Lifeboat Foundation

Decision-making algorithms transform how automated systems evaluate and synthesize novel compounds.

A California startup made the first cross-country trip completed by an autonomous truck, delivering 40,000 pounds of butter in under three days. The self-driving truck drove from the west coast to Pennsylvania.

Today, Amazon has more than 200,000 mobile robots working inside its warehouse network, alongside hundreds of thousands of human workers. This robot army has helped the company fulfill its ever-increasing promises of speedy deliveries to Amazon Prime customers.

“They defined the expectations for the modern consumer,” said Scott Gravelle, the founder and CEO of Attabotics, a warehouse automation startup.

And those expectations of fast, free delivery driven by Amazon have led to a boom in the retail warehouse industry, with entrepreneurs like Gravelle and startups like Attabotics attempting to build smarter and cheaper robotic solutions to help both traditional retailers and younger e-commerce operations keep up with a behemoth like Amazon.

Yoshua Bengio is known as one of the “three musketeers” of deep learning, the type of artificial intelligence (AI) that dominates the field today.

Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal, is credited with making key breakthroughs in the use of neural networks — and just as importantly, with persevering with the work through the long cold AI winter of the late 1980s and the 1990s, when most people thought that neural networks were a dead end.

He was rewarded for his perseverance in 2018, when he and his fellow musketeers (Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun) won the Turing Award, which is often called the Nobel Prize of computing.

At the VietAI Summit 2019, Chip Huyen, Senior Deep Learning Engineer, NVIDIA, at SlatorCon San Francisco gave an insightful presentation about Machine Learning entitled “Machine Learning Interviews.”



ERCC1 (excision repair cross complementing‐group 1) is a mammalian endonuclease that incises the damaged strand of DNA during nucleotide excision repair and interstrand cross‐link repair. Ercc1^−/Δ mice, carrying one null and one hypomorphic Ercc1 allele, have been widely used to study aging due to accelerated aging phenotypes in numerous organs and their shortened lifespan. Ercc1^−/Δ mice display combined features of human progeroid and cancer‐prone syndromes. Although several studies report cellular senescence and apoptosis associated with the premature aging of Ercc1^−/Δ mice, the link between these two processes and their physiological relevance in the phenotypes of Ercc1^−/Δ mice are incompletely understood. Here, we show that ERCC1 depletion, both in cultured human fibroblasts and the skin of Ercc1^−/Δ mice, initially induces cellular senescence and, importantly, increased expression of several SASP (senescence‐associated secretory phenotype) factors. Cellular senescence induced by ERCC1 deficiency was dependent on activity of the p53 tumor‐suppressor protein. In turn, TNFα secreted by senescent cells induced apoptosis, not only in neighboring ERCC1‐deficient nonsenescent cells, but also cell autonomously in the senescent cells themselves. In addition, expression of the stem cell markers p63 and Lgr6 was significantly decreased in Ercc1^−/Δ mouse skin, where the apoptotic cells are localized, compared to age‐matched wild‐type skin, possibly due to the apoptosis of stem cells. These data suggest that ERCC1‐depleted cells become susceptible to apoptosis via TNFα secreted from neighboring senescent cells. We speculate that parts of the premature aging phenotypes and shortened health‐ or lifespan may be due to stem cell depletion through apoptosis promoted by senescent cells.

Last week, the transhumanist activist Zoltan Istvan announced his candidacy for President of the United States in next year’s elections. The writer, humanitarian and outspoken advocate of radical science is no stranger to the issues surrounding Longevity, and has spoken widely on subjects including AI, genetic editing, technology policy, and futurism.

In 2016, Istvan ran as an independent presidential candidate and travelled across the United States, spreading his message from a coffin-shaped bus, known as the “Immortality Bus.” This time he’s on the ballot, running against Donald Trump as a candidate for the Republican party in next year’s primaries. Things are a bit more serious this time.

Among his key policies, Istvan includes transhumanism, universal basic income and the need to beat China in the global innovation race – an issue we addressed in our Jamie Metzl interview. We spoke to him to find out more about his views on the Longevity sector.

Recently world-renowned theoretical physicist, Doctor Michio Kaku, sat down for an interview with world-renowned artificial intelligence Doctor Ray Kurzweil, to talk about The Singularity; who is at the forefront of artificial intelligence and robotics.

The two geniuses talked about how soon computer intelligence will soon surpass us and the possible outcomes of this.

What if developing a 3D gaming world were as easy as snapping pics with your phone? Nvidia researchers recently developed an AI system capable of predicting a complete 3D model from any 2D image.

Called “DIB-R,” the AI takes a picture of any 2D object – an image of a bird, for example – and predicts what it would look like in three dimensions. This prediction includes lighting, texture, and depth.