Lifeboat Foundation

While facial recognition performs well in controlled environments (like photos taken at borders), they struggle to identify faces in the wild. According to data released under the UK’s Freedom of Information laws, the Metropolitan’s AFR system has a 98 percent false positive rate — meaning that 98 percent of the “matches” it makes are of innocent people.

The head of London’s Metropolitan Police force has defended the organization’s ongoing trials of automated facial recognition systems, despite legal challenges and criticisms that the technology is “almost entirely inaccurate.”

According to a report from The Register, UK Metropolitan Police commissioner Cressida Dick said on Wednesday that she did not expect the technology to lead to “lots of arrests,” but argued that the public “expect[s]” law enforcement to test such cutting-edge systems.

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In recent days, word about Nvidia’s new Turing architecture started leaking out of the Santa Clara-based company’s headquarters. So it didn’t come as a major surprise that the company today announced during its Siggraph keynote the launch of this new architecture and three new pro-oriented workstation graphics cards in its Quadro family.

Nvidia describes the new Turing architecture as “the greatest leap since the invention of the CUDA GPU in 2006.” That’s a high bar to clear, but there may be a kernel of truth here. These new Quadro RTx chips are the first to feature the company’s new RT Cores. “RT” here stands for ray tracing, a rendering method that basically traces the path of light as it interacts with the objects in a scene. This technique has been around for a very long time (remember POV-Ray on the Amiga?). Traditionally, though, it was always very computationally intensive, though the results tend to look far more realistic. In recent years, ray tracing got a new boost thanks to faster GPUs and support from the likes of Microsoft, which recently added ray tracing support to DirectX.

Continue reading “Nvidia’s new Turing architecture is all about real-time ray tracing and AI” »

To understand how cells in the body behave, bioengineers create miniature models of the cells’ environment in their lab. But recreating this niche environment is incredibly complex in a controlled setting, because researchers are still learning all the factors that influence cell behavior and growth. By observing and then modifying their engineered mini-models, scientists are better able to identify those factors.

This form of cellular research is essential to the study of regenerative medicine, which focuses on replacing or repairing damaged tissue, often through the use of stem cells, a special population of cells that can give rise to all tissues in the body. Bioengineers face the central question of regenerative medicine: what causes stem cells to grow, organize, and mature from a small population of cells to complex organs?

To find an answer, a research team from the Johns Hopkins Institute for NanoBioTechnology borrowed a process commonly used in the electronics industry called micropatterning, in which the miniaturization of shapes increases the number of transistors on a circuit. The team created micropatterned shapes, coupled with machine learning, to see how confinement influences stem cell maturation and organization.

Continue reading “Bioengineers borrow from electronics industry to get stem cells to shape up” »

An adjustable shading system that adapts itself independently over the course of the day, without sensors or motors and largely maintenance-free? It really is possible: an ETH doctoral student at the Institute for Building Materials has developed an alternative to motor-driven sunshades.

It gets hot in the city in summer, and buildings in direct sunlight get particularly warm. At night, it can then be difficult to get rid of that accumulated heat. These days, many people dream of efficient air conditioning. Chiara Vailati had a different dream: after completing her studies in Italy, the civil engineer pursued the idea of creating an adjustable and autonomous sunshade for houses, to reduce the amount of heat that enters a building and therefore the need for cooling. She had high requirements: “I wanted the system to be made of environmentally friendly materials, use very little energy and have low installation and maintenance costs,” remembers Vailati.

Continue reading “From pine cones to an adaptive shading system” »

The United States and Russia aren’t the only two nations working hard at realizing their space-faring dreams. China has quickly ramped up its high-flying ambitions in the past couple of decades and late 2018 will mark a real milestone for the country’s space program. The country just announced that it plans on launching a lunar rover to the far side of the Moon in December of this year.

The announcement comes via China’s state-run news agency CCTV, and China seems bullish on the prospect of being the first country to explore the far side of Earth’s moon with a robotic rover.

The mission, named Chang’e 4, follows in the footsteps of its predecessor (you guessed it, Chang’e 3) which saw a rover nicknamed “Jade Rabbit” land on the near side of the Moon back in 2013. That rover ran out of steam in August of 2016, and the model that will be flying to the far side is built largely of backup parts from the Chang’e 3 mission.

Last week, NASA announced the awardees for an ongoing effort to foster commercial activity in space. This effort allows 13 companies to study the future of commercial human spaceflight in low-Earth orbit, including long-term opportunities for the International Space Station.

I’m pleased to share that NanoRacks is one of these awardees.

This study is not only a big step for NanoRacks, but a big step for the commercial space ecosystem. Today, we are the largest commercial user of the International Space Station and are proud of the impact we’ve made to help foster this ecosystem and bring customers from all over the world into to orbit. This study will allow us to take our vision to the next step and detail the viability for habitable and automated platforms for low-Earth orbit.

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A new study finds children are particularly susceptible to the influence of AI.

This story is brought to you by SynbiCITE, which is accelerating the commercialization of synthetic biology applications. To learn how SynbiCITE is nucleating a sustainable UK economy, visit www.synbicite.com.

Just as Henry Ford’s assembly line revolutionized the automobile industry, synthetic biology is being revolutionized by automated DNA assembly (see SynBioBetaLive! with Opentrons). The key features of an assembly line translate well into the field of synthetic biology – speed, accuracy, reproducibility and validation. Instead of welding chassis together, small robotic arms are lifting delicate plates holding dozens of samples, adding and removing miniscule amounts of fluid.

Continue reading “The assembly line of the future: Automation, DNA construction, and synthetic biology” »