Lifeboat Foundation

Visitors to The Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, will now be greeted by a digitally resurrected simulation of Salvador Dali. Created using machine learning and deepfake technologies, the digital Dali is programmed to communicate in novel ways, from commenting on the day’s weather to taking a selfie with museum patrons.

An innovative system to predict lung cancer could make a huge change in survival rates, with Google exploring how artificial intelligence could dramatically improve diagnosis rates. Despite advances in cancer treatment, lung cancer remains one of the most deadly diseases, not least because difficulty in identifying it among patients means it can often be too late to address.

In this post, Brett Schilke, Singularity University’s Director of Impact, asks us to consider whether exponential technologies like artificial intelligence can make us better people. He astutely observes the impact of his own interactions with AI-powered devices and invites you to do the same.

Here is the latest Seeking Delphi™ podcast, with John C. Havens on IEEE’s newly minted guidelines on ethical design of autonomous systems.

“With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.”–Elon Musk.

Continue reading “Podcast #31: Ethically Aligned Design in Autonomous Systems with John C. Havens” »

The new technology could be used for the development of effective and time-sensitive search-and-rescue robots.

A fleet of driverless cars working together to keep traffic moving smoothly can improve overall traffic flow by at least 35 percent, researchers have shown.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, programmed a small fleet of miniature robotic cars to drive on a multi-lane track and observed how the traffic flow changed when one of the cars stopped.

When the cars were not driving cooperatively, any cars behind the stopped car had to stop or slow down and wait for a gap in the traffic, as would typically happen on a real road. A queue quickly formed behind the stopped car and overall traffic flow was slowed.

Continue reading “Driverless cars working together can speed up traffic” »

CRISPR technology is a simple yet powerful tool for editing genomes. It allows researchers to easily alter DNA sequences and modify gene function.

It has many potential applications include correcting genetic defects, treating and preventing the spread of diseases and improving crops. By delivering the CRISPR enzyme Cas9 nuclease coupled with synthetic guide RNA (gRNA) into a cell, the cell’s genome can be cut at a desired location, that allows existing genes to be removed or add new ones.

Brain-computer interfaces have managed some amazing feats: allowing paralyzed people to type words and move a robot using only their minds, to name two examples. Brown University neuroengineering professor Arto Nurmikko has had a hand in some of those developments, but even he says the technology is at only a rudimentary stage—the equivalent of the computer understanding the brain’s intention to bend a single finger.

“We’re trying to go from the bending-of-the-finger paradigm to tying shoe laces and even to the concert pianist level. That requires lots more spatial and temporal resolution from an electronic brain interface,” Nurmikko says. His team is hoping that kind of resolution will come along with the transition from a single, hard wired neural implant to a thousand or more speck-size neural implants that wirelessly communicate with computers outside the brain. At the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference, engineers from Brown University, Qualcomm, and the University of California San Diego presented the final part of a communications scheme for these implants. It allows bidirectional communication between the implants and an external device with an uplink rate of 10 megabits per second and a downlink rate of 1 Mb/s.

“We believe that we are the first group to realize wireless power transfer and megabits per second communications” in a neural implant, says Wing Ching (Vincent) Leung, technical director at the Qualcomm Institute Circuits Lab at UC San Diego.

Continue reading “Wireless Network Brings Dust-Sized Brain Implants a Step Closer” »

In hospitals, where many people are treated for life-threatening illnesses, having quality time with your doctor can be the difference between life and death.

However, physicians are often busy, seeing dozens of patients each day. So, then, how can we get more time with them? A.I., says physician and author Eric Topol. In this video, he explains how machine intelligence can free up doctors’ time while they go through their rounds.