Lifeboat Foundation

One way to crack this problem, according to the authors of a Perspective in this issue, is through a hybrid approach. The latest techniques in deep learning should be accompanied by a hand-in-glove pursuit of conventional physical modelling to help to overcome otherwise intractable problems such as simulating the particle-formation processes that govern cloud convection. The hybrid approach makes the most of well-understood physical principles such as fluid dynamics, incorporating deep learning where physical processes cannot yet be adequately resolved.

Studies of complex climate and ocean systems could gain from a hybrid between artificial intelligence and physical modelling.

The Elon Musk funded OpenAI non-profit has created a breakthrough system for writing high-quality text. It can write text, performs basic reading comprehension, machine translation, question answering, and summarization and all without task-specific training.

The system is able to take a few sentences of sample writing and then produce a multi-paragraph article in the style and context of the sample. This capability would let AI’s to impersonate the writing style of any person from previous writing samples.

GPT-2, is a 1.5 billion parameter Transformer that achieves state of the art results on 7 out of 8 tested language modeling datasets in a zero-shot setting, yet still simplifies (or in AI term underfits) their database called WebText. Samples from the model reflect these improvements and contain coherent paragraphs of text. These findings suggest a promising path towards building language processing systems which learn to perform tasks from their naturally occurring demonstrations.

Continue reading “A Tsunami of Fake News is On Its Way and Here is How” »

Fake. Dangerous. Scary. Too good. When headlines swim with verdicts like those then you suspect, correctly, that you’re in the land of artificial intelligence, where someone has come up with yet another AI model.

So, this is, GPT-2, an algorithm and, whether it makes one worry or marvel, “It excels at a task known as language modeling,” said The Verge, “which tests a program’s ability to predict the next word in a given sentence.”

Depending on how you look at it, you can blame, or congratulate, a team at California-based OpenAI who created GPT-2. Their language modeling program has written a convincing essay on a topic which they disagreed with.

Continue reading “OpenAI’s GPT-2 algorithm is good in knitting fake news” »

Nvidia’s incredible people-creating AI is now available online. Now you can create startling images of people who do not exist, to your heart’s content.

Circa 2015

Now if only they could get rid of all the ocean’s plastic next.

Our morning routine could be appended to something like “breakfast, stretching, sit on a medical examiner, shower, then commute.” If we are speaking seriously, we don’t always get to our morning stretches, but a quick medical exam could be on the morning agenda. We would wager that a portion of our readers are poised for that exam as they read this article. The examiner could come in the form of a toilet seat. This IoT throne is the next device you didn’t know you needed because it can take measurements to detect signs of heart failure every time you take a load off.

Tracking heart failure is not just one test, it is a buttload of tests. Continuous monitoring is difficult although tools exist for each test. It is unreasonable to expect all the at-risk people to sit at a blood pressure machine, inside a ballistocardiograph, with an oximeter on their fingers three times per day. Getting people to browse Hackaday on their phones after lunch is less of a struggle. When the robots overthrow us, this will definitely be held against us.

Continue reading “Toilet Seat Could Save Your Ass” »

An international team of researchers, from Imperial College London and the University of Melbourne in Australia, has demonstrated a new AI system that can effectively predict survival rates from ovarian cancer better than any current conventional method available to doctors.

The Longevity Therapeutics Summit was focused on therapeutics that target aging, rather than basic research or theory.

This was the first year for the Longevity Therapeutics Summit in San Francisco, California. Ably organized by Hanson Wade, with John Lewis, CEO of Oisín Biotechnologies, as program chair, the conference focused on senolytics for senescent cell clearance, big data and AI in finding new drugs (“in silico” testing), delivery systems for therapeutics like senolytics, TORC1 drugs, and biomarkers of aging, and the challenges of clinical trial development and FDA approval.

The conference featured a smorgasbord of cutting-edge longevity research, and, as the name implies, the general focus was on therapeutics that target aging, rather than basic research or theory.

Continue reading “A Report from the Longevity Therapeutics Summit” »

Plants are master chemists, and Michigan State University researchers have unlocked their secret of producing specialized metabolites.

The research, published in the latest issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, combined plant biology and machine learning to sort through tens of thousands of genes to determine which genes make specialized metabolites.

Some metabolites attract pollinators while others repel pests. Ever wonder why deer eat tulips and not daffodils? It’s because daffodils have metabolites to fend off the critters who’d dine on them.

Continue reading “Machine learning unlocks plants’ secrets” »