Could aliens ever visit Earth? An aerospace scientist unpacks the challenges of interstellar spaceflight
To travel between solar systems, a spacecraft would need extremely sophisticated – if not impossible – technology.
🇺🇸 미국 · "SCIENTIST" · 총 88건
필터 보기현재 지수
50.0
0 = 부정 우세
50 = 중립
100 = 긍정 우세
최근 7일 기준 11,489건을 분석한 결과, 뉴스 심리지수는 50.0(균형)입니다. 긍정 1건(0.0%)·중립 11,487건(100.0%)·부정 1건(0.0%)이며, 중립 비중이 뚜렷하게 높습니다. 성향 지수는 종합 19.2(중도 균형)입니다.
To travel between solar systems, a spacecraft would need extremely sophisticated – if not impossible – technology.
Are we tri-clops?
Rattlesnakes are among the most vulnerable species threatened around the world, say scientists.
A single infusion of an experimental gene-editing drug seemed to reduce LDL long-term in a small trial. The results may point to something “curative,” one expert said.
This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. It lives in a glass castle deep under the sea. It’s not a character from The Little Mermaid but a very real, very mysterious marine worm. Known as Dalhousiella yabukii, the worm resides inside a glass sea sponge—a simple marine animal that forms a […]
Scientists are hoping to use genetic engineering to reduce the transmission of Lyme disease. The scientists' target is not the deer or the ticks often associated with the disease; it's wild mice.
Scientists are hoping to use genetic engineering to reduce the transmission of Lyme disease. The scientists' target is not the deer or the ticks often associated with the disease; it's wild mice.
An Ebola vaccine based on the same technology that delivered the AstraZeneca Covid-19 jab is being urgently developed by British scientists to help contain the deadly sub-strain enveloping the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and its neighbors. The post UK Scientists Working on Ebola Vaccine Based on AstraZeneca Covid-19 Jab appeared first on Breitbart.
There are black holes that are too big to be born from the death of a star but aren’t quite supermassive either. There’s finally evidence for where those came from.
Turns out the only thing more deeply buried than these trees is the debate over what buried them.
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In this illustrated guide, behavioral scientist BJ Fogg breaks down his Tiny Habits framework to help you rethink your approach to starting (or restarting) a habit.
This sponsored article is brought to you by Melbourne Convention Bureau (MCB) supported by Business Events Australia. Melbourne’s reputation as a global events city, from the Australian Open tennis and Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix to hosting NFL regular season games, now intersects with a different form of scale: large-scale compute, data-intensive research, and advanced engineering. Long recognized for delivering complex international events, the city is applying the same organisational capability to the infrastructure that underpins modern AI research, positioning Melbourne at the convergence of global convening and high-performance digital systems. Consistently ranked among the world’s most livable cities, Melbourne was named Time Out’s Best City in the World in 2026, the first Australian city to hold the title. Melbourne, Australia’s premier conference destination. Tourism Australia More materially for research and innovation, Melbourne is also the nation’s fastest‑growing capital, attracting increasing concentrations of engineering and technology talent, investment and international engagement. Australia’s artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem is entering a new phase, defined less by isolated initiatives and more by the convergence of compute infrastructure, research intensity and international collaboration. Melbourne sits at this intersection. Melbourne’s trajectory highlights what enables research at scale: access to frontier-grade compute, proximity to industry-ready infrastructure, and repeated opportunities for global research communities to convene. Sovereign AI compute, expanding hyperscale data center campuses and a growing pipeline of international research-led conferences are reshaping the city’s research landscape. Together, these elements position Melbourne as a focal point for applied AI research, advanced engineering and data-intensive science. The growing global influence of AI engineering, underscored by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang receiving the 2026 IEEE Medal of Honor, reflects the scale of this shift. In Melbourne, these factors form a reinforcing research flywheel linking infrastructure, discovery and collaboration. Rather than focusing on startup density or short-term commercial output, Melbourne’s trajectory highlights what enables research at scale: access to frontier-grade compute, proximity to industry-ready infrastructure, and repeated opportunities for global research communities to convene. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang received the 2026 IEEE Medal of Honor.IEEE Sovereign AI foundations The most recent cornerstone of Melbourne’s AI capability is MAVERIC (Monash AdVanced Environment for Research and Intelligent Computing), Australia’s largest university-based AI supercomputer. Built and deployed by Monash University in partnership with NVIDIA, Dell Technologies, and CDC Data Centres, MAVERIC has been engineered specifically for large scale AI and data intensive science, with medical research representing a key priority. Indeed, in these regards MAVERIC has been designed to function as a Next Generation Trusted Research Environment thus ensuring that it is state-of-the-art and provides a safe and secure framework for the analysis of large sensitive datasets. Designed to support research projects including cancer and neurodegenerative disease detection, clinical trial analysis and drug discovery through to materials science and engineering, MAVERIC enables Australian researchers to train and evaluate large models domestically while keeping highly sensitive datasets secure and under national jurisdiction. This sovereign design is particularly relevant in fields such as medical research where privacy, regulation or intellectual property constraints limit the use of offshore cloud resources. Monash University Vice-Chancellor and President Professor Sharon Pickering with researchers [left to right] Professor Anton Peleg, Professor Victoria Mar, Professor James Whisstock, Vice-President (Strategy and Major Projects) Teresa Finlayson, and Professor Patrick Kwan.Eamon Gallagher (Australian Financial Review) Technically, the system reflects the latest shifts in high performance AI architecture. Built on NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 platforms and integrated using Dell’s rack scale infrastructure, MAVERIC employs closed loop liquid cooling to reduce water consumption compared with conventional air-cooled systems, aligning large scale compute growth with sustainability objectives while supporting high density, high throughput workloads. Professor James Whisstock, Deputy Dean Research of Monash’s Faculty of Medicine, Nursing, and Health Sciences commented, “MAVERIC provides a huge leap forward in our compute capability that will revolutionize our researchers’ ability to address the most challenging and important research questions across the fields of medical research, information technology, and STEM disciplines. It will seed wonderful new cross-disciplinary collaborations, underpin the work of our best and brightest young researchers and will allow our scientists to continue to make major discoveries that positively impact the Australian and global population more broadly.” “MAVERIC provides a huge leap forward in our compute capability that will revolutionize our researchers’ ability to address the most challenging and important research questions across the fields of medical research, information technology, and STEM disciplines.” —Professor James Whisstock, Deputy Dean Research of Monash’s Faculty of Medicine, Nursing, and Health Sciences Monash University frames MAVERIC not as a standalone asset, but as part of the national research infrastructure, intended to strengthen collaboration across academia, healthcare, government and industry. This approach positions Melbourne at the forefront of sovereign AI enabled research in the region. Data center scale as research infrastructure The infrastructure demands of modern AI research extend well beyond individual systems. Melbourne’s expanding data center footprint now supports hyperscale compute, applied AI deployment and large-scale research workloads simultaneously. Total data center investment, US$ billions.Source: Data Centres Global Report 2025 In February 2026, CDC Data Centres opened its first Melbourne campus in Brooklyn, with two live facilities and a third in planning. Combined with CDC’s Laverton campus, Melbourne is projected to host more than 800 megawatts of sovereign digital capacity, critical for AI workloads requiring sustained access to high-density power, cooling and secure environments. Parallel investment is underway in Fishermans Bend, where NEXTDC is developing a AUD $2 billion AI and digital infrastructure hub adjacent to the Innovation Precinct. Planned facilities include an AI Factory, a Mission Critical Operations Center and a Technology Center of Excellence, enabling sovereign AI, high-performance computing and cross-sector collaboration across health, defence and finance. Melbourne hosts Australia’s largest cluster of AI firms, with 188 companies, and more than 40 data centers currently operate across Victoria. The Victorian Government has complemented this growth with an initial AUD $5.5 million investment in the Sustainable Data Center Action Plan. Together, these developments reinforce Melbourne’s role as a national and increasingly global hub for high-performance AI infrastructure as model complexity and infrastructure dependency continue to accelerate. Applied AI research at scale Monash University is home to MAVERIC, Australia’s largest university-based AI supercomputer, built and deployed by Monash in partnership with NVIDIA, Dell Technologies, and CDC Data Centres.Monash University Melbourne’s research strength is underpinned by a dense university network with deep capability across AI, data science and engineering. Institutions including Monash University, the University of Melbourne, Deakin University, La Trobe University, RMIT University and Swinburne University of Technology collectively support research across machine learning, robotics, human-computer interaction, extended reality and advanced manufacturing. This concentration fosters applied collaboration where AI intersects with medicine, sustainability, cognitive systems and immersive technologies. For visiting researchers, it provides access not only to academic expertise but also to live infrastructure environments where research can be tested and validated, reinforcing Melbourne’s position as one of the Asia-Pacific’s most integrated AI research ecosystems. Conferences as research accelerators Plenary session at Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Center.Melbourne Convention Bureau Melbourne’s selection as host city for a growing number of international technology conferences reflects the convergence of research capability and infrastructure maturity. In September 2026, Data Center World Australia and The AI Summit Australia will be co-located at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Center, bringing together global leaders across AI, digital infrastructure and enterprise technology. The pairing highlights a broader reality: advances in AI are inseparable from the infrastructure that enables them. Melbourne’s expanding data center footprint now supports hyperscale compute, applied AI deployment and large-scale research workloads simultaneously. Research-led conferences are also expanding Melbourne’s global footprint. ICONIP 2026, hosted by Deakin University, will bring up to 700 researchers in neural networks and machine learning, followed in 2027 by IEEE VR, the leading conference on virtual reality and 3D user interfaces, attracting up to 1,000 delegates. In this context, conferences function not simply as events, but as infrastructure for knowledge transfer, supporting standards exchange, collaboration and system-level learning at global scale. A global platform for advancing research Sovereign compute, data center scale and a strong conference pipeline create a reinforcing cycle, enabling researchers to engage directly with infrastructure and industry well beyond the event itself. By closing the gap between theory and deployment, Melbourne supports deeper technical exchange and more enduring global research networks. This role was recognized in 2025 when the IEEE awarded Melbourne Convention Bureau the 2025 Organisational Supporting Friend of IEEE Member and Geographic Activities (MGA) — the first convention bureau in the Asia Pacific region to receive the acknowledgement as a result of the longstanding partnership with the IEEE Victorian Section. Melbourne Convention Bureau (MCB) representative Fatima Aboudrar, Senior Business Development Manager, with Vijay S. Paul, Immediate Past Chair, IEEE Victorian Section, receiving Supporting Friend Member recognition in 2025. As AI research becomes increasingly dependent on infrastructure scale, sovereign capability, and global collaboration, Melbourne is moving beyond hosting conversations to actively enabling the systems that advance AI and data‑driven research at global scale. Conference support in Melbourne Your browser does not support the video tag. Why host a conference in Melbourne, Australia.Melbourne Convention Bureau This ecosystem is underpinned by Melbourne’s highly accessible city center, where world-class venues, research institutions and industry hubs are located in close proximity. Free public transport and a compact city footprint enable seamless movement from conference floor to real-world application. Melbourne Convention Bureau (MCB) is a not-for-profit state government agency with over 60 years’ experience, that provides IEEE and its members with free support to bring international conferences to Melbourne, Australia. MCB’s support spans early-stage exploration and international bidding through to securing government funding, connecting organizers with venues, accommodation and event suppliers, and providing destination support for conference planning and delivery. Organizations considering a conference in Australia are encouraged to connect with MCB’s dedicated team, which supports IEEE conferences in Melbourne. Enquiries can be directed to info@melbournecb.com.au.
The work of Peter Aaby and Christine Stabell Benn has long been controversial. Until Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became US health policy chief, most vaccine scientists tended to ignore it. Now they can’t.
Editor’s note: If you’d like to pinpoint the instant when the world entered the nuclear age, 5:29:45 a.m. Mountain War Time on 16 July 1945, is an excellent choice. That was the moment when human beings first unleashed the power of the nucleus in an immense, blinding ball of fire above a gloomy stretch of desert in the Jornada del Muerto basin in New Mexico. Emily Seyl’s Trinity: An Illustrated History of the World’s First Atomic Test (The University of Chicago Press) offers hundreds of startlingly vivid photographs of the Manhattan Project that emerged from a 20-year restoration effort. This excerpt and the accompanying photos record the massive effort to capture the awesome detonation of “the Gadget.” aspect_ratioReprinted with permission from Trinity: An Illustrated History of the World’s First Atomic Test by Emily Seyl with contributions by Alan B. Carr, published by The University of Chicago Press. © 2026 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. In the North 10,000 photography bunker, Berlyn Brixner was listening to the countdown on a loudspeaker, his head inside a turret loaded with cameras and film. He was one of the only people instructed to look toward the blast—through his welder’s glasses—ready to follow the path of the fireball as it launched into the sky. The two Mitchell movie cameras at his station would deliver the best footage to come of the Trinity test, used by Los Alamos scientists to make some of the first measurements of the effects of a nuclear explosion. Related: New Trinity Book Uncovers Images of the First Atomic Test When the detonators fired, the cameras captured what Brixner could not have seen—the very first light of a violent, silent sea of energy unfurling into the basin. As 32 blocks of high explosives erupted all together, their incredible force surged inward toward the sleeping plutonium core, compressing the dense sphere of metal instantaneously from all sides and bringing its atoms impossibly close together. A carefully timed burst of neutrons sowed momentary, uncontrolled chaos, and then, as quickly as it began, the fission chain reaction ended. Footage from a high-speed Fastax camera in Brixner’s bunker, shot through a thick glass porthole, shows a translucent orb bursting through the darkness less than a hundredth of a second after detonation, as a rush of heat, light, and matter blew apart the Gadget. When the brightness faded enough for witnesses to make out ground zero, they saw a wall of dust rise up around a brilliant, shape-shifting, multicolored ball of flames—forming a fiery cloud that shot into the sky atop a twisting stream of debris. The camera footage tells a story no less dramatic but hundreds of times more intricate, preserving the moment for scientists to return to again and again to measure and describe the behavior of the fireball and other visible effects with exacting detail. On balance, the photography effort was a huge success, despite only 11 of the 52 cameras producing satisfactory images. By arranging those cameras at intentionally staggered distances, complementary angles, and with a broad spectrum of frame rates and focal lengths, the Spectrographic and Photographic Measurements Group was able to piece together a remarkably complete picture of their subject. On 12 July 1945, Herbert Lehr, a U.S. Army sergeant and electrical engineer assigned to Los Alamos, delivered the plutonium core to the McDonald ranch house, where the bomb was assembled. Los Alamos National Laboratory According to the group’s leader, Julian Mack, the more than 100,000 frames that were captured still “give no idea of the brightness, or of time and space scales.” Mack attributed fortune, as much as foresight, to the photographic record that was made, especially during the earliest phase of the blast. Indeed, the explosion was several times more powerful than predicted, and the intensity of its effects overwhelmed many of the cameras and diagnostic instruments. The human observers were similarly overcome. “The shot was truly awe-inspiring,” said Norris Bradbury, the physicist who would succeed Robert Oppenheimer as director of Los Alamos. “Most experiences in life can be comprehended by prior experiences, but the atom bomb did not fit into any preconception possessed by anybody. The most startling feature was the intense light.” Norris Bradbury, the physicist responsible for the final assembly of the Gadget, stands next to the partially assembled bomb at the top of the shot tower. The cables on the outside of the bomb would transmit the signals to trigger the synchronized detonations of conventional explosives, which would then create the inward-directed shock wave that would compress the bomb’s plutonium core. Bradbury would go on to succeed Robert Oppenheimer as director of Los Alamos on 17 October 1945.Los Alamos National Laboratory It is a common sentiment that words and even pictures pale in comparison to the experience of the explosion. Even so, soldiers, scientists, and many other witnesses have added their firsthand accounts—often absorbing and poetic—to complement the trove of hard data collected during the test shot. They describe an intense and blinding brightness that filled the basin with daytime; an ominous, darkening cloud rearing its head in eerie silence; the wait for the invisible wave rushing out from the heart of the Gadget; and the mighty roar that arrived at last, in a thunder, and seemed never to leave. Physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi, watching from 20 miles away, remembered, “It blasted; it pounced; it bored its way right through you.” James Chadwick, head of the British contingent of scientists who joined the Manhattan Project, later said, “Although I had lived through this moment in my imagination many times during the past few years and everything happened almost as I had pictured it, the reality was shattering.” The blast, captured with an assortment of high-speed and motion-picture cameras, shows the fireball expanding between 25 milliseconds and 60 seconds, by which time the mushroom cloud is over 3 kilometers high.Los Alamos National Laboratory And physicist George Kistiakowsky found himself certain that “at the end of the world—in the last millisecond of the Earth’s existence—the last human will see what we saw.”
When Ana Inês Inácio goes to work at the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) in The Hague, she thinks about signals most people never notice: radio waves moving between satellites, sensors, and future wireless networks. The integrated circuits the research scientist designs lay the foundation for next-generation RF sensor systems critical to advancing radar technologies. Ana Inês Inácio EMPLOYER Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research, TNO TITLE Scientist IEEE MEMBER GRADE Senior member ALMA MATER University of Aveiro, in Portugal Those invisible RF signals are only part of what earned the IEEE senior member her global recognition. Inácio recently received the IEEE–Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Young Professional Award for “leadership in IEEE Young Professionals, fostering innovation and inclusivity, and pioneering advancements in RF sensor systems, bridging technical excellence with impactful community engagement.” The recognition from IEEE’s honor society reflects a career built along two parallel paths: advancing RF circuit design while helping engineers worldwide build professional communities. “I’ve always liked building things,” Inácio says. “Sometimes that means circuits; sometimes it means helping people connect and grow together.” That blend of technical innovation and global leadership gives her work impact far beyond the laboratory. EE lessons at the kitchen table Inácio grew up in Vales do Rio, a rural village near Covilhã in central Portugal. The region was known for farming and textiles, she says. Many residents worked in the textile industry, including her grandfather, who repaired machinery such as industrial looms. He became her first engineering teacher without ever holding the formal title. Through correspondence courses delivered by mail, he taught himself electrical systems. At home, he explained electricity to his granddaughter while he repaired the household’s appliances and wiring. “He would show me why something broke and how we could fix it,” she recalls. It sparked her curiosity. Her mother was a tailor who later managed other tailors. Her father left his factory job to attend culinary school and now cooks at an elder-care facility. Curiosity was a trait that ran through the family. By high school, Inácio was drawn equally to mathematics and physics and to biology and geology, she says. Encouragement from teachers and an uncle, an engineer, ultimately steered her toward electronics engineering. Conducting research on integrated circuits In 2008 she enrolled in an integrated master’s degree program in electrical and telecommunications engineering at the Universidade de Aveiro in Portugal, a five-year degree that combined undergraduate and graduate studies. An opportunity to study abroad changed her path. In 2012 she moved to the Netherlands to study at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) through a six-month European exchange program with UAveiro. A professor encouraged her to stay on, so she completed her final year of masters in the Netherlands. She focused on techniques to improve the linearization of RF power amplifiers at Thales. The company, based in Hengelo, Netherlands, designs and produces electronics for defense and security. She earned her master’s degree from UAveiro in 2013. After graduating, she joined the integrated circuit design group at the University of Twente, in The Netherlands, conducting collaborative research as part of a nationally funded program on linearization techniques for RF front-end systems. The experience introduced her to international research culture and persuaded her to pursue a career abroad, she says. Engineering the future of wireless Inácio joined TNO in 2018 as a junior scientist and innovator: her first professional industry job. Today she designs integrated RF front-end systems—the circuits that allow devices to transmit and receive wireless signals. The components sit at the core of modern communications, enabling sensor networks, satellite links, and emerging 6G technologies. Her work aims to tackle a central challenge: getting greater performance from smaller chips. “As communication evolves, we need more bandwidth to transfer more data at higher speeds,” she says. “The question is how much complexity you can integrate into one system while keeping it efficient.” Unlike commercial lab environments, which reuse established designs, research projects often start from scratch. Each transmit-receive chain—the signal path that converts digital data to radio waves and back again—is tailored to specific requirements. Her work focuses on improving key circuit characteristics including linearity (ensuring that the signals that go out of the antenna are not distorted) as well as noise reduction (so design blocks can be optimized). Advanced design techniques help devices communicate more reliably while consuming less energy, a critical need for large sensor networks such as the Internet of Things, she says. Artificial intelligence is beginning to influence her field, she says: “AI is already helping us work faster. The real challenge is learning how to use it to make better designs, not just quicker ones.” A parallel vocation with IEEE While her technical career flourished in research labs, an additional journey unfolded through IEEE. Inácio joined the organization in 2009 as a student after discovering UAveiro’s student branch. What began as curiosity evolved into a long-term leadership path. She advanced through roles within Region 8—covering Europe, Africa, and the Middle East—one of the organization’s most culturally diverse regions. She was the student branch’s vice chair, and the region’s student representative for more than 22,000 IEEE members. She also served as the Young Professionals Affinity Group chair for the IEEE Benelux Section, which encompasses Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Currently, she serves as the immediate past chair of the Region 8 Young Professionals Committee, and vice chair and IEEE Member and Geographical Activities representative on the IEEE Young Professionals Committee. In those roles, she represents close to 135,000 IEEE members. In addition, she is an active member of the IEEE Microwave Theory and Technology Society, currently serving as its Young Professionals liaison. Her involvement with IEEE has boosted her professional confidence, she says. “IEEE didn’t directly give me promotions at my day job, but it gave me leadership skills, networking opportunities, and the ability to work with people from everywhere,” she says. Those experiences now shape her collaborations at TNO, where international teamwork is essential. The IEEE-HKN Outstanding Young Professional Award recognizes that combination of technical excellence and community impact, she says. Looking back, Inácio sees a clear thread connecting her childhood curiosity, her international career, and her IEEE leadership: Engineering, she says, is ultimately about people as much as it is about technology.
For nine months in 2024 and 2025, I had an additional duty — monitoring an inbox that connected potential direct commission candidates with the Army’s individual branches. I served on the Army Reserve’s senior leadership team, helping to stand up a brokerage between mid-career professionals and the decentralized branch pipelines that controlled direct commission slots.During that time, I personally reviewed over 300 inquiries from accomplished professionals — data scientists, logistics engineers, cyber specialists, and strategic communicators — all of whom wanted to serve their country in uniform. The experience taught me two main lessons. First, people either regret not serving The post What 300 Emails Say About Americans and the Army’s Direct Commission Program appeared first on War on the Rocks.
Scientists shared transcripts with The Times in which chatbots described how to assemble deadly pathogens and unleash them in public spaces.
This article is brought to you by DAIMON Robotics. This April, Hong Kong-based DAIMON Robotics has released Daimon-Infinity, which it describes as the largest omni-modal robotic dataset for physical AI, featuring high resolution tactile sensing and spanning a wide range of tasks from folding laundry at home to manufacturing on factory assembly lines. The project is supported by collaborative efforts of partners across China and the globe, including Google DeepMind, Northwestern University, and the National University of Singapore. The move signals a key strategic initiative for DAIMON, a two-and-a-half-year-old company known for its advanced tactile sensor hardware, most notably a monochromatic, vision-based tactile sensor that packs over 110,000 effective sensing units into a fingertip-sized module. Drawing on its high-resolution tactile sensing technology and a distributed out-of-lab collection network capable of generating millions of hours of data annually, DAIMON is building large-scale robot manipulation datasets that include vast amounts of tactile sensing data. To accelerate the real-world deployment of embodied AI, the company has also open-sourced 10,000 hours of its data. Prof. Michael Yu Wang, co-founder and chief scientist at DAIMON Robotics, has pioneered Vision-Tactile-Language-Action (VTLA) architecture, elevating the tactile to a modality on par with vision.DAIMON Robotics Behind the strategy is Prof. Michael Yu Wang, DAIMON’s co-founder and chief scientist. Prof. Wang earned his PhD at Carnegie Mellon — studying manipulation under Matt Mason — and went on to found the Robotics Institute at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. An IEEE Fellow and former Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, he has spent roughly four decades in the field. His objective is to address the missing “insensitivity” of robot manipulation, which practically relies on the dominant Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model. He and his team have pioneered Vision-Tactile-Language-Action (VTLA) architecture, elevating the tactile to a modality on par with vision. We spoke with Prof. Wang about how tactile feedback aims to change dexterous manipulation, how the dataset initiative is foreseen to improve our understanding of robotic hands in natural environments, and where — from hotels to convenience stores in China — he sees touch-enabled robots making their first real-world inroads. Daimon-Infinity is the world’s largest omni-modal dataset for Physical AI, featuring million-hour scale multimodal data, ultra-high-res tactile feedback, data from 80+ real scenarios and 2,000+ human skills, and more.DAIMON Robotics The Dataset Initiative This month, DAIMON Robotics released the largest and most comprehensive robotic manipulation dataset with multiple leading academic institutions and enterprises. Why releasing the dataset now, rather than continuing to focus on product development? What impact will this have on the embodied intelligence industry? DAIMON Robotics has been around for almost two and a half years. We have been committed to developing high-resolution, multimodal tactile sensing devices to perceive the interaction between a robot’s hand (particularly its fingertips) and objects. Our devices have become quite robust. They are now accepted and used by a large segment of users, including academic and research institutes as well as leading humanoid robotics companies. As embodied AI continues to advance, the critical role of data has been clearer. Data scarcity remains a primary bottleneck in robot learning, particularly the lack of physical interaction data, which is essential for robots to operate effectively in the real world. Consequently, data quality, reliability, and cost have become major concerns in both research and commercial development. This is exactly where DAIMON excels. Our vision-based tactile technology captures high-quality, multimodal tactile data. Beyond basic contact forces, it records deformation, slip and friction, material properties and surface textures — enabling a comprehensive reconstruction of physical interactions. Building on our expertise in multimodal fusion, we have developed a robust data processing pipeline that seamlessly integrates tactile feedback with vision, motion trajectories, and natural language, transforming raw inputs into training-ready dataset for machine learning models. Recognizing the industry-wide data gap, we view large-scale data collection not only as our unique competitive advantage, but as a responsibility to the broader community. By building and open-sourcing the dataset, we aim to provide the high-quality “fuel” needed to power embodied AI, ultimately accelerating the real-world deployment of general-purpose robotic foundation models. The robotics industry is highly competitive, and many teams have chosen to focus on data. DAIMON is releasing a large and highly comprehensive cross-embodiment, vision-based tactile multimodal robotic manipulation dataset. How were you able to achieve this? We have a dedicated in-house team focused on expanding our capabilities, including building hardware devices and developing our own large-scale model. Although we are a relatively small company, our core tactile sensing technology and innovative data collection paradigm enable us to build large-scale dataset. Our approach is to broaden our offering. We have built the world’s largest distributed out-of-lab data collection network. Rather than relying on centralized data factories, this lightweight and scalable system allows data to be gathered across diverse real-world environments, enabling us to generate millions of hours of data per year. “To drive the advancement of the entire embodied AI field, we have open-sourced 10,000 hours of the dataset for the broader community.” —Prof. Michael Yu Wang, DAIMON Robotics This dataset is being jointly developed with several institutions worldwide. What roles did they play in its development, and how will the dataset benefit their research and products? Besides China based teams, our partners include leading research groups from universities, such as Northwestern University and the National University of Singapore, as well as top global enterprises like Google DeepMind and China Mobile. Their decision to partner with DAIMON is a strong testament to the value of our tactile-rich dataset. Among the companies involved there are some that have already built their own models but are now incorporating tactile information. By deploying our data collection devices across research, manufacturing and other real-world scenarios, they help us to gather highly practical, application-driven data. In turn, our partners leverage the data to train models tailored to their specific use cases. Furthermore, to drive the advancement of the entire embodied AI field, we have open-sourced 10,000 hours of the dataset for the broader community. Equipped with Daimon’s visuotactile sensor, the gripper delicately senses contact and precisely controls force to pick up a fragile eggshell.Daimon Robotics From VLA to VTLA: Why Tactile Sensing Changes the Equation The mainstream paradigm in robotics is currently the Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model, but your team has proposed a Vision-Tactile-Language-Action (VTLA) model. Why is it necessary to incorporate tactile sensing? What does it enable robots to achieve, and which tasks are likely to fail without tactile feedback? Over these years of working to make generalist robots capable of performing manipulation tasks, especially dexterous manipulation — not just power grasping or holding an object, but manipulating objects and using tools to impart forces and motion onto parts — we see these robots being used in household as well as industrial assembly settings. It is well established that tactile information is essential for providing feedback about contact states so that robots can guide their hands and fingers to perform reliable manipulation. Without tactile sensing, robots are severely limited. They struggle to locate objects in dark environments, and without slip detection, they can easily drop fragile items like glass. Furthermore, the inability to precisely control force often leads to failed manipulation tasks or, in severe cases, physical damage. Naturally, the VLA approach needs to be enhanced to incorporate tactile information. We expanded the VLA framework to incorporate tactile data, creating the VTLA model. An additional benefit of our tactile sensor is that it is vision-based: We capture visual images of the deformation on the fingertip surface. We capture multiple images in a time sequence that encodes contact information, from which we can infer forces and other contact states. This aligns well with the visual framework that VLA is based upon. Having tactile information in a visual image format makes it naturally suitable for integration into the VLA framework, transforming it into a VTLA system. That is the key advantage: Vision-based tactile sensors provide very high resolution at the pixel level, and this data can be incorporated into the framework, whether it is an end-to-end model or another type of architecture. DAIMON has been known for its vision-based tactile sensors that can pack over 110,000 effective sensing units.DAIMON Robotics The Technology: Monochromatic Vision-based Tactile Sensing You and your team have spent many years deeply engaged in vision-based tactile sensing and have developed the world’s first monochromatic vision-based tactile sensing technology. Why did you choose this technical path? Once we started investigating tactile sensors, we understood our needs. We wanted sensors that closely mimic what we have under our fingertip skin. Physiological studies have well documented the capabilities humans have at their fingertips — knowing what we touch, what kind of material it is, how forces are distributed, and whether it is moving into the right position as our brain controls our hands. We knew that replicating these capabilities on a robot hand’s fingertips would help considerably. When we surveyed existing technologies, we found many types, including vision-based tactile sensors with tri-color optics and other simpler designs. We decided to integrate the best of these into an engineering-robust solution that works well without being overly complicated, keeping cost, reliability, and sensitivity within a satisfactory range, thus ultimately developing a monochromatic vision-based tactile sensing technique. This is fundamentally an engineering approach rather than a purely scientific one, since a great deal of foundational research already existed. With the growing realization of the necessity of tactile data, all of this will advance hand in hand. DAIMON vision-based tactile sensor captures high-quality, multimodal tactile data.DAIMON Robotics Last year, DAIMON launched a multi-dimensional, high-resolution, high-frequency vision-based tactile sensor. Compared with traditional tactile sensors, where does its core advantage lie? Which industries could it potentially transform? The key features of our sensors are the density of distributed force measurement and the deformation we can capture over the area of a fingertip. I believe we have the highest density in terms of sensing units. That is one very important metric. The other is dynamics: the frequency and bandwidth — how quickly we can detect force changes, transmit signals, and process them in real time. Other important aspects are largely engineering-related, such as reliability, drift, durability of the soft surface, and resistance to interference from magnetic, optical, or environmental factors. A growing number of researchers and companies are recognizing the importance of tactile sensing and adopting our technology. I believe the advances in tactile sensing will elevate the entire community and industry to a higher level. One of our potential customers is deploying humanoid robots in a small convenience store, with densely packed shelves where shelf space is at a premium. The robot needs to reach into very tight spaces — tighter than books on a shelf — to pick out an object. Current two-jaw parallel grippers cannot fit into most of these spaces. Observing how humans pick up objects, you clearly need at least three slim fingers to touch and roll the object toward you and secure it. Thus, we are starting to see very specific needs where tactile sensing capabilities are essential. From Academia to Startup After 40 years in academia — founding the HKUST Robotics Institute, earning prestigious honors including IEEE Fellow, and serving as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE TASE — what motivated you to found DAIMON Robotics? I have come a long way. I started learning robotics during my PhD at Carnegie Mellon, where there were truly remarkable groups working on locomotion under Marc Raibert, who founded Boston Dynamics, and on manipulation under my advisor, Matt Mason, a leader in the field. We have been working on dexterous manipulation, not only at Carnegie Mellon, but globally for many years. However, progress has been limited for a long time, especially in building dexterous hands and making them work. Only recently have locomotion robots truly taken off, and only in the last few years have we begun to see major advancements in robot hands. There is clearly room for advancing manipulation capabilities, which would enable robots to do work like humans. While at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, I saw increasingly greater people entering this area in the form of students and postdoctoral researchers. We wanted to jumpstart our effort by leveraging the available capital and talent resources. Fortunately, one of my postdocs, Dr. Duan Jianghua, has a strong sense for commercial opportunities. Recognizing the rapid growth of robotics market and the unique value that our vision-based tactile sensing technology could bring, together we started DAIMON Robotics, and it has progressed well. The community has grown tremendously in China, Japan, Korea, the U.S., and Europe. Robots equipped with DAIMON technology have been deployed in factory settings. The company aims to enable robots to achieve “embodied intelligence” and close the gap between what they can see and what they can feel.DAIMON Robotics Business Model and Commercial Strategy What is DAIMON’s current business model and strategic focus? What role does the dataset release play in your commercial strategy? We started as a device company focused on making highly capable tactile sensors, especially for robot hands. But as technology and business developed, everyone realized it is not just about one component, rather the entire technology chain: devices, data of adequate quality and quantity, and finally the right framework to build, train, and deploy models on robots in real application environments. Our business strategy is best described as “3D”: Devices, Data, and Deployment. We build devices for data collection, our own ecosystem, and for deploying them in our partners’ potential application domains. This enables the collection of real-world tactile-rich data and complete closed-loop validation. This will become an integral part of the 3D business model. Most startups in this space are following a similar path until eventually some may become more specialized or more tightly integrated with other companies. For now, it is mostly vertical integration. Embodied Skills and the Convergence Moment You’ve introduced the concept of “embodied skills” as essential for humanoid robots to move beyond having just an advanced AI “brain.” What prompted this insight? What new capabilities could embodied skills enable? After the rapid evolution of models and hardware over the past two years, has your definition or roadmap for embodied skills evolved? We have come a long way now see a convergence point where electrical, electronic, and mechatronic hardware technologies have advanced tremendously in last two decades. Robots are now fully electric, do not require hydraulics, because hardware has evolved rapidly. Modern electronics provide tremendous bandwidth with high torques. If we can build intelligence into these systems, we can create truly humanoid robots with the ability to operate in unstructured environments, make decisions, and take actions autonomously. “Our vision is for robots to achieve robust manipulation capabilities and evolve into reliable partners for humans.” —Prof. Michael Yu Wang, DAIMON Robotics AI has arrived at exactly the right time. Enormous resources have been invested in AI development, especially large language models, which are now being generalized into world models that enable physical AI capabilities. We would like to see these manifested in real-world systems. While both AI and core hardware technologies continue to evolve, the focus is much clearer now. For example, human-sized robots are preferred in a home environment. This is an exciting domain with a promise of great societal benefit if we can eventually achieve safe, reliable, and cost-effective robots. The Road to Real-World Deployment Today, many robots can deliver impressive demos, yet there remains a gap before they truly enter real-world applications. What could be a potential trigger for real-world deployment? Which scenarios are most likely to achieve large-scale deployment first? I think the road toward large-scale deployment of generalist robots is still long, but we are starting to see signs of feasibility within specific domains. It is very similar to autonomous vehicles, where we are yet to see full deployment of robo-taxis, while we have already started to find mobile robots and smaller vehicles widely deployed in the hospitality industry. Virtually every major hotel in China now has a delivery robot — no arms, just a vehicle that picks up items from the hotel lobby (e.g., food deliveries). The delivery person just loads the food and selects the room number. It is up to the robot thereafter to navigate and reach the guest’s room, which includes using the elevator, to deliver the food. This is already nearly 100 percent deployed in major Chinese hotels. Hotel and restaurant robots are viewed as a model for deploying humanoid robots in specific domains like overnight drugstores and convenience stores. I expect complete deployment in such settings within a short timeframe, followed by other applications. Overall, we can expect autonomous robots, including humanoids, to progressively penetrate specific sectors, delivering value in each and expanding into others. Ultimately, our vision is for robots to achieve robust manipulation capabilities and evolve into reliable partners for humans. By seamlessly integrating into our homes and daily lives, they will genuinely benefit and serve humanity. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.