Lifeboat Foundation

The Chinese search giant lost the star leader of its AI lab last week, but the technology remains an essential long-term focus.

• by.

  Yiting Sun

• March 30, 2017

For a mind to be capable of tackling anything, it has to have a memory.

Humans are exceptionally good at transferring old skills to new problems. Machines, despite all their recent wins against humans, aren’t. This is partly due to how they’re trained: artificial neural networks like Google’s DeepMind learn to master a singular task and call it quits. To learn a new task, it has to reset, wiping out previous memories and starting again from scratch.

This phenomenon, quite aptly dubbed “catastrophic forgetting,” condemns our AIs to be one-trick ponies.

Continue reading “Google Chases General Intelligence With New AI That Has a Memory” »

We will be able to embed storytelling directly into business strategy development, tell meaningful and memorable stories that truly connect with employees and customers, craft moments that are personalized and frictionless, and as a bonus, have the ability to harness Watson to optimize distribution across channel, demo and geography.

This is particularly resonant as I believe that just as the last twenty years mandated that every organization strive to be a technology company, the next twenty will command every winning corporation to be a content or media brand. In my view, Watson and AI will be the ingredient brand catalyzing tomorrow’s innovation at leading corporations in many ways; but media for certain will be top of the list, as AI assists them in becoming the top content studios of the future. Smaller businesses can scale these ideas using Watson as well as compelling content creation becomes an increasingly important driver of business strategy.

Tomorrow’s business success stories will be fueled by AI that extends beyond the CTO and areas of pure technology and infrastructure, to the CMO and areas ranging from culture to communication to creativity. The winning formula of the future as articulated by IBM will be creativity + technology = meaningful engagement, and the ability to activate purposeful change.

Continue reading “IBM Watson: The Ingredient Brand Helping Inform The Purposeful Business Of Tomorrow” »

DARPA envisions this development to come in three waves of innovation, culminating in machines capable of abstract thought.

ES Emerging Technology are delighted to invite you to the second event in our Exponential Series!

Nathan Waters is a futurist, decentralist and entrepreneur. He is the founder of the monthly Ethereum blockchain meetup (SydEthereum) and Australia’s largest independent hackathon (Hackagong).

In this discussion Nathan will be presenting a new project for a blockchain-based economic protocol intended to transition humanity to a post-Capitalist future. We’ll be covering topics such as: runaway automation, technological unemployment, future of work and education, wage slavery, wealth inequality, rising precariat, universal basic income, peer production, platform co-operatives, post-scarcity and decentralised autonomous organisations.

Continue reading “Exponential Series — Nathan Waters” »

Intelligent Machines

Apple’s AI director: here’s how to supercharge deep learning.

Ruslan Salakhutdinov, who leads Apple’s AI efforts, says emerging techniques could make the most popular approach in the field far more powerful.

Continue reading “Apple’s AI director: Here’s how to supercharge deep learning” »

Could artificial intelligence make devices easier to use? According to Samsung, it sure can, and that’s what it the company out to prove with its Bixby AI service.

Bixby is being loaded on the Galaxy S8 and S8+ smartphones, which were announced on Tuesday. Bixby is an agent that can help the smartphones talk, recommend, and remind, said Mok Oh, vice president of service strategy at Samsung.

The AI service is being positioned as a more intuitive way to use and interact with smartphones. For example, Bixby can help smartphones execute tasks with a voice command. It also brings cool features like image recognition and language translation on board the S8 smartphones.

Continue reading “5 things the Samsung Galaxy S8’s Bixby artificial intelligence service will do” »

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket will deliver SES-10, a commercial communications satellite for SES, to a Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO). SES is a world-leading satellite operator, providing reliable and secure satellite communications solutions across the globe.

The SES-10 mission will mark a historic milestone on the road to full and rapid reusability as the world’s first reflight of an orbital class rocket. Falcon 9’s first stage for the SES-10 mission previously supported the successful CRS-8 mission in April 2016.

Continue reading “Ses-10 Mission” »

Back in August 2014, researchers at Michigan State University created a fully transparent solar concentrator, which could turn any window or sheet of glass (like your smartphone’s screen) into a photovoltaic solar cell. Unlike other “transparent” solar cells that we’ve reported on in the past, this one really is transparent, as you can see in the photos throughout this story. According to Richard Lunt, who led the research at the time, the team was confident the transparent solar panels can be efficiently deployed in a wide range of settings, from “tall buildings with lots of windows or any kind of mobile device that demands high aesthetic quality like a phone or e-reader.”

Now Ubiquitous Energy, an MIT startup we first reported on in 2013, is getting closer to bringing its transparent solar panels to market. Lunt cofounded the company and remains assistant professor of chemical engineering and materials science at Michigan State University. Essentially, what they’re doing is instead of shrinking the components, they’re changing the way the cell absorbs light. The cell selectively harvests the part of the solar spectrum we can’t see with our eye, while letting regular visible light pass through.

Scientifically, a transparent solar panel is something of an oxymoron. Solar cells, specifically the photovoltaic kind, make energy by absorbing photons (sunlight) and converting them into electrons (electricity). If a material is transparent, however, by definition it means that all of the light passes through the medium to strike the back of your eye. This is why previous transparent solar cells have actually only been partially transparent — and, to add insult to injury, they usually they cast a colorful shadow too.

Continue reading “This fully transparent solar cell could make every window and screen a power source” »