Towards a smart future with AI

Can our home intelligently switch heating and lighting on and off to save a third of our energy consumption? Can a smart home assist elderly and disabled people in living an autonomous life at home by detecting critical events like falls? What about intruder detection? Making these visions a reality requires novel sensing devices. From an experimental physicist’s perspective, discover how crazy wave patterns can allow to precisely detect motion around the corner, to track objects in complex indoor environments using their unique wave-fingerprints, and to recognize human gestures and postures.

Young robots go to school to develop their « Artificial Intelligence » (AI) and study real-life situations with data provided by sensors. Their teachers are engineers that train them on how to undertake specific tasks by demonstrating the best practices. When machines obtain their diploma, they apply for a job and are recruited by the industry. But very often, they only do painful and repetitive tasks alone while humans hesitate to collaborate with them because they simply do not understand them. So, is the AI of the robots sufficiently human-centred? Should we reform their education system?