Lifeboat Foundation

From code breakers and proto-programmers to molecular biologists and AI leaders, their work has broken barriers and set the stage for the future.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Ernest Quintana’s family knew he was dying of chronic lung disease when he was taken by ambulance to a hospital, unable to breathe.

But they were devastated when a robot machine rolled into his room in the intensive care unit that night and a doctor told the 78-year-old patient by video call he would likely die within days.

“If you’re coming to tell us normal news, that’s fine, but if you’re coming to tell us there’s no lung left and we want to put you on a morphine drip until you die, it should be done by a human being and not a machine,” his daughter Catherine Quintana said Friday.

As a passionate supporter of the advancement of women and recognition for their immense contributions to our world, I was thrilled to learn of a fascinating new initiative that launched today, in honor of International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month. This unique AI-powered web experience called https://www.nobelprize.org/womenwhochangedscience/” target=”_blank” rel=” nofollow noopener noreferrer” data-ga-track=” ExternalLink: https://www.nobelprize.org/womenwhochangedscience/”>Women Who Changed Science highlights the achievements of female Nobel Prize winners who broke new ground in physics, chemistry and medicine. Raising awareness of their tremendous impact, the initiative aims to empower the next generation of scientists.

Women Who Changed Science is an outgrowth of a new collaboration with Nobel Media and Microsoft and is one of Microsoft’s ongoing initiatives to build female inclusion and diversity in STEM fields. This new endeavor trains a lens on the inspiring journeys and contributions of female Nobel Prize winners who’ve significantly impacted our world for the better.

Researchers have developed nanobots that can be injected using an ordinary hypodermic syringe, according to a new release. The nanobots are microscopic functioning robots with the ability to walk and withstand harsh environments. Each robot has a 70-micron length, which is about the width of a thin human hair, and a million can be produced from a single 4-inch silicon composite wafer.

When I joined the artificial intelligence company Clarifai in early 2017, you could practically taste the promise in the air. My colleagues were brilliant, dedicated, and committed to making the world a better place.

We founded Clarifai 4 Good where we helped students and charities, and we donated our software to researchers around the world whose projects had a socially beneficial goal. We were determined to be the one AI company that took our social responsibility seriously.

I never could have predicted that two years later, I would have to quit this job on moral grounds. And I certainly never thought it would happen over building weapons that escalate and shift the paradigm of war.

Continue reading “I Quit My Job to Protest My Company’s Work on Building Killer Robots” »

Researchers at Cornell University in the US have created wirelessly powered walking robot bugs that are tiny enough to be injected through an ordinary hypodermic needle.

The microscopic robots, which are each just 70 microns long, were produced using a multistep nanofabrication technique that turns a 4-inch specialised silicon wafer into a million microscopic robots in just weeks.

“The really high-level explanation of how we make them is we’re taking technology developed by the semiconductor industry and using it to make tiny robots,” explained Marc Miskin, assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who developed the techniques whilst a post-doc at Cornell University with his colleagues professors Itai Cohen and Paul McEuen and researcher Alejandro Cortese.

It won’t be simple. As with the advent of the car, many serious implications will be emergent, and the harshest effects borne by communities with the least powerful voices. We need to move our gaze from individuals to systems to communities, and back again. We must bring together diverse expertise, including workers and citizens, to develop a framework that health systems can use to anticipate and address issues. This framework needs an explicit mandate to consider and anticipate the social consequences of AI — and to keep watch over its effects. That is the best way to ensure that health technologies meet the needs of all, and not just those in Silicon Valley.

Health authorities are overlooking risks to systems and society in their evaluations of new digital technologies, says Melanie Smallman.

YORKSHIRE, U.K. — 7 MARCH, 2019 — Optalysys Ltd. (@ Optalysys), a disruptive technology company developing light-speed optical AI systems announced today that the world’s first optical co-processor system, the FT: X 2000, is now available to order.

Optical processing comes at a pivotal time of change in computing. Demand for AI is exploding just as silicon-based processing is facing the fundamental problem of Moore’s Law breaking down. Optalysys is addressing this problem with its revolutionary optical processing technology — enabling new levels of AI performance for high resolution image and video-based applications.

Artificial intelligence researchers are building tools to quickly and accurately turn data into diagnoses. But practical limitations and ethical concerns mean humans should remain in charge.