Lifeboat Foundation

https://youtube.com/watch?v=5Sd-zLdC7qc

We live in an age of incredible technological innovation. Innovation that has the potential to do great good or great harm to society. Prince Harry, sat down with one of the most celebrated figures in Artificial Intelligence, Demis Hassabis, British artificial intelligence researcher, neuroscientist, computer game designer, entrepreneur, the co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, to discuss the responsibility that big tech firms have to ensure that change to society is positive. The Artificial Intelligence Channel.

Automation of the Transportation Industry, expect the big roll out around 2022’ish.

Once thought of as a distant fantasy, autonomous trucks are moving toward commercial reality on Canadian highways as companies look to boost productivity amid a driver shortage and governments seek to reduce deadly crashes.

They are not yet driving themselves out of warehouses and down the highways, but companies of all sizes —including General Motors, Google and Uber — are testing out the technology.

Continue reading “Driverless trucks moving closer to commercial reality on Canadian highways” »

After less than eight months of development, the algorithms are helping intel analysts exploit drone video over the battlefield.

Earlier this month at an undisclosed location in the Middle East, computers using special algorithms helped intelligence analysts identify objects in a video feed from a small ScanEagle drone over the battlefield.

A few days into the trials, the computer identified objects — people, cars, types of building — correctly about 60 percent of the time. Just over a week on the job — and a handful of on-the-fly software updates later — the machine’s accuracy improved to around 80 percent. Next month, when its creators send the technology back to war with more software and hardware updates, they believe it will become even more accurate.

Continue reading “The Pentagon’s New Artificial Intelligence Is Already Hunting Terrorists” »

Christmas carol songwriters should be relieved to hear that they can keep their jobs for a little while longer. It turns out that artificial intelligence hasn’t quite mastered the art of their job.

In a Dec. 21 entry on her personal AI blog, Janelle Shane, a research scientist in industry and machine-learning hobbyist in her spare time, chronicles her journey of trying to teach a neural network to generate Christmas lyrics.

I trained a neural network to write Christmas carols and it got confused. In retrospect I should have seen this coming. http://aiweirdness.com/post/168770625987/christmas-carols-ge…al-network pic.twitter.com/XueoR4V5cC

Continue reading “A deep neural network wrote us a Christmas carol—and it’s hilariously bad” »

Some 50,000 people in the U.S. are diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease (PD) every year. The American Institute of Neurology estimates there are one million people affected with this neurodegenerative disorder, with 60 years as average age of onset. Falls and fall-related injuries are a major issue for people with Parkinson’s?up to 70 percent of advanced PD patients fall at least once a year and two-thirds suffer recurring falls. These fall rates are twice as high as those of adults of comparable age, so improving balance in patients with Parkinson’s would provide a major health advantage.

Sunil Agrawal, professor of mechanical engineering and of rehabilitation and regenerative medicine at Columbia Engineering, along with Dario Martelli, a post-doctoral researcher in his group, have been working on this issue with Movement Disorders faculty from the department of neurology at Columbia University Medical Center?Stanley Fahn, a leading expert in Parkinson’s, and Un Jung Kang, division director, and Movement Disorder Fellow Lan Luo. In their latest study, published today in Scientific Reports, the team looked at whether or not Parkinson’s disease affects patients’ balance and diminishes their ability to react and adapt to walking with perturbations. The researchers found that the ability to adapt to multiple perturbations or to modify responses to changing amplitudes or directions was not affected by PD; both the Parkinson’s and the healthy subjects controlled their reactive strategies in the same way.

This Autonomous Flying Car will be ready to take to the skies by 2018.

Researchers have developed an easy-to-build camera that produces 3D images from a single 2D image without any lenses. In an initial application of the technology, the researchers plan to use the new camera, which they call DiffuserCam, to watch microscopic neuron activity in living mice without a microscope. Ultimately, it could prove useful for a wide range of applications involving 3D capture.

The camera is compact and inexpensive to construct because it consists of only a diffuser — essentially a bumpy piece of plastic — placed on top of an image sensor. Although the hardware is simple, the software it uses to reconstruct high resolution 3D images is very complex.

“The DiffuserCam can, in a single shot, capture 3D information in a large volume with high resolution,” said the research team leader Laura Waller, University of California, Berkeley. “We think the camera could be useful for self-driving cars, where the 3D information can offer a sense of scale, or it could be used with machine learning algorithms to perform face detection, track people or automatically classify objects.”

“Unsupervised” machine learning could help translate between uncommon languages.

There are plenty of humanoid-looking robots out there, but very few actually have bodies that are particularly analogous to our own when it comes to moving and interacting with the environment. Japanese researchers are working to remedy that with a robot designed specifically to mimic not just human movements but the way humans actually accomplish those movements. Oh, and it sweats.

Kengoro is a new-ish robot (an earlier version made the rounds last year) that emphasizes flexibility and true humanoid structure rather than putting power or efficiency above all else.

As the researchers explain in their paper, published today in Science Robotics:

Continue reading “This humanoid robot works out (and sweats) like we do (or should)” »