What's in this week's issue?

MIT’s CSAIL department this week is showcasing RoboGrocery. It combines computer vision with a soft robotic gripper to bag a wide range of items. To test the system, researchers placed 10 objects unknown to the robot on a grocery conveyer belt.

The products ranged from delicate items like grapes, bread, kale, muffins and crackers to far more solid ones like soup cans, meal boxes and ice cream containers. The vision system kicks in first, detecting the objects before determining their size and orientation on the belt.

As the grasper touches the grapes, pressure sensors in the fingers determine that they are, in fact, delicate and therefore should not go at the bottom of the bag — something many of us no doubt learned the hard way. Next, it notes that the soup can is a more rigid structure and sticks it in the bottom of the bag.

The 2024 U.S. presidential debates kicked off June 27, with President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump sharing the stage for the first time in four years.

Duncan Watts, a computational social scientist from the University of Pennsylvania, considers this an ideal moment to test a tool his lab has been developing during the last six months: the Media Bias Detector.

“The debates offer a real-time, high-stakes environment to observe and analyze how media outlets present and potentially skew the same event,” says Watts.

The Media Bias Detector uses artificial intelligence to analyze articles from major news publishers, categorizing them by topic, detecting events, and examining factors like tone, partisan lean, and fact selection.

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