Lifeboat Foundation

Farmers have enough worries—between bad weather, rising costs, and shifting market demands—without having to stress about the carbon footprint of their operations. But now a new set of projects by scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), including scientists at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), could make agriculture both more sustainable and more profitable.

The three projects, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), leverage Berkeley Lab’s strengths in artificial intelligence, sensors, and ecological biology. They aim to quantify and reduce the carbon intensity of agriculture, including the farming of biofuel feedstocks such as corn, soy, and sorghum, while also increasing yield.

Crop-based biofuels have the potential to supply up to about 5% of U.S. energy demand, according to the DOE. Two of the new projects are part of the SMARTFARM program of DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). This initiative aspires to make the biofuel supply chain carbon negative—meaning it removes or sequesters more carbon than it emits—which would greatly improve biofuel’s benefits to the broader economy and environment. Scientists also hope that the increased productivity will have the effect of lowering costs and increasing farmers’ income.

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This robotic system is able to autonomously clean up to 90 plates at once!

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!):

Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

Join us for an online webinar on Tuesday, June 30th at 9:30 a.m. ET with MIT faculty member and expert in machine learning, Professor Devavrat Shah.

This webinar is a way to understand the topics covered in the ‘Machine Learning: From Data to Decisions’ online course, ask questions, and get a preview of the content.

This is a 60-minute webinar with Prof. Devavrat Shah to learn more about the upcoming Machine Learning: From Data to Decisions (Online) Program, followed by a Q&A session.

Continue reading “Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: Live Webinar: MIT Professional Education’s Machine Learning: From Data to Decisions. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar” »

When six-foot-four inch Marty first rolled into Stop & Shop, the robot walked into history. Social robot experts say it is among the first instance of a robot deployed in a customer environment, namely supermarkets in the Northeast.

In the span of 72 hours, both IBM and Amazon backed out of the facial recognition business this week.

It’s a chess match on the geopolitical playing board, with AI ethics and data bias in play.

The FBI is concerned that AI is being used to create deepfake videos that are so convincing they cannot be distinguished from reality.

The alarm was sounded by an FBI executive at a WSJ Pro Cybersecurity Symposium held recently in San Diego. “What we’re concerned with is that, in the digital world we live in now, people will find ways to weaponize deep-learning systems,” stated Chris Piehota, executive assistant director of the FBI’s science and technology division, in an account in WSJPro.

The technology behind deepfakes and other disinformation tactics are enhanced by AI. The FBI is concerned natural security could be compromised by fraudulent videos created to mimic public figures. “As the AI continues to improve and evolve, we’re going to get to a point where there’s no discernible difference between an AI-generated video and an actual video,” Piehota stated.

New types of antibiotics are being developed using an AI machine-learning approach that scans a pool of more than 100 million molecules, including one that works against strains of bacteria previously considered untreatable, according to a recent account in Nature.

Software developers are using AI to help write and review code, detect bugs, test software and optimize development projects. This assistance is helping companies to deploy new software more efficiently, and to allow a new generation of developers to learn to code more easily.