Lifeboat Foundation

Dr. Ben Goertzel CEO & Founder of the SingularityNET Foundation is particularly visible and vocal on his thoughts on Artificial Intelligence, AGI, and where research and industry are in regards to AGI. Speaking at the (Virtual) OpenCogCon event this week, Dr. Goertzel is one of the world’s foremost experts in Artificial General Intelligence. He has decades of expertise applying AI to practical problems in areas ranging from natural language processing and data mining to robotics, video gaming, national security, and bioinformatics.

Are we at a turning point in AGI?

Dr. Goertzel believes that we are now at a turning point in the history of AI. Over the next few years he believes the balance of activity in the AI research area is about to shift from highly specialized narrow AIs toward AGIs. Deep neural nets have achieved amazing things but that paradigm is going to run out of steam fairly soon, and rather than this causing another “AI winter” or a shift in focus to some other kind of narrow AI, he thinks it’s going to trigger the AGI revolution.

The science of using AI to detect and predict emotions is shaky but the U.S. military and a handful of well-funded startups are hoping to prove the doubters wrong, whatever the risks.

Can artificial intelligence enhance human surgeons with AI superpowers to reduce medical errors?

In February of last year, the San Francisco–based research lab OpenAI announced that its AI system could now write convincing passages of English. Feed the beginning of a sentence or paragraph into GPT-2, as it was called, and it could continue the thought for as long as an essay with almost human-like coherence.

Now, the lab is exploring what would happen if the same algorithm were instead fed part of an image. The results, which were given an honorable mention for best paper at this week’s International Conference on Machine Learning, open up a new avenue for image generation, ripe with opportunity and consequences.

Android apps targeted by this new trojan include banking, dating, social media, and instant messaging apps.

How do you beat Tesla, Google, Uber and the entire multi-trillion dollar automotive industry with massive brands like Toyota, General Motors, and Volkswagen to a full self-driving car? Just maybe, by finding a way to train your AI systems that is 100,000 times cheaper.

It’s called Deep Teaching.

Perhaps not surprisingly, it works by taking human effort out of the equation.

Ancient Egyptians used hieroglyphs over four millennia ago to engrave and record their stories. Today, only a select group of people know how to read or interpret those inscriptions.

To read and decipher the ancient hieroglyphic writing, researchers and scholars have been using the Rosetta Stone, an irregularly shaped black granite stone.

In 2017, game developer Ubisoft launched an initiative to use AI and machine learning to understand the written language of the Pharoahs.

A growing number of prominent hospitals are using AI-powered tools to advise patient care. But patients often aren’t informed, a STAT examination finds.

A new method developed at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) uses DNA sequencing to efficiently map long-range connections between different regions of the brain. The approach dramatically reduces the cost of mapping brain-wide connections compared to traditional microscopy-based methods.

Neuroscientists need anatomical maps to understand how information flows from one region of the brain to another. “Charting the cellular connections between different parts of the brain—the connectome—can help reveal how the nervous system processes information, as well as how faulty wiring contributes to mental illness and other disorders,” says Longwen Huang, a postdoctoral researcher in CSHL Professor Anthony Zador’s lab. Creating these maps has been expensive and time-consuming, demanding massive efforts that are out of reach for most research teams.

Continue reading “How to map brain connections using DNA barcodes” »