Law
Government, Policy, Politics, and Law
May 2013
Intuitive Surgical Beats Claims of Negligent Training Practices
05/30/13 — Intuitive Surgical’s stock shot up 5 percent last Friday after a Washington State jury found that the company did not fail to properly train a doctor who used its robotic surgery system, handing the company a victory in the first of more than two dozen similar lawsuits to go to trial. Jurors deliberated for a day and a half before voting 10-2 that Intuitive Surgical was not liable in a $8 million lawsuit brought by the estate of Fred Taylor, lawyers for the parties said. Taylor was 67 years old when he underwent prostate surgery involving a da Vinci surgical system,…
Roadmap for Self-Driving Cars: Five Highlights
WSJ, 05/30/13
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Thursday came out with a road map for navigating the future of self…
April 2013
Robo-cars face a new threat: Lawyers
Apr 09, 2013, 10:01 AM | By Declan McCullagh
Robot enthusiasts debate ways to protect self-driving cars and other autonomous machines from the looming existential threat of class action lawsuits.
Robots: Ethical, social and legal issues
by Robots Podcast, April 19, 2013
In this episode, Per talks to Pericle Salvini from Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna about his work with social, ethical and legal issues in robotics. He tells us about the Robolaw project that will provide advice to the European Union when it creates laws concerning robotics. Finally, we discuss how you can contribute to this important work. Link to audio file (33:23)
Canadian ‘space robot‘ banknote puts UK to shame
Wired.co.uk-May 1, 2013
Canada’s new $5 note features an astronaut, a view of Earth from space, and, yes, space robots. The UK’s new £5 note will feature… Sir Winston Churchill.
March 2013
Man Shoots Robot, Gets Charged with Vandalism
Evan Ackerman / Wed, March 06, 2013
The robotic victim was an Avatar from Robotex Robots aren’t people. This is why we get them to do all kinds of stuff that we’d rather not do, whether it’s dull, dirty, dangerous, or other sinister words that start with “d.” Robots don’t have parents, they don’t have feelings, they don’t experience pain, and they don’t hold it against you if you shoot them. So how much trouble can you get in for shooting them? Apparently, not much. At least in Ohio.
Bad laws would hurt good drones | CNN
By Ryan Calo, Special to CNN
Editor’s note: Ryan Calo is a law professor at the University of Washington School of Law and an affiliate scholar at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society. You can follow him on Twitter @rcalo.
(CNN) — An Alitalia passenger jet pilot said he saw a drone over Brooklyn on Monday. Whether it’s true or not — the Federal Aviation Administration is investigating — we are going to be hearing more and more about drones in American skies. I predicted two things about drones in an online essay for Stanford Law Review in December 2011. Those predictions turned out to be true. But there was something I didn’t see coming.
February 2013
Automation Federation works with White House and US government …
InTech-Feb 14, 2013
Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, USA (14 February 2013) –Working with the Obama administration, the Automation Federation is helping to forge …
Man Charged For Shooting Robot
Popular Science-20 hours ago
An Ohio man has been charged for shooting a robot. Michael Blevins was charged with vandalism of government property, after drunkenly firing at a police robot…
Should we put robots on trial?
Boston Globe-Mar 1, 2013
But experts in artificial intelligence and the emerging field of robot ethics say that is likely to change. With the advent of technological marvels like the self-driving …
December 2012
County upgrades to Accela Automation for land management
Tucson Citizen-Dec 21, 2012
Pima County announced that Accela Automation is its new enterprise software for service delivery to eight Public Works departments.
November 2012
Robots Reduce Cost of Science for USGS
Posted 7 Nov 2012
After a contentious election, the US Government will be returning to business as usual soon and one thing both sides agree on is that the cost of government needs to be reduced. A recent report by the US Geological Survey illustrates how robots are helping out with this problem. Airborne scientific observation missions can cost as much as $30,000 per hour. The USGS is replacing these expensive airborne data gathering missions with remotely piloted vehicles, or drones, which can complete an entire mission for $3,000. So far the USGS is using the Honeywell T-Hawk Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) and AeroVironment Raven RQ-11B. The Raven in particular has other advantages over manned missions besides cost. From the report:
September 2012
Labor Union Summit Focuses on Automation
MarineLink-Sep 17, 2012
Elsewhere, and in Australia, but also on the introduction of dock automation, MUA National Secretary Crumlin reported on the events leading up to Patrick …
June 2012
Google says California legislators could drive away robotic cars
Jun 25, 2012, 5:33 PM | By Donna Tam
A Google rep tells an Assembly committee that if California passes a bill that removes the ability to have driverless cars eventually, the state is telling technology providers to take autonomous cars elsewhere.
Activists want stronger privacy protections for driverless cars
Jun 25, 2012, 2:00 PM | By Donna TamConsumer Watchdog says Google is going to go willy-nilly with data collection for autonomous vehicles, and the California bill shouldn’t get the green light without more restrictions.
Jan.-April 2012
California’s autonomous car bill inches closer to reality
Apr 11, 2012, Liane Yvkoff
Autonomous car legislation SB 1298 passed the Senate Transportation Committee and is headed to the Senate Rules committee.
Energid Funded by the NSF to Cut Costs for Robotic Manufacturing
03/12/12 — Energid Technologies Corporation received funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) under a two-year project to create robotic manipulation technology for cost-effective manufacturing. The work will make it easy for operators to achieve more with existing hardware capability. Many time-consuming tedious tasks, such as moving and modifying objects, combining…
June – Dec. 2011
National Robotics Initiative (NRI)
Posted 25 Jun 2011 at 18:33 UTC (updated 25 Jun 2011 at 23:46 UTC) by John_RobotsPodcast
During his speech at CMU, President Obama also alluded to the National Robotics Initiative (NRI), described in this NSF publication.
Obama Commanding Robot Revolution, Announces Major Robotics Initiative
Erico Guizzo / Fri, June 24, 2011
President Barack Obama loves robots. He’s invited bots to the White House and has even befriended a Japanese android. But now Obama has gone one step further: He’s decided to lead what may be a profound robotics revolution. In a visit today to Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Center, Obama launched the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership, a $500 million program to bring together industry, universities, and government to invest in emerging technologies that can improve manufacturing and create new businesses and jobs.
U.S. Senator Calls Robot Projects Wasteful. Robots Call Senator Wasteful
Erico Guizzo / Tue, June 14, 2011
A U.S. senator has cited three robotics projects as examples of “wasteful” research that lack useful applications and shouldn’t have received government funding. In a recent report, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma takes aim at the National Science Foundation, the premier source of funding for science and engineering in the United States, raising questions about the agency’s management and priorities. In one section of the report, Coburn criticizes the NSF for squandering “millions of dollars on wasteful projects,” including three that involve robots. “A dollar lost to mismanagement, fraud, inefficiency, or a dumb project is a dollar that could have advanced scientific discovery,” the report says. Coburn didn’t give the roboticists a chance to respond, so I reached out to the three groups—from the University of California, Berkeley; University of California, Davis; and Rowan University, in Glassboro, N.J.—to hear their side.
Regulation, automation, and cloud computing
An interesting debate recently between groups calling for regulation of the cloud and those opposed to it, highlights an interesting problem with big repercussions: how do we safely regulate a complex automated system?
News – Aug 01, 2011, 9:20 AM | By James Urquhart
Obama pledges $70 million for robotics R&D
The National Robotics Initiative will foster “co-robots” to work with people in locales ranging from hospitals to battlefields.
News – Jun 24, 2011, 9:11 AM | By Tim Hornyak
Humanoid plant workers wow crowds at iRex
At the 2011 International Robot Exhibition in Tokyo, power-lifting bots mix it up with the latest humanoids.
News – Nov 09, 2011, 10:49 PM | By Tim Hornyak
Feb. – May 2011
How China Plans To Send Robots To the Moon
Evan Ackerman / Mon, May 09, 2011
Despite the fact that the moon is so close (cosmically speaking), we haven’t really interacted much with the lunar surface since the late ’70s. We’ve taken pictures of it and crashed the occasional spacecraft into it, but in general the moon has been bypassed for sexier planets like Mars.
Nevada Bill Would Provide Tentative Roadmap for Autonomous Vehicles
Evan Ackerman / Fri, April 29, 2011
Right now, we have cars that that will automatically keep you in your lane while adjusting your speed so that you don’t run into anyone in front of you. You can go out and buy one. It’s not just that the technology exists to allow our cars to do our driving for us, at least on highways… The technology is in some consumer cars already. So why aren’t cars driving us around yet? A big (possibly the biggest) issue is legal: there’s simply no precedent that’s been established for, and let’s be blunt, who gets to sue who when something goes wrong. And something will, at some point, inevitably go wrong, and when it does, what happens next could decide the how the next decade of autonomous vehicles plays out.
January 2011
Automation Touted As Way To Help Fix Immigration System
National Journal – Aliya Sternstein – Jan 13, 2011
Nextgov.com reports that the government can fix the immigration system without legislation, by automating visa processing and by …
Barcelona Seeks Technologies for Automation of Urban Services
TMC Net – Calvin Azuri – Jan 24, 2011
The city of Barcelona invites international solutions providers and research centers who can materialize its automation goals through sensors and other …
01/25/11 WSJ Washington Wire
Members of Congress love their drones, but they want to give all robots their due. So the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Caucus…
December 2010
Section 179: Take Advantage of Tax Deduction in 2010
Robotworx.com, December 07, 2010
Considering purchasing robots, workcells, or other robotic equipment soon? Why not make this capital investment now, before the end of the year. This way you can take advantage of Section 179 tax incentives.
November 2010
NASA plans to put a robot on the moon
Economic Times – Nov 3, 2010
LONDON: NASA is contemplating sending a robot to the moon in just 1000 days — for just a fraction of the cost of sending a human. Engineers at the US space …
September 2010
HONEYWELL Opens Automation College In Russia
Oil and Gas Industry Latest News – Sep 15, 2010
Honeywell has opened a department in the Moscow College of Automation which will give Russian specialists the opportunity to perfect their skills.
Newsweek: GOP would produce fewer jobs, bigger deficit
Atlanta Journal Constitution (blog) – Aug 30, 2010
It is not the GOP that would produce fewer jobs, it is automation. Accelerating computer technology is the primary cause of the current global economic …
The Generation That Can’t Move On Up
09/02/10, Opinion, ANDREW J. CHERLINand W. BRADFORD WILCOX
Most people assume that working-class members of the baby-boomer generation have been hurt the most by the outsourcing and automation in which millions of factory jobs moved overseas or disappeared into computer chips, a shift recently compounded by recession. But actually it may be their children’s generation. Not only are many members of the younger working class unprepared for the contemporary job market. New research we have done shows their striking inability to fit the middle-class ideal in family and religious life. It’s a worrisome development for their lifestyle and our culture. These are the people we used to call “blue collar,” although you can no longer tell a person’s social class by the color of his shirt. If we can speak of a working class at all, education is now the best way to define them. Think of people with high school degrees but not four-year college degrees. They make up slightly more than half of all Americans between the ages of 25 and 44; old enough to have completed their schooling but young enough to be still having children, and 79% of them are white. Because they don’t have the educational credentials to get most middle-class professional and managerial jobs, their earnings have sunk toward the wages of the working poor.The grim employment picture is familiar, but what’s less widely known is that they are losing not only jobs but also their connections to basic social institutions such as marriage and religion. They’re becoming socially disengaged, floating away from the college-educated middle class.
Automating sewage treatment processes
World Pumps – Sep 10, 2010
The main improvements involved the automation of the treatment processes to enable increased efficiency and reduced energy consumption.
August 2010
Azerbaijani IT company starts implementing project on automation of state tax …
Trend News Agency (subscription) – Aug 26, 2010
Azerbaijani SINAM IT Company started implementing the project of automation of the State Tax Service of Kyrgyzstan, SINAM director for business development …
Automation is key to credible elections in 2011 , SALISU
Jul 20, 2010, Vanguard, Nigeria
While the debate on electoral reforms is going in the national assembly, how best to realize a stable democratic political system in Nigeria through IT tools and strategies has continued to be a major concern of stakeholders in the Nigerian IT industry, especially the Nigerian Computer Society. For many observers, electoral reform is not feasible without deployment of robust IT infrastructure. Less than one week ahead of the 2010 NCS Annual General Meeting slated for next week in Asaba, Delta, Mr Afolabi Salisu, Chairman, Conference Committee of the conference who is also the Managing Director of Simplex Automation Systems LTD spoke to CyberLIFE’s Emeka Aginam on a number of issues including stable political system in Nigeria with the deployment of technology, how INEC can face the challenges ahead of 2011 elections, among others.
July 2010
Report on poll fraud: plug gaps, or nix automation
Business Mirror – Fernan Marasigan – Jun 27, 2010
SPORADIC cheating in the country’s first automated general elections last month appears to be confined to local races, the chairman of the House Committee on Suffrage and Electoral Reforms has concluded. But these, taken with the “fitful credibility” with which technical provider Smartmatic-TIM explained crucial date-and-time stamp issues in the vote-counting machine, and the Commission on Elections’ move to discard certain security features, made it necessary to revisit the country’s experiment with automation—and perhaps even set it aside for the next elections if the loopholes of the May 10 exercise are not plugged. Locsin said, “The further danger is that these admittedly sporadic automated or automation-related anomalies could be perpetrated and institutionalized …
Recent Comments