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Apr 1, 2017
Can Futurists Predict the Year of the Singularity?
Posted by Klaus Baldauf in categories: Ray Kurzweil, robotics/AI, singularity
The end of the world as we know it is near. And that’s a good thing, according to many of the futurists who are predicting the imminent arrival of what’s been called the technological singularity.
The technological singularity is the idea that technological progress, particularly in artificial intelligence, will reach a tipping point to where machines are exponentially smarter than humans. It has been a hot topic of late.
Well-known futurist and Google engineer Ray Kurzweil (co-founder and chancellor of Singularity University) reiterated his bold prediction at Austin’s South by Southwest (SXSW) festival this month that machines will match human intelligence by 2029 (and has said previously the Singularity itself will occur by 2045). That’s two years before SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son’s prediction of 2047, made at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) earlier this year.
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Apr 1, 2017
Intel CEO admits to industry-wide conspiracy to slow CPU advances, kill frequency boosts
Posted by Shane Hinshaw in category: computing
Taped remarks, smuggled from an investor meeting with Intel’s CEO Brian Krzanich, just rewrote decades of computer history. Everything you think you know is wrong. The real story? It’s inside.
Apr 1, 2017
Killing Science and Culture Doesn’t Make the Nation Stronger
Posted by Derick Lee in categories: government, physics, science
Scientists throughout the country across a wide spectrum of fields, from biochemists to physicists, are bemoaning the potentially devastating impact on science and technology in the United States of President Trump’s proposed budget request to Congress.
Massive funding cuts in the president’s proposed budget could be more devastating than any threat posed by illegal immigrants.
- By Lawrence M. Krauss on March 21, 2017
Apr 1, 2017
Adobe’s experimental app copies one photo’s style to another
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in category: robotics/AI
Photo retouching and style matching (not to be confused with Prisma -like Instagram filters) is challenging work that requires a trained eye and hours of labor. At least, it was, until AI took that job, too. Researchers from Adobe and Cornell University have showed off an experimental app called “Deep Photo Style transfer” that can transform your image from drab to dramatic using someone else’s photo.
As shown above, using it is pretty simple — you just select a photo you want to change and one with the style you’re trying to emulate. The AI does the rest, applying the color, lighting and contrast of the example photo to the original. It can transform a lake photo snapped in the most boring light possible (above) into one that looks like it was taken at the golden hour on another planet. In another example it transforms a daylight city shot into a much more interesting nighttime scene.
The researchers built on the “Neural Style Transfer” work done by European researchers. They refined it so that the style transfer only happens to colors and doesn’t distort objects in the picture, like previous deep learning systems. In other words, it can pick out which part of the image is sky and which part is ground, so that the sky doesn’t “spill over” into the rest of the image, the team says.
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Mar 31, 2017
This Robotic Tentacle Works Just Like An Octopus
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in category: robotics/AI
Mar 31, 2017
Scientists Hack a Human Cell and Reprogram It Like a Computer
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in categories: biotech/medical, computing
New research shows that cells understand and execute directions correctly, and scientists may be able to take advantage.
By hijacking the DNA of a human cell, they showed it’s possible to program it like a simple computer.
Mar 31, 2017
Elon Musk has job openings for 473 people at SpaceX — here’s who it’s hiring
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in categories: Elon Musk, space travel
A visit to SpaceX’s careers page reveals a surprising growth plan for Musk’s 15-year-old rocket company.