Technology
Humanoid robots learn to fall well
Smart marketers at Boston Dynamics produced two major robotics news series last week. The larger of them was, after all, an announcement of the electrical Atlas. As I write this, the sub-40-second video is steadily approaching five million views. The day before, the corporate touched the hearts of the community by announcing that the unique Hydraulic Atlas can be put out to pasture ten years after its launch.
An accompanying video celebrated the older Atlas’ journey from a DARPA research project to an impressively agile bipedal “bot.” But after a minute, the tone changes. Ultimately, Farewell to Atlas is each a celebration and a bummer. It’s a pleasant reminder that each time a robot captures a landing on video, there are dozens of slips, falls and snorts.
I actually have long advocated for this sort of transparency. This is something I would really like to see more of on the planet of robotics. Just showing a highlight reel hurts the hassle that went into making those shots. In many cases, we’re talking about years of trial and error that led to robots looking good on camera. By sharing only positive results, you set unrealistic expectations. Bipedal robots fall over. At least on this respect they’re the identical as us. As agility put it down recently“Everyone falls sometimes. How we rise up defines us.” I’d go a step further and add that learning to fall well is equally necessary.
The company’s newly appointed CTO, Pras Velagapudi, recently told me that seeing robots get to work at this stage is definitely a great thing. “When a robot is actually in the world doing real things, unexpected things will happen,” he notes. “You’re going to see some falls, but that’s part of learning to run for a really long time in real-world conditions. This is to be expected and is a sign that you are not staging anything.”
A fast review of Harvard’s policies for a fall without injury reflects what we intuitively understand concerning the fall as humans:
- Protect your head
- Use your weight to guide your fall
- bend your knees
- Avoid taking other individuals with you
As for robots, yes Excerpt from last yr’s IEEE Spectrum is an amazing place to start.
“We’re not afraid of failure — we don’t treat robots as if they’re going to break down all the time,” Boston Dynamics chief technology officer Aaron Saunders said last yr. “Our robot falls a lot, and one of the things we decided a long time ago is that we need to build robots that can fall without breaking. If you can go through the cycle of bringing the robot to failure, investigating the failure, and repairing it, you can make progress to the point where the robot does not fall. But if you build a machine, control system, or culture that never falls, you will never learn what you need to learn to keep the robot from falling. We celebrate falls, even those that break the robot.”
The topic of decline also got here up after I spoke with Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Playter ahead of the launch of the electrical Atlas. It’s value noting that the short video starts with the robot in a prone position. The way the robot’s legs arch is kind of novel, because it allows the system to get up from a totally flat position. At first glance, you would possibly get the impression that the corporate is showing off through the use of this flashy movement simply to showcase its extremely durable, custom-made actuators.
“It will be a very practical application,” Playter told me. “Robots will fall. You higher have the option to stand up from a lying position. He adds that the power to stand up from a lying position may also be useful for charging.
Much of Boston Dynamics’ knowledge about falls comes from Spot. While the four-legged chassis is usually more stable (as evidenced by many years of trying to kick robots in movies and failing), Spot Robots are simply lots more workable in real-world conditions.
“The Spot travels approximately 70,000 km per year around production halls and conducts approximately 100,000 inspections per month,” adds Playter. “Eventually they fall. You have to be able to get up. We hope you slow down your rate of descent – we do. I think we fall once every 100-200 km. The rate of decline is really slow, but it does happen.”
Playter adds that the corporate has a protracted history of being “harsh” with its robots. “They are falling and so they have to survive. Fingers cannot fall off.
Watching the Atlas videos above, it’s hard not to transfer a little bit of human empathy to the “bot”. It really does feel prefer it’s falling like a human, pulling its limbs as close to its body as possible to protect them from further injury.
When Agility added arms to Digit in 2019, they discussed the role they played in falls. “For us, arms are at once a tool for navigating the world – think of getting up after a fall, swinging your arms for balance, or opening doors – while also being useful for manipulating or moving objects” – co-founder Jonathan Hurst then noticed.
I talked a bit about this with Agility at Modex earlier this yr. A video circulated on social media of the Digit robot collapsing on the convention floor the yr before. “With a 99% success rate in approximately 20 hours of live demonstration, Digit still had a few downs in ProMat,” Agility noted on the time. “We have no evidence, but we believe our sales team arranged this so they could talk about Digit’s quick-change limbs and durability.”
As with the Atlas video, the corporate told me that a fetal-like position is helpful for shielding the robot’s legs and arms.
The company uses reinforcement learning to help fallen robots right themselves. Agility disabled Digit’s obstacle avoidance for the video above to force a fall. In the video, the robot uses its arms to break its fall as much as possible. He then uses the strengthening knowledge he has gained to return to a well-recognized position from which he can stand again by performing an automatic push-up.
One of the foremost benefits of humanoid robots is their ability to integrate into existing workflows – these factories and warehouses are called “brownfields”, meaning they weren’t custom-built with automation in mind. In many existing factory automation cases, errors mean the system effectively shuts down until human intervention occurs.
“Rescuing a humanoid robot won’t be easy,” Playter says, noting that these systems are heavy and may be difficult to arrange manually. “How are you going to do that if he can’t get off the ground?”
If these systems are truly to provide uninterrupted automation, they are going to have to fail and rise quickly.
“Every time Digit goes down, we learn something new,” adds Velagapudi. “When it comes to two-legged robotics, falling is a great teacher.”
Technology
Wiz acquires Dazz for $450 million to expand cybersecurity platform
Wizardone of the talked about names within the cybersecurity world, is making a major acquisition to expand its reach of cloud security products, especially amongst developers. This is buying Dazzlespecialist in solving security problems and risk management. Sources say the deal is valued at $450 million, which incorporates money and stock.
This is a leap within the startup’s latest round of funding. In July, we reported that Dazz had raised $50 million at a post-money valuation of just below $400 million.
Remediation and posture management – two areas of focus for Dazz – are key services within the cybersecurity market that Wiz hasn’t sorted in addition to it wanted.
“Dazz is a leader in this market, with the best talent and the best customers, which fits perfectly into the company culture,” Assaf Rappaport, CEO of Wiz, said in an interview.
Remediation, which refers to helping you understand and resolve vulnerabilities, shapes how an enterprise actually handles the various vulnerability alerts it could receive from the network. Posture management is a more preventive product: it allows a company to higher understand the scale, shape and performance of its network from a perspective, allowing it to construct higher security services around it.
Dazz will proceed to operate as a separate entity while it’s integrated into the larger Wiz stack. Wiz has made a reputation for itself as a “one-stop shop,” and Rappaport said the integrated offering will proceed to be a core a part of it.
He believes this contrasts with what number of other SaaS corporations are built. In the safety industry, there are, Rappaport said, “a lot of Frankenstein mashups where companies prioritize revenue over building a single technology stack that actually works as a platform.” It could be assumed that integration is much more necessary in cybersecurity than in other areas of enterprise IT.
Wiz and Dazz already had an in depth relationship before this deal. Merat Bahat — the CEO who co-founded Dazz with Tomer Schwartz and Yuval Ofir (CTO and VP of R&D, respectively) — worked closely with Assaf Rappaport at Microsoft, which acquired his previous startup Adallom.
After Rappaport left to found Wiz together with his former Adallom co-founders, CTO Ami Luttwak, VP of Product Yinon Costica and VP of R&D Roy Reznik, Bahat was one in all the primary investors. Similarly, when Bahat founded Dazz, Assaf was a small investor in it.
The connection goes deeper than work colleagues. Bahat and Rappaport are also close friends, and she or he was the second family of Mickey, Rappaport’s beloved dog, referred to as Chief Dog Officer Wiz (together with LinkedIn profile). Once the deal was done, the 2 faced two very sad events: each Bahat and Mika’s mother died.
“We hope for a new chapter of positivity,” Bahat said. The cycle of life does indeed proceed.
Rumors of this takeover began to appear earlier this month; Rappaport confirmed that they then began talking seriously.
But that is not the one M&A conversation Wiz has gotten involved in. Earlier this 12 months, Google tried to buy Wiz itself for $23 billion to construct a major cybersecurity business. Wiz walked away from the deal, which might have been the biggest in Google’s history, partly because Rappaport believed Wiz could turn into a fair larger company by itself terms. And that is what this agreement goals to do.
This acquisition is a test for Wiz, which earlier this 12 months filled its coffers with $1 billion solely for M&A purposes (it has raised almost $2 billion in total, and we hear the subsequent round will close in just a few weeks). . Other offers included purchasing Gem security for $350 million, but Dazz is its largest acquisition ever.
More mergers and acquisitions could also be coming. “We believe next year will be an acquisition year for us,” Rappaport said.
In an interview with TC, Luttwak said that one in all Wiz’s priorities now’s to create more tools for developers that have in mind what they need to do their jobs.
Enterprises have made significant investments in cloud services to speed up operations and make their IT more agile, but this shift has include a significantly modified security profile for these organizations: network and data architectures are more complex and attack surfaces are larger, creating opportunities for malicious hackers to find ways to to hack into these systems. Artificial intelligence makes all of this far more difficult when it comes to malicious attackers. (It’s also a chance: the brand new generation of tools for our defense relies on artificial intelligence.)
Wiz’s unique selling point is its all-in-one approach. Drawing data from AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and other cloud environments, Wiz scans applications, data and network processes for security risk aspects and provides its users with a series of detailed views to understand where these threats occur, offering over a dozen products covering the areas, corresponding to code security, container environment security, and provide chain security, in addition to quite a few partner integrations for those working with other vendors (or to enable features that Wiz doesn’t offer directly).
Indeed, Wiz offered some extent of repair to help prioritize and fix problems, but as Luttwak said, the Dazz product is solely higher.
“We now have a platform that actually provides a 360-degree view of risk across infrastructure and applications,” he said. “Dazz is a leader in attack surface management, the ability to collect vulnerability signals from the application layer across the entire stack and build the most incredible context that allows you to trace the situation back to engineers to help with remediation.”
For Dazz’s part, once I interviewed Bahat in July 2024, when Dazz raised $50 million at a $350 million valuation, she extolled the virtues of constructing strong solutions and this week said the third quarter was “amazing.”
“But market dynamics are what trigger these types of transactions,” she said. She confirmed that Dazz had also received takeover offers from other corporations. “If you think about the customers and joint customers that we have with Wiz, it makes sense for them to have it on one platform.”
And a few of Dazz’s competitors are still going it alone: Cyera, like Dazz, an authority in attack surface management, just yesterday announced a rise of $300 million at a valuation of $5 billion (which confirms our information). But what’s going to he do with this money? Make acquisitions, after all.
Wiz says it currently has annual recurring revenue of $500 million (it has a goal of $1 billion ARR next 12 months) and has greater than 45% of its Fortune 100 customers. Dazz said ARR is within the tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars and currently growing 500% on a customer base of roughly 100 organizations.
Technology
Department of Justice: Google must sell Chrome to end its monopoly
The U.S. Department of Justice argued Wednesday that Google should sell its Chrome browser as part of a countermeasure to break the corporate’s illegal monopoly on online search, according to a filing with the Justice Department. United States District Court for the District of Columbia. If the answer proposed by the Department of Justice is approved, Google won’t have the option to re-enter the search marketplace for five years.
Ultimately, it’ll be District Court Judge Amit Mehta who will determine what the ultimate punishment for Google might be. This decision could fundamentally change one of the most important firms on the planet and alter the structure of the Internet as we understand it. This phase of the method is anticipated to begin sometime in 2025.
In August, Judge Mehta ruled that Google constituted an illegal monopoly since it abused its power within the search industry. The judge also questioned Google’s control over various web gateways and the corporate’s payments to third parties to maintain its status because the default search engine.
The Department of Justice’s latest filing says Google’s ownership of Android and Chrome, that are key distribution channels for its search business, poses a “significant challenge” to remediation to ensure a competitive search market.
The Justice Department has proposed other remedies to address the search engine giant’s monopoly, including Google spinning off its Android mobile operating system. The filing indicated that Google and other partners may oppose the spin-off and suggested stringent countermeasures, including ending the use of Android to the detriment of search engine competitors. The Department of Justice has suggested that if Google doesn’t impose restrictions on Android, it must be forced to sell it.
Prosecutors also argued that the corporate must be barred from stepping into exclusionary third-party agreements with browser or phone firms, resembling Google’s agreement with Apple to be the default search engine on all Apple products.
The Justice Department also argued that Google should license its search data, together with ad click data, to competitors.
Additionally, the Department of Justice also set conditions prohibiting Google from re-entering the browser market five years after the spin-off of Chrome. Additionally, it also proposed that after the sale of Chrome, Google mustn’t acquire or own any competing ad text search engine, query-based AI product, or ad technology. Moreover, the document identifies provisions that allow publishers to opt out of Google using their data to train artificial intelligence models.
If the court accepts these measures, Google will face a serious setback as a competitor to OpenAI, Microsoft and Anthropic in AI technology.
Google’s answer
In response, Google said the Department of Justice’s latest filing constitutes a “radical interventionist program” that may harm U.S. residents and the country’s technological prowess on the planet.
“The Department of Justice’s wildly overblown proposal goes far beyond the Court’s decision. “It would destroy the entire range of Google products – even beyond search – that people love and find useful in their everyday lives,” said Google’s president of global affairs and chief legal officer Kent Walker. blog post.
Walker made additional arguments that the proposal would threaten user security and privacy, degrade the standard of the Chrome and Android browsers, and harm services resembling Mozilla Firefox, which depends upon Google’s search engine.
He added that if the proposal is adopted, it could make it tougher for people to access Google search. Moreover, it could hurt the corporate’s prospects within the AI race.
“The Justice Department’s approach would lead to unprecedented government overreach that would harm American consumers, developers and small businesses and threaten America’s global economic and technological leadership at precisely the moment when it is needed most,” he said.
The company is to submit a response to the above request next month.
Wednesday’s filing confirms earlier reports that prosecutors were considering getting Google to spin off Chrome, which controls about 61% of the U.S. browser market. According to to the StatCounter web traffic service.
Technology
Snowflake acquires data management company Datavolo
Cloud giant Snowflake has agreed to take over Datavoloa company managing the data pipeline, for an undisclosed amount.
Snowflake announced the deal on Wednesday after the market bell closed, while reporting its third-quarter 2025 earnings. The purchase has not yet closed and is subject to customary closing conditions, Snowflake noted wa release.
Joseph Witt and Luke Roquet, who met while working together at Hortonworks, founded Datavolo in 2023. Witt was previously a vp at Cloudera, and Roquet was Cloudera’s chief marketing officer and, before that, director of business development at AWS.
Datavolo uses Apache NiFi, an open source data processing project developed by the NSA, to power a platform to automate data flow between disparate enterprise data sources. Data “processors” extract, cleanse, transform and enrich data, including for generative use of artificial intelligence.
With Datavolo having raised $21 million in enterprise capital from investors including Citi Ventures and General Catalyst prior to the acquisition, Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy envisions creating more comprehensive data pipelines for Snowflake customers. For example, he says Datavolo can enable users to interchange single-use data connectors with flexible pipelines that allow them to maneuver data from cloud and on-premises sources to Snowflake’s data cloud.
“By bringing Datavolo to Snowflake, we are increasing the amount of data captured by Snowflake over the lifecycle, providing our customers with both simplicity and cost savings, without sacrificing data extensibility,” Ramaswamy said in a press release. “We are thrilled to have the Datavolo team join Snowflake as we accelerate the best platform for enterprise data – unstructured and structured, batch and streaming – and committed to the success of the open source community.”
Witt says Snowflake will support and help manage the Apache NiFi project after the acquisition closes. “Data engineering at scale can be extremely expensive and complex, and our goal has always been to simplify our customers’ experiences so they can realize value faster,” he added within the press release. “By joining forces with Snowflake, we can deliver the massive scale and radical simplicity of the Snowflake platform to our customers, ultimately unlocking data engineering for more users.”
Thanks partly to artificial intelligence, demand for data management technologies has increased. Fortune’s business insights estimates that the worldwide enterprise data management market could possibly be price $224.87 billion by 2032.
However, data management has been a challenge for enterprises long before the substitute intelligence boom. According to in a 2022 survey by Great Hopetions, a data quality platform, 91% of organizations said data quality issues impact their performance.
Against this backdrop, it isn’t surprising that firms like Datavolo are gaining prominence.
Today was a giant day for Snowflake who reported better-than-expected earnings sent the company’s shares up 19%. In addition to the acquisition of Snowflake, the company announced a multi-year partnership with Anthropic to integrate the startup’s AI models into Snowflake’s Cortex AI, Snowflake Intelligence and Cortex Analyst products.
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