Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: robotics/AI – Page 8

New brain atlas offers unprecedented detail in MRI scans

The human brain comprises hundreds of interconnected regions that drive our thoughts, emotions, and behaviours. Existing brain atlases can identify major structures in MRI scans – such as the hippocampus, which supports memory and learning – but their finer sub-regions remain hard to detect. These distinctions matter because sub-regions of areas like the hippocampus, for example, are affected differently during Alzheimer’s disease progression.

Examining the brain at the cellular level is achievable using microscopy (histology), but cannot be done in living individuals, limiting its potential for understanding how the human brain changes during development, ageing and disease.

Published in Nature, the new study introduces NextBrain, an atlas of the entire adult human brain that can be used to analyse MRI scans of living patients in a matter of minutes and at a level of detail not possible until now.

The creators of the atlas, which is freely available, hope it will ultimately help to accelerate discovery in brain science and its translation into better diagnosis and treatment of conditions such as Alzheimer’s.

&

Continue reading “New brain atlas offers unprecedented detail in MRI scans” | >

Coordinating health AI to prevent defensive escalation

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems that can analyse medical images, records, and claims are becoming accessible to everyone. Although these systems outperform physicians at specific tasks, such as detecting cancer on CT scans, they are still imperfect. But as AI performance progresses from occasionally correct to reliably superior, there will be increasing pressure to conform to algorithmic outputs.

AI-designed antibodies created from scratch

Research led by the University of Washington reports on an AI-guided method that designs epitope-specific antibodies and confirms atomically precise binding using high-resolution molecular imaging, then strengthens those designs so the antibodies latch on much more tightly.

Antibodies dominate modern therapeutics, with more than 160 products on the market and a projected value of US$445 billion in 5 years. Antibodies protect the body by locking onto a precise spot—an epitope—on a virus or toxin.

That pinpoint connection determines whether an antibody blocks infection, marks a pathogen for removal, or neutralizes a harmful protein. When a drug antibody misses its intended epitope, treatment can lose power or trigger side effects by binding the wrong target.

Brain-computer interface decodes Mandarin from neural signals in real time

Researchers in Shanghai have reported in a study, recently published in Science Advances, that they’ve successfully decoded Mandarin Chinese language in real time with the help of a brain-computer interface (BCI) framework, a first for BCIs working with tonal languages. The participant involved in the study was also capable of controlling a robotic arm and digital avatar and interacting with a large language model using this new system.

While most people may not want a computer reading their mind, those who are unable to speak due to neurological conditions, like strokes or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), need to find alternative ways to communicate. Speech BCIs, capable of decoding neural signals, offer a promising way to restore communication in such individuals. In addition to communication, BCIs also offer ways to control devices directly through thought. This is particularly helpful for neurological conditions in which disabilities extend beyond loss.

These types of devices are not exactly a novel technology, but most BCI speech decoding research has focused on English, a non-tonal language.

Mapping a new frontier with AI-integrated geographic information systems

Over the past 50 years, geographers have embraced each new technological shift in geographic information systems (GIS)—the technology that turns location data into maps and insights about how places and people interact—first the computer boom, then the rise of the internet and data-sharing capabilities with web-based GIS, and later the emergence of smartphone data and cloud-based GIS systems.

Now, another is transforming the field: the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) as an independent “agent” capable of performing GIS functions with minimal human oversight.

In a study published in Annals of GIS, a multi-institutional team led by geography researchers at Penn State built and tested four AI agents in order to introduce a conceptual framework of autonomous GIS and examine how this shift is redefining the practice of GIS.

Nobel winner’s lab notches another breakthrough: AI-designed antibodies that hit their targets

Researchers from Nobel Laureate David Baker’s lab and the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design (IPD) have used artificial intelligence to design antibodies from scratch — notching another game-changing breakthrough for the scientists and their field of research.

“It was really a grand challenge — a pipe dream,” said Andrew Borst, head of electron microscopy R&D at IPD. Now that they’ve hit the milestone of engineering antibodies that successfully bind to their targets, the research “can go on and it can grow to heights that you can’t imagine right now.”

Borst and his colleagues are publishing their work in the peer-reviewed journal Nature. The development could supercharge the $200 billion antibody drug industry.

Fake or the real thing? How AI can make it harder to trust the pictures we see

A new study has revealed that artificial intelligence can now generate images of real people that are virtually impossible to tell apart from genuine photographs.

Using AI models ChatGPT and DALL·E, a team of researchers from Swansea University, the University of Lincoln and Ariel University in Israel, created highly realistic images of both fictional and famous faces, including celebrities.

They found that participants were unable to reliably distinguish them from authentic photos—even when they were familiar with the person’s appearance.

Super recognizers’ unique eye patterns give AI an edge in face matching tasks

What is it that makes a super recognizer —someone with extraordinary face recognition abilities—better at remembering faces than the rest of us?

According to new research carried out by cognitive scientists at UNSW Sydney, it’s not how much of a face they can take in—it comes down to the quality of the information their eyes focus on.

“Super-recognizers don’t just look harder, they look smarter. They choose the most useful parts of a face to take in,” says Dr. James Dunn, lead author on the research that was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

/* */