Lifeboat Foundation

Social science has an image problem—too many findings don’t hold up. A new project will crank through 30,000 studies to try to identify red flags.

A great analogy can often be the key to innovation, making it possible to transfer knowledge from one domain to another. Now researchers have shown that rather than relying on eureka moments, crowdsourcing and AI can dramatically speed up the search for these parallels.

Examples of analogies leading to major breakthroughs range from Edison’s early work in motion pictures to Kepler’s elucidation of the laws of planetary motion. But being able to strip away superficial differences and understand the underlying similarities between solutions to diverse problems has so far largely relied on individual genius.

That doesn’t need to be the case, though, according to the authors of a recent paper in PNAS. By splitting the task up and leveraging the strengths of both crowdsourcing and AI, they were able to find novel analogies that could help solve a variety of problems in creative ways.

Continue reading “Combine AI With Crowdsourcing and What Do You Get? Turbocharged Innovation” »

As part of its effort to upgrade its manufacturing sector, the Chinese government started a campaign in 2014 with the overall aim gradually replace manual labour with robots, with the heavily industrialised provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Guangdong among those introducing the new technology on a massive scale.

Companies, including iPhone manufacturer Foxconn, are turning to robots with around 100 million workers in China’s manufacturing industry under threat.

It hasn’t been determined whether it led to any rescues yet.

An impressive new language AI writes product reviews and news articles. Its creators are worried about misuse.

The system wrote a news article that’s almost good enough to print.

Thousands of school districts are using AI to hunt for signs of trouble.

A NASA technologist is taking miniaturization to the extreme.

Continue reading “NASA to Advance Unique 3D Printed Sensor Technology” »

New technologies like facial recognition are coming – whether we like it or not. We can’t turn back the tide, but we can manage new technology to do the least harm and most good.