self-learning” machine-learning technique, the model looks at treatment regimens currently in use, and iteratively adjusts the doses. Continue reading Artificial intelligence model “learns” from patient data to make cancer treatment less toxic