That sounds like a machine's job
Princeton
Joined March 2010
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TTTA retweeted
Ever wondered what it’s like to learn robot autonomy @Stanford? Now you can.
Today, we’re opening up the robot autonomy teaching materials that my collaborators and I have been developing over the past several years—for anyone, anywhere, completely free.
At the heart of this effort is Principles of Robot Autonomy (PoRA), a textbook inspired by the Stanford robot autonomy course series I’ve been teaching since 2017.
Robot autonomy has evolved from a research discipline into a technology deployed in the real world. Building capable autonomous systems requires more than understanding individual algorithms: it requires understanding how perception, state estimation, planning, control, and learning work together in a complete autonomy stack.
That’s what we set out to teach with PoRA: bringing classical robotics and modern AI together in one coherent framework, grounded in both theory and practice.
Coming soon in print from Cambridge University Press, Principles of Robot Autonomy is also freely available online and comes with a comprehensive collection of open educational resources:
📖 Textbook, arxiv.org/abs/2608.03496 — Foundations of robot autonomy, from classical methods to modern AI-based approaches.
🎥 Video lectures, porabook.com/lectures/ Lectures from my Stanford courses on robot autonomy and on optimal and learning-based control.
💻 Interactive exercises, porabook.com/exercises/ — Hands-on Python implementations and Jupyter notebooks.
📝 Teaching materials, porabook.com/instructors/ — Lecture slides and resources for instructors.
🌐 Explore all PoRA resources, porabook.com/ — Including Ask the Book, an AI study assistant integrated throughout the textbook to answer questions, explain derivations, and connect ideas across chapters.
📣 Read the Stanford announcement: news.stanford.edu/stories/20…
Our goal is simple: to make high-quality education in robot autonomy accessible to students, researchers, engineers, educators, and anyone curious about how autonomous robotic systems work.
I believe that sharing knowledge is fundamental to the mission of a university. Autonomous robotics—and Physical AI more broadly—are among the defining technological frontiers of our time. We want to help more people understand these technologies, build with them, and advance the field.
A huge thank you to my co-authors, @DanieleGammelli, Joseph Lorenzetti, @katielulula, and @GioeleZardini, and to everyone who helped bring this project to life.
Explore the resources, use them in your own learning or teaching, and please share them with anyone who might find them useful!
#Robotics #PhysicalAI #ArtificialIntelligence #AutonomousSystems #Education
@Stanford @StanfordEng @StanfordAILab @StanfordHAI
Good soil quantification effort, but I feel the grading system (Min(x_1, x_2,...x_i)) is a bit lacking. Certainly leaves room for another paper to find the soil with the lowest remediation "cost," using the xESM to approximate cost
Where is the best soil for growing future crops on Mars?
New work suggests it's "found around the planet’s middle latitudes, including around Tharsis, central Arabia Terra, and Elysium Planitia. However, this soil type is only found on 0.14 percent of the planet’s surface."
@TheMarsSociety this may interest you.
📸 Irving, McBratney, et al. University of Sydney
Feeling extra thankful for my ancestor(s) who took up arms to free themselves from that island
After working directly with on-site staff in India and seeing their aggressive resistance to anything resembling good security practices, I would expect any hot war involving India to begin with the digital equivalent of complete nuclear annihilation.
About 14 years ago. We had applied for a tender to run a full penetration test on an Indian bank. Black box. 120 IPs. External.
I don’t remember how much we quoted. But the winning bid was INR 25000 ($250 in today’s terms)
eMudhra and its “independent security verification” and “stringent audit requirements” are likely a result of similar procurement practices.
Unless they went to an Ivy League, they're not champagne socialists, they're just sparkling reds
Hey, AI give me your best "Unless it is from X, its just sparkling Y" style joke":
GPT-6 Pro: "Unless it comes from the Stockholm region of Sweden, it’s just sparkling employee engagement."
Gemini 4 Argon High: "Unless it comes from the 3:00 AM region of staring at the ceiling, it’s not an existential crisis—it’s just sparkling anxiety."
Opus 5.5 Max: "It’s only cognition if it comes from the Cognac region of France. Otherwise it’s just sparkling autocomplete."
TTTA retweeted
This is the most realistic imagining of future life on Mars that I've done yet. Complete with heavy windows and overhang for cosmic ray protection.
And even with all that, it can still be a beautiful place.
TTTA retweeted
Our MAP scores just came back and they're insane. Still waiting on all the tests to come through for us to post aggregated data, but some highlights:
A student scoring in the 1st percentile when he started with us 2 months ago now is in the 34th percentile.
His brother went from the 4th percentile to the 43rd. Sometimes kids need the right environment to actually be able to learn.
A kid who loves engineering but was never that into math went from the 50th percentile to the 93rd. Once we were able to meet him where he was at and get him excited, he was able to fly.
A high-performing student obsessed with anime went from the 86th to the 98th.
A kid -- who we just discovered had undiagnosed dyslexia until one of our tutors was able to take the time to actually get to know her -- went from the 24th to the 43rd.
An ADHD, bouncing-off-the-walls student rose from the 52nd to the 93rd.
All of these scores happened in the span of a few months. It's actually absurd what AI technology + passionate teachers can do to help a kid reach their potential.
I am SO pumped and hell yeah I'll use this as an excuse to promote our school: Come join Recess, whether it's for the full online school experience or just to get tutored in math after school. We're changing the world, come be a part of it.
This sounds nice in theory for Policy Twitter, but on STEM Twitter I don't know what to do with someone whose only meaningful contribution to physics is the inertia of their ignorance
TTTA retweeted
Today, Pioneer Labs is announcing our first step towards terraforming Mars. 🚀🌼
With equipment that fits in just a single rocket launch, we can convert Martian dirt, water, and air into enough building materials to construct a small city on Mars.
To do it, we made the first microbe for Mars. We found the best microbe on Earth and used evolution to teach it how to source all of its nutrients directly from Martian materials.
The first astronauts will be greeted with safe shelter already filled with water, oxygen, and rocket fuel for the return journey.
This is the first step toward using biology to make Mars a friendly place for life. It lets us live off the land and helps us build the next great frontier.
It's the first of five organisms we need to green Mars ⬇️
TTTA retweeted
Breaking: @Pioneer__Labs has engineered a microbe able to live on Mars, consuming solely nutrients found on the planet to create building materials.
I interviewed @erika_alden_d, the CEO, to learn how they did it and what might come next. Much of the interview was about bottlenecks to growing life on Mars; the planet has tons of water, but only in the form of ice. (If you melted all that ice, it would create an ocean 100 feet deep across the entire planet!)
Similarly, we talked about the dirt. Martian regolith has salts, heavy metals, and perchlorates that are toxic to many organisms. Some microbes on Earth are able to break down these toxins, though, so Pioneer is engineering them to make them better at eating those toxins while adding nutrients back into the soil. This could possibly help support plant life in the future.
Watch the full episode and subscribe to @AsimovPress for more.
0:00 A first microbe engineered for Mars
5:03 Simulating Martian chemistry
8:27 The five "pioneer species"
17:20 Water, warming, and nitrogen
26:39 Radiation, growth rates, and poor measurements
35:49 Starship
41:05 Why create a second biosphere?
Thank you, @sendcutsend ! Was struggling to find OEM parts (and they were crap anyways), broke out a ruler and sent out an order. Parts came quickly, dishwasher is strapped down, wife is impressed.
Found out the funny way that hemp is added to many bird seed mixes when a mouse stashed his winter food in my bag of potting mix
TTTA retweeted
Bad Apple but it's playing on a fly's brain
For the first time, scientists have mapped the complete brain and central nervous system of an adult male fruit fly — a key model organism in science. 🪰
Working alongside HHMI Janelia Research Campus and the scientific community, @GoogleResearch scientists and researchers used AI to combine millions of 2D images into 3D neural shapes, reconstructing a record-breaking 166,000+ neurons. This foundational map of the adult male fruit fly brain can help accelerate our understanding of the brain, and is a major milestone in neuroscience.
ALT Vibrant 3D digital reconstruction of a fruit fly brain against a white background, displaying a dense, intricate network of multicolored neural fibers and cell bodies in shades of blue, cyan, orange, and purple.
ALT A complex 3D visualization of a fruit fly brain, featuring a dense, symmetrical network of thousands of tiny, multicolored neurons and fine, interconnected fibers in shades of blue, magenta, orange, and green against a solid white background.
Another one today. Job location is so far away that I might lose money on transportation alone, and pay is ~half the median pay for my job title, not to mention wildly outside of my career.
I told them to ask for a refund on their automated outreach system.
