Lifeboat Foundation

The dramatic rise of online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic has spotlit concerns about the role of technology in exam surveillance — and also in student cheating.

Some universities have reported more cheating during the pandemic, and such concerns are unfolding in a climate where technologies that allow for the automation of writing continue to improve.

Over the past two years, the ability of artificial intelligence to generate writing has leapt forward significantly, particularly with the development of what’s known as the language generator GPT-3. With this, companies such as Google, Microsoft, and NVIDIA can now produce “human-like” text.

Deploying autonomous mini-rovers could help us explore places where conventional ones can’t go.

“We are absolutely losing some science,” Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, tells The Register. “How much science we lose depends on how many satellites there end up being. You occasionally lose data. At the moment it’s one in every ten images.”

Telescopes can try waiting for a fleet of satellites to pass before they snap their images, though if astronomers are trying to track moving objects, such as near-Earth asteroids or comets, for example, it can be impossible to avoid the blight.

“As we raise the number of satellites, there starts to be multiple streaks in images you take. That’s no longer irritating, you really are losing science. Ten years from now, there may be so many that we can’t deal with it,” he added.

Studying The Atoms Of Perception, Memory, Behavior and Consciousness — Dr. Christof Koch, Ph.D. — Chief Scientist, MindScope Program, Allen Institute.

Dr. Christof Koch, Ph.D. (https://alleninstitute.org/what-we-do/brain-science/about/te…stof-koch/) is Chief Scientist of the MindScope Program at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, originally funded by a donation of more than $500 million from Microsoft founder and philanthropist Paul G. Allen.

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Alphabet has launched a new drug discovery company called Isomorphic Labs that will be led by DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis.

Russian chess legend Garry Kasparov was beaten by a supercomputer — but when it comes to artificial intelligence, he is firmly convinced that it’s the humans who pose the real threat.

Kasparov has remained fascinated by technology since his famous matches against IBM’s Deep Blue computer in the 1990s.

When he wasn’t busy taking on 10 simultaneous chess opponents at Lisbon’s Web Summit this week — handily beating them all in 45 minutes — he spoke to AFP about AI’s growing role in society.

AIOps startup Moogsoft has improved its unified cloud monitoring platform for enterprises with a host of new features, including integration with its observability service Datadog.

The updates, according to a statement from the company, improve workflow automation and increase incident context, giving organizations using the platform a more holistic view of their systems as well as deeper actionable insights to diagnose and fix problems in real-time.

“Monitoring alone can’t move businesses forward if they don’t understand the context of what went wrong. Context achieved through observability helps customers make sense of data and illustrates how to prevent issues from happening again,” explained Adam Frank, Moogsoft’s vice president of product management and user experience (UX) design.

The former Secretary of State and the former CEO of Google call for leadership and guidelines around how we use artificial intelligence.

Robotic hand manipulates thousands of objects with ease: bit.ly/3bI367h

At just one year old, a baby is more dexterous than a robot. Sure, machines can do more than just pick up and put down objects, but we’re not quite there as far as replicating a natural pull towards exploratory or sophisticated dexterous manipulation goes.

OpenAI gave it a try with “Dactyl” (meaning “finger” from the Greek word daktylos), using their humanoid robot hand to solve a Rubik’s cube with software that’s a step towards more general AI, and a step away from the common single-task mentality. DeepMind created “ RGB-Stacking ‚” a vision-based system that challenges a robot to learn how to grab items and stack them.

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