1. One Thing that Helps
Only around 28,000 blind people in the world have a guide dog. Arrow Electronics is helping Romanian startup .lumen offer the rest an alternative by scaling up production of haptic glasses designed to help blind people navigate easily and reliably.
"Glasses for the Blind" is a headset that applies autonomous car navigation to help blind pedestrians. The wearable features six integrated cameras, on-device artificial intelligence, and a real-time haptic feedback system delivering directional vibrations to guide visually impaired users around obstacles.
Because the AI runs on the device rather than in the cloud, it reacts fast enough to scan the surroundings in real time, spot obstacles and coach users along a safe path. It needs no changes to footpaths or buildings, and a future update called "Take Me" will hook into mapping services so the glasses can guide people to an actual destination. .lumen is already taking orders.
2. One to be Wary of
My son's assignment was recently flagged as AI. He was horrified! He is either an Oscar-worthy actor or was harshly done by. He may now be vindicated as the NSW Education Standards Authority has told schools to stop relying on AI-detection software to decide whether a student has cheated. One academic integrity researcher thinks the sector should ditch it altogether, as it may be causing more harm than good.
The problem is structural. Detectors assume humans and AI write differently, but polished human writing looks a lot like AI output, because that's exactly what the models were trained on. In a test by the Authors Guild, five tools were fed ten articles published before generative AI went mainstream. Two got it right, but one flagged every single article as mostly AI.
Turnitin, an AI detection software company, says its flags are data for a conversation rather than a verdict, but that hasn't stopped people using them as such. In New York, a student hit with a 100% AI score had to take Adelphi University to court to get the finding annulled and wiped from his record. And Turnitin's "less than 1%" false positive rate isn't the comfort it sounds like. Academic integrity expert Phillip Dawson estimated that even 0.7% would wrongly flag more than 100,000 assessments a year in Australian higher education alone.
OK my boy, you're off the hook!
3. One to Amaze
A lot of us wish AI would do our laundry instead of doing the fun things like making music and painting. Well, DYNA Robotics has launched DYNA 2.1, a commercial humanoid physical agent.
In a post, they said, "We are releasing Dyna-2.1, the first Physical Agent that achieves reliable super long-horizon whole-body autonomy. It combines our brand-new semi-humanoid hardware with an agentic system built around Dyna-2 to handle ultra-long real-world workflows." Catchy quote!
In plain English, a robot can now fold all your laundry.
DYNA 2.1, a two-armed robot on four steerable wheels, uses a world action model trained on 1 million hours of human and robot data. It loads the washer and dryer, reaches into the back of the drum for the towels, then folds them, sorts them by size and puts them on the shelves. When it makes a mistake, such as dropping a towel or fumbling a grip, it sorts itself out without needing help from a human.
It's already clocking shifts in hotels, laundromats and restaurants. They still need to improve the drop rate, though. I wouldn't want my favorite shirt running through several cycles because it kept ending up on the floor!