Bible Verses of the Day

13 These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. 14 For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. 15 If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. 16 But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city. [Hebrews 11:13-16 ESV]

What's in this week's issue?

• 🍇 MIT’s soft robotic system is designed to pack groceries

• 🕵️ UPenn News: Duncan Watts and CSSLab's new Media Bias Detector

• ⛅️ Easy Cloud News

• 📰 AI News

• 🧰 AI Tools

MIT’s CSAIL department this week is showcasing RoboGrocery. It combines computer vision with a soft robotic gripper to bag a wide range of items. To test the system, researchers placed 10 objects unknown to the robot on a grocery conveyer belt.

The products ranged from delicate items like grapes, bread, kale, muffins and crackers to far more solid ones like soup cans, meal boxes and ice cream containers. The vision system kicks in first, detecting the objects before determining their size and orientation on the belt.

As the grasper touches the grapes, pressure sensors in the fingers determine that they are, in fact, delicate and therefore should not go at the bottom of the bag — something many of us no doubt learned the hard way. Next, it notes that the soup can is a more rigid structure and sticks it in the bottom of the bag.

The 2024 U.S. presidential debates kicked off June 27, with President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump sharing the stage for the first time in four years.

Duncan Watts, a computational social scientist from the University of Pennsylvania, considers this an ideal moment to test a tool his lab has been developing during the last six months: the Media Bias Detector.

“The debates offer a real-time, high-stakes environment to observe and analyze how media outlets present and potentially skew the same event,” says Watts.

The Media Bias Detector uses artificial intelligence to analyze articles from major news publishers, categorizing them by topic, detecting events, and examining factors like tone, partisan lean, and fact selection.

Easy Cloud News

Listen or read the following transcript as Joel R. Beeke explores the theme of divine guidance in finding a marriage partner. He discusses how God orchestrates relationships through providence and prayer, using the story of Isaac and Rebekah to illustrate how faith and obedience can lead to God-ordained unions.

The following unedited transcript is provided by Beluga AI.

AI News

• 🎹 How to make a song on Suno AI: a step-by-step guide (link)

• 🍁 Light-controlled artificial maple seeds could monitor the environment even in hard-to-reach locations (link)

• 🦺 AI safety and research company Anthropic calls for proposals to evaluate advanced models (link)

• 🖥️ Dappier is building a marketplace for publishers to sell their content to LLM builders (link)

• 🎦 Video editing app Captions releases AI edit feature that automatically adds effects to your video (link)

AI Tools

• 🐋 Beluga: Christian sermon and lecture transcripts, translations and more (link)

• 🦸 Zapier: AI that gives you automation superpowers (link)

• 📬️ Mailbutler: An email extension that adds useful features to your inbox (link)

• 🤖 Motion: Chatbots made easy (link)

• 📽️ Runway: Generate images and videos (link)