Lifeboat Foundation

The new digital payment app, called Tez, allows people in India to use a phone to pay for goods in physical stores and online, or make payments to other bank accounts. It’s different to the (already incredibly popular) Indian service PayTM in the respect that it links a phone directly with a bank account, rather than having the user regularly top up a wallet with money.

The Financial Times reports ($) that, unlike many other mobile payment systems which rely on NFC to make payments, Google offers users the ability to make use of a technology called AudioQR to transfer money. The approach allows any two phones with mics and speakers to communicate with each other using ultrasound, above the range of human hearing, to arrange a transaction. That will be particularly useful in a country where not everyone has a high-spec device.

According to TechCrunch, Google has also trademarked the name Tez in other Asian countries, including Indonesia and the Philippines. That suggests that, in the longer term, it has bigger ambitions for the service.

Continue reading “Google’s New Mobile Payment System Sends Money via Sound” »

My new story for my #transhumanism column at Psychology Today on Direct Neurofeedback:

Transhumanism—the movement of using science and technology to improve the human being—covers many different fields of research. There are exoskeleton suits to help the disabled; there are stem cell treatments to cure disease; there are robots and AI to perform human chores. The field is wide open and booming as humanity uses more and more tech in its world.

It’s not that often I get to participate directly in these radical technologies, but I did so recently when Grant Rudolph, Clinical Director at Echo Rock Neurotherapy in Mill Valley, California invited me to try his Direct Neurofeedback techniques. Via his computer and EEG wire hookups, Mr. Rudolph echoed my brainwave information back into my head at an imperceptible level. I did two sessions of Direct Neurofeedback.

Continue reading “I Tried Direct Neurofeedback and the Results Surprised Me” »

We are delighted to announce that Dr. Aubrey de Grey has accepted our offer to join the LEAF scientific advisory board, and he joins the other luminaries whose expertise we already benefit from.

The majority of you already know about Dr. Aubrey de Grey and his work at the SENS Research Foundation, but for those who are not familiar with him, here is a short introduction.

Decades on, his work remains an irresistible trove of ideas for film-makers to plunder. Philip K Dick’s Electric Dreams, which begins on Sunday (Channel 4, 9pm), is an ambitious series of 10 one-hour films based on his stories, with different casts and creative teams.

An ambitious series of 10 one-hour films based on the stories of the sci-fi writer.

At well over $150,000 per appliance, the Volta GPU based DGX appliances from Nvidia, which take aim at deep learning with framework integration and 8 Volta-accelerated nodes linked with NVlink, is set to appeal to the most bleeding edge of machine learning shops.

Nvidia has built its own clusters by stringing several of these together, just as researchers at Tokyo Tech have done with the Pascal generation systems. But one of the first commercial customers for the Volta based boxes is the Center for Clinical Data Science, which is part of the first wave of hospitals set to use deep learning for MR and CT image analysis.

The center, which is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has secured a whopping four DGX-1 Volta appliances, which sport the latest GPUs with eight per node with the NVlink interconnect. The Next Platform talked with Neil Tenenholtz, senior data scientist at the center, about where deep learning will yield results for hospitals and medical research and about their early experiences with the four machines.

Continue reading “Hospital Captures First Commercial Volta GPU Based DGX-1 Systems” »

Doing well on such a challenge would appear to require significant advances in AI technology, making it a potentially powerful way to advance the field. In this video, Carissa Schoenick discusses “Moving Beyond the Turing Test with the Allen AI Science Challenge,” in the September 2017 CACM.

http://ow.ly/pyjO30f7EpM

At the Disrupt SF 2017 Hackathon, a massive swath of the 102 companies that took the stage on Sunday presented hacks with disaster relief in mind. From ResQme to ResQMi to RescueMe, if you can think of a phrase with the word “rescue” in it, it probably showed up on stage among the roughly 30 emergency and disaster related hacks.

Most of the disaster-related apps that presented today mentioned the recent events of Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma in their pitches, observing that tech should be able to pair victims, resources and rescue workers far better than existing services. Many of the rescue-oriented apps that took the stage acknowledged that mobile data services usually go down during these events and the vast majority of them offered an SMS-based version of their hack.

Continue reading “Disaster relief hacks dominate the stage at the Disrupt SF 2017 Hackathon” »

AgeX Therapeutics: A Discussion with Dr. Aubrey de Grey, V.P. New Technology Discovery and Dr. Michael West. Co-CEO of BioTime & CEO of AgeX Therapeutics.

http://www.agexinc.com/

Continue reading “Aubrey de Grey on The State of Anti-Aging & His New Job At AgeX Therapeutics” »

The new self-propelled, cancer-seeking bacteriobot swims right into the tumor and zaps it with a deadly payload of cancer drugs.

The recently perfected #bacteriobot holds ‘a lot of promise’ in treating #cancer says a physician. Cancer patients at a hospital in Montreal may be the first to be treated with these #nanorobots built out of bacteria.

Summary: The recently perfected bacteriobot holds ‘a lot of promise’ in treating cancer says a physician. Cancer patients at a hospital in Montreal may be the first to be treated with nanorobots built out of bacteria. The new self-propelled, cancer-seeking bacteriobot swims right into the tumor and zaps it with a deadly payload of cancer drugs. [Cover image: Getty Images/iStock.]

Continue reading “Bacteriobot Holds ‘A Lot Of Promise’ To Treat Cancer, Says Doctor” »