Lifeboat Foundation

The state of artificial intelligence (AI) in smart homes nowadays might be likened to a smart but moody teenager: It’s starting to hit its stride and discover its talents, but it doesn’t really feel like answering any questions about what it’s up to and would really rather be left alone, OK?

William Yeoh, assistant professor of computer science and engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis, is working to help smart-home AI to grow up.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded Yeoh a $300,000 grant to assist in developing smart-home AI algorithms that can determine what a user wants by both asking questions and making smart guesses, and then plan and schedule accordingly. Beyond being smart, the system needs to be able to communicate and to explain why it is proposing the schedule it proposed to the user.

In July 2018, The Engineer examined how modular fabrication techniques are reshaping the construction industry, enabling clean builds that are cost-effective and time efficient. But while off-site assembly brings many advantages, it can also be restrictive. This has prompted a new wave of engineers to bring the latest technology on-site, elevating the pre-fab to the fabulous.

According to Andrew Watts, CEO of engineering technology firm Newtecnic, this trend is part of a new era of digital construction where robots and drones will become commonplace on site. Digitalisation has penetrated virtually every aspect of design and engineering, but in many ways physical construction itself has remained a stubbornly analogue process, centuries of accumulated human expertise resisting the allure of ones and zeroes, and human hands still doing much of the heavy lifting. Newtecnic’s Construction Labs concept is aiming to change that, merging modular building with on-site construction to deliver perfect finishes on major public buildings.

“We’re using Construction Labs to realise complex projects,” Watts told The Engineer. “Its specific use is in the construction of facades and applications and connections for primary structures.”

Scientific progress, and Internet and mobile coverage proliferation in the last 8 years alone might have decreased the numbers dramatically. Still not as much as to liquidate the spiritual beliefs of the vast majority of the world’s population.

Does God exist? If She does, this is how we got our sacred soul. If She does not, we will soon be able to recreate the soul in machines!

There is. Our engagement with AI will transform us. Technology always does, even while we are busy using it to reinvent our world. The introduction of the machine gun by Richard Gatling during America’s Civil War, and its massive role in World War I, obliterated our ideas of military gallantry and chivalry and emblazoned in our minds Wilfred Owen’s imagery of young men who “die as Cattle.” The computer revolution beginning after World War II ushered in a way of understanding and talking about the mind in terms of hardware, wiring and rewiring that still dominates neurology. How will AI change us? How has it changed us already? For example, what does reliance on navigational aids like Waze do to our sense of adventure? What happens to our ability to make everyday practical judgments when so many of these judgments—in areas as diverse as credit worthiness, human resources, sentencing, police force allocation—are outsourced to algorithms? If our ability to make good moral judgments depends on actually making them—on developing, through practice and habit, what Aristotle called “practical wisdom”—what happens when we lose the habit? What becomes of our capacity for patience when more and more of our trivial interests and requests are predicted and immediately met by artificially intelligent assistants like Siri and Alexa? Does a child who interacts imperiously with these assistants take that habit of imperious interaction to other aspects of her life? It’s hard to know how exactly AI will alter us. Our concerns about the fairness and safety of the technology are more concrete and easier to grasp. But the abstract, philosophical question of how AI will impact what it means to be human is more fundamental and cannot be overlooked. The engineers are right to worry. But the stakes are higher than they think.

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The data captured helps better understand human movement.

This Japanese robot can do push-ups, play badminton, and could help us better understand our bodies.

What is happening with the future of AI, and how will it alter geopolitics? That’s the kind of question that motivates our company, and our preparation for our fall conference. China looks strong. Beijing-based computer scientist, investor, and author Kai-Fu Lee will be one of several interpreters.

That’s what we are after, with AI. Understanding intelligence in machines, animals and humans, is one of the great scientific challenges of our times and building intelligent machines is one of the greatest technological challenges of our times. No single entity in industry, academia or public research has a monopoly on the good ideas that will achieve these goals. It’s going to take the combined effort of the entire research community to make progress in the science and technology of intelligence.

Facebook is taking an unusual recruitment model championed in law and medicine and applying it to artificial intelligence — and it’s working.

In Machine Learning one of the biggest problem faced by the practitioners in the process is choosing the correct set of hyper-parameters. And it takes a lot of time in tuning them accordingly, to stretch the accuracy numbers.

For instance lets take, SVC from well known library Scikit-Learn, class implements the Support Vector Machine algorithm for classification which contains more than 10 hyperparameters, now adjusting all ten to minimize the loss is very difficult just by using hit and trial. Though Scikit-Learn provides Grid Search and Random Search, but the algorithms are brute force and exhaustive, however hyperopt implements distributed asynchronous algorithm for hyperparameter optimization.

The question today is, do you think Replika is really cool artificial intelligence and you cannot wait to use it or is it a creepy, invasive, soul stealing app that is going too far?

Replika.ai Cool artificial intelligence that you cannot wait to use or a creepy, invasive, soul sucking way to degrade your humanity.