Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 5h

Agreed on SGU. Stargate overall was fun. The end of Atlantis was a watershed moment for me. I finally understood what it meant for a show to be “bad.”

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 6h

GenZ keeps scrolling TikTok and not raising the shields.

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 6h

Every couple of years, I remember the hilarity of the Stargate science fiction universe.

On a supposed modern-day Earth, the 5 UN security council nations build an interstellar military armada, obliterate every alien adversary across two galaxies, in secret, before we have iPhones.

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 15h

Here's a link to the paper and videos put out publicly by Shi and Song's groups at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford respectively.

"UMI-on-Air: Embodiment-Aware Guidance for Embodiment-Agnostic Visuomotor Policies"
Gupta et al.
arxiv.org/abs/2510.02614
umi-on-air.github.io

UMI on Air: Embodiment-Aware Guidance for Embodiment-Agnostic Visuomotor Policies

Not all robots are equally UMI-able - they can't all track UMI trajectories perfectly. Our key idea: allow the robot's controller to steer UMI's diffusion policy, leading to more robust cross-embodime...

umi-on-air.github.io

Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 15h

New result: a drone that can screw on a lightbulb

But it's more than that. Right now, the best robot hand controllers work very differently than our best locomotion controllers--they don't coordinate very well.

Seems like a good step toward making them work together, and for more than just flying.

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 18h

Here’s an example from just this week. Swiss engineering firm and robot maker, ABB, being bought out by SoftBank for $5.4 billion. SoftBank, like Google, also bought and later sold Boston Dynamics by the way.

www.reuters.com/world/asia-p...

www.reuters.com

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 18h

Did you hear Google bought out 8 robotics companies? Including Boston Dynamics? Holy crap what do they have planned?!

Oh wait, that was back in 2013. It was not the dawn of a new robotics age.

Remember that when reading about big industry buys in #robotics.

spectrum.ieee.org/amp/google-a...

Google Acquires Seven Robot Companies, Wants Big Role in Robotics

The company is funding a major new robotics group and acquiring a bunch of robot startups

spectrum.ieee.org

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 1d

How do their cybersecurity vulnerabilities factor into this? We firewall our Unitree.

Reposted by Christian Hubicki

David in Setouchi @david.setouchi.social · 2d

And by "some" they mean people who have no clue about how AI works.

Nature @nature.com · 2d

Researchers question whether autonomous AI scientists are possible or even desirable.

Read the full story: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 2d

Makes me curious what the up and down times are.

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 2d

Yeah, the reliability is always what I’m looking for.

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 2d

The interview’s vague, but the Pentagon is considering Generative AI for decision support — a terrible idea.

If LLMs are ever helpful it’s in *low*-stakes suggestions, not life-or-death choices. But for now, industry guardrails hinder LLM use in lethal scenarios.

www.politico.com/news/magazin...

Killer Robots, AI Psychosis and Nuclear War: The Pentagon’s Biggest AI Fears

A Q&A with a former Pentagon insider on the AI debates that could shape the future of national security.

www.politico.com

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 4d

*tele-operation

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 4d

In this case, teleportation would actually be more impressive than a pre-canned trained routine.

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 4d

Aaaaannd it’s already ruined.

It’s true the controller is a neural network, but the routine is pre-choreographed. It’s not responding to the human and making decisions how to “fight,” (it’s probably not even using vision) which is of course what the typical person would assume by saying it’s “AI.”

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 4d

Basically, good job. But I’m also judging your robot on the company claim that it will be a multi-TRILLION dollar product that we’ll send to Mars soon.

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 4d

But it feels to me a fully separate endeavor from making humanoids useful in the near term. This control method is kinda hard to marry with the dexterous task controllers (stable diffusion) humanoids are trying to use.

It’s more saying, “we can do king fu too, Unitree”.

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 4d

I’ll highlight the best part—the balance.

They train it in a computer simulation, pushing it at random times during while attempting to execute the performance. That’s why it can take a shove, and can shimmy on one foot to rebalance.

While not fully new, it’s uncommon for a full-size humanoid.

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 4d

If it’s like other companies, they’re doing motion retargeting using deep reinforcement learning (DRL). That’s different than their typical balancing which is more traditional.

It’s cleaner than their prior DRL results👇, but likely because it’s designed to imitate the symmetry of human performance.

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 4d

Good martial arts routine from Tesla.

It’s trained to do a pre-choreographed routine and the human is playing along.

I’ll wonk out more in the replies, but in short, their balance control is getting much better (other companies have too) but this is mostly a party trick.

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 5d

Okay, the AI actor thing is ridiculous. It’s a fully synthetic media push. I regret engaging with the articles even to poke fun at them.

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 6d

So glad that professors can get family leave. With time off, I can finally give the care, attention, and patience that my grad students need.

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Reposted by Christian Hubicki

David Lane @dml125.bsky.social · 7d

Very sorry to hear of Jane Goodall’s passing. Her scientific contributions and her work as a conservationist are extraordinary.
#goodall #chimpanzee #conservation #primatology

🧪

Gift article

Jane Goodall, Eminent Primatologist Who Chronicled the Lives of Chimps, Dies at 91

www.nytimes.com

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 8d

The scholar is me. Humanoids are not ready for Mars.

www.forbes.com/sites/kevinh...

Elon Musk’s Optimus Robots Face Speedy Downfall On Mars, Scholar Says

SpaceX’s Elon Musk says he will rocket Optimus bots on the first Starships sent to Mars, but a leading robotics scholar predicts their space odyssey will be short-lived.

www.forbes.com

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 8d

Wikipedia is great at setting standards for math articles. I can always expect a page that’s beautiful, thorough, and unhelpful.

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