Lifeboat Foundation

Engineered living materials promise to aid efforts in human health, energy and environmental remediation. Now they can be built big and customized with less effort.

Bioscientists at Rice University have introduced centimeter-scale, slime-like colonies of engineered bacteria that self-assemble from the bottom up. They can be programmed to soak up contaminants from the environment or to catalyze biological reactions, among many possible applications.

Continue reading “Lab grows macroscale, modular materials from bacteria” »

Following the success of the inaugural competition in 2021, Amazon is officially launching the Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 2. Starting today, university teams across the globe can apply to compete in developing multimodal conversational agents that assist customers in completing tasks requiring multiple steps and decisions. The first-place team will take home a prize of $500,000.

The TaskBot Challenge 2, which will begin in January 2023, addresses one of the hardest problems in conversational AI — to create next-generation conversational AI experiences that delight customers by addressing their changing needs as they complete complex tasks. It builds upon the Alexa Prize’s foundation of providing universities a unique opportunity to test cutting edge machine learning models with actual customers at scale.

The same AI engine that made computers even better at games like chess and Go could also boost new drug discoveries.

Amid the festivities at its fall 2022 GTC conference, Nvidia took the wraps off new robotics-related hardware and services aimed at companies developing and testing machines across industries like manufacturing. Isaac Sim, Nvidia’s robotics simulation platform, will soon be available in the cloud, the company said. And Nvidia’s lineup of system-on-modules is expanding with Jetson Orin Nano, a system designed for low-powered robots — plus a new platform called IGX.

Isaac Sim, which launched in open beta last June, allows designers to simulate robots interacting with mockups of the real world (think digital re-creations of warehouses and factory floors). Users can generate datasets from simulated sensors to train the models on real-world robots, leveraging synthetic data from batches of parallel, unique simulations to improve the model’s performance.

It’s not just marketing bluster, necessarily. Some research suggests that synthetic data has the potential to address many of the development challenges plaguing companies attempting to operationalize AI. MIT researchers recently found a way to classify images using synthetic data, and nearly every major autonomous vehicle company uses simulation data to supplement the real-world data they collect from cars on the road.

Chipmaker Nvidia launches a new system for autonomous driving. The big tech in the gaming chip and AI market has unveiled Drive Thor, one chip to rule all software-defined vehicles.

Using artificial intelligence and editing software, photographer Alper Yesiltas has resurrected stars who died when they were young.

The Turkey-based photographer, who created the portraits for a project titled ‘As If Nothing Happened,’ said ‘’With the development of AI technology, I’ve been excited for a while, thinking that anything imaginable can be shown in reality.’’

Sharing the haunting and realistic images on his Instagram handle, Yesiltas said ‘’When I started tinkering with technology, I saw what I could do and thought about what would make me the happiest. I wanted to see some of the people I missed again in front of me and that’s how this project emerged.’‘.

In this talk, Kurzweil explores the history and trajectory of advances in computing and Information Technology to project how he believes Artificial Intelligence (AI) may enhance our natural biological intelligence in the future.

Kurzweil spoke at the Nobel Week Dialogue on December 9, 2015 in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Continue reading “Ray Kurzweil: The Future of Intelligence — Nobel Week Dialogue 2015” »

Harvard Medical School scientists and colleagues at Stanford University have developed an artificial intelligence diagnostic tool that can detect diseases on chest X-rays directly from natural-language descriptions contained in accompanying clinical reports.

The step is deemed a major advance in clinical AI design because most current AI models require laborious human annotation of vast reams of data before the labeled data are fed into the model to train it.

Get more HMS news here.

The technology, which has been tested in the lab, could ultimately be used for manufacturing and building in difficult-to-access or dangerous locations such as tall buildings or help with post-disaster relief construction, say the researchers.

3D printing is gaining momentum in the construction industry. Both on-site and in the factory, static and mobile robots print materials for use in construction projects, such as steel and concrete structures.

Continue reading “3D-printed drones work like bees to build and repair structures while flying” »