Lifeboat Foundation

On the Right Track

In the final analysis, while IBM clearly has more work to do, it’s on the right track. Its investments in cloud and AI are already paying off, while blockchain and quantum computing bets are looking promising.

Furthermore, while IBM’s progress overall is clearly a massive team effort, Big Blue’s execution is due in large part to Rometty’s six years of leadership.

Continue reading “IBM Bets Company On Exponential Innovation In AI, Blockchain, And Quantum Computing” »

Intelligent Machines

AI tackles the Vatican’s secrets

Even church archivists don’t know what mysteries lie hidden in the Vatican Secret Archives, since many of its documents have never been transcribed. A machine-vision system for medieval text is about to change that.

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Robots, including floating spheres and spacewalkers, are performing critical tasks for astronauts and researchers as we speak.

The basic physics of earthquakes is such that strong ground motion cannot be expected from an earthquake unless the earthquake itself is very close or has grown to be very large. We use simple seismological relationships to calculate the minimum time that must elapse before such ground motion can be expected at a distance from the earthquake, assuming that the earthquake magnitude is not predictable. Earthquake early warning (EEW) systems are in operation or development for many regions around the world, with the goal of providing enough warning of incoming ground shaking to allow people and automated systems to take protective actions to mitigate losses. However, the question of how much warning time is physically possible for specified levels of ground motion has not been addressed. We consider a zero-latency EEW system to determine possible warning times a user could receive in an ideal case. In this case, the only limitation on warning time is the time required for the earthquake to evolve and the time for strong ground motion to arrive at a user’s location. We find that users who wish to be alerted at lower ground motion thresholds will receive more robust warnings with longer average warning times than users who receive warnings for higher ground motion thresholds. EEW systems have the greatest potential benefit for users willing to take action at relatively low ground motion thresholds, whereas users who set relatively high thresholds for taking action are less likely to receive timely and actionable information.

Earthquake early warning (EEW) systems rapidly detect and characterize ongoing earthquakes in real time to provide advance warnings of impending ground motion. They use the information contained in the early parts of the typically low-amplitude ground motion waveforms to estimate the ensuing and potentially large-amplitude ground motion. Because EEW alert information can be transmitted faster than seismic wave propagation speed, such ground motion warnings may arrive at a target site before the strong shaking itself, thereby providing invaluable time for both people and automated systems to take actions to mitigate earthquake-related injury and losses. These actions might range from simple procedures like warning people to get themselves to a safe location to complex automated procedures like halting airport takeoffs and landings.

Get past the jargon and buzzwords surrounding neural networks and learn what they have to do with machine learning and data science.

Millenials grew up under the technological halo of Moore’s law, enjoying booming exponential growth of computation power that ushered in the information age. It should come as no surprise that transhumanism has earned a degree of mainstream acceptance—from Hollywood movies to magazine covers and the latest sci-fi TV. Transhumanist beliefs will continue to permeate culture as long as the promise of technological progress holds its end of the bargain.

For transhumanist faiths, technology becomes a way of cashing checks religion helped write.

For instance, Silicon Valley engineer Anthony Levandowski—whom you may know from the Uber-Waymo lawsuit over self-driving car technology—recently launched the Way of the Future Church, a new religious organization based on developing godlike artificial intelligence. On its website, the Way of the Future states, “We believe the creation of ‘super intelligence’ is inevitable,” and according to IRS documents detailed by Wired, this new religion seeks “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software.” This exuberance departs from the cautious stance toward A.I. taken by Hawking, Musk, and others who warn that artificial superintelligence could pose an existential threat. However, regardless of whether artificial superintelligence is seen as an angel or a demon, Hawking, Musk, and A.I. evangelists alike share the common belief that this technology should be taken seriously.

Continue reading “Transhumanism Is Complicating the Sometimes Antagonistic Faith vs. Science Dynamic” »

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Reaching the highest levels of safety for self-driving cars will depend on how well the cars are engineered to know when communications are needed, and to be able to communicate with other cars, with bikes, with people on foot. Where to go? When to walk?

Uber Technologies has filed a patent toward that end, with a discussion on how self-driving cars might communicate with pedestrians.

The patent title is “Light output system for a self-driving vehicle.” The patent applicant is Uber Technologies.

Continue reading “Uber patent application discusses intention signaling system” »

Scientists have mapped 6,000 new craters on the Moon with the help of a newly developed technique based on artificial intelligence (AI).

“When it comes to counting craters on the Moon, it’s a pretty archaic method,” said Mohamad Ali-Dib from the University of Toronto, Scarborough in Canada.

“Basically we need to manually look at an image, locate and count the craters and then calculate how large they are based off the size of the image. Here we’ve developed a technique from artificial intelligence that can automate this entire process that saves significant time and effort,” Ali-Dib said.

Continue reading “New technique based on AI finds 6,000 new craters on Moon” »