Lifeboat Foundation

How our ideas about sex and service influence the personalities we give machines… Consider the artificially intelligent voices you hear on a regular basis. Are any of them men? Whether it’s Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Amazon’s Alexa, or virtually any GPS system, chances are the computerized personalities in your life are women.

This gender imbalance is pervasive in fiction as well as reality. Films like “Her” and “Ex Machina” reflect our anxieties about what intelligent machines mean for humanity. But AI, in and of itself, is genderless and sexless. Why, then, are the majority of the personalities we construct for these machines female?

Is it about service? Assigning gender to these AI personalities may say something about the roles we expect them to play. Virtual assistants like Siri, Cortana, and Alexa perform functions historically given to women. They schedule appointments, look up information, and are generally designed for communication.

In the course of Assured Autonomy program, researchers will aim to develop tools that provide foundational evidence that a system can satisfy explicitly stated functional and safety goals, resulting in a measure of assurance that can also evolve with the system.

Learn more about the Assured Autonomy program: http://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2017-08-16

Made In Space has announced the completion of its three-part project focused on the additive manufacturing of radiation shields it launched earlier this summer, and tested them aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

TCT first reported the printing of the protective shields which are being used on NASA’s Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) – connected to the ISS – in May. Made In Space (MIS) used its Additive Manufacturing Facility to produce the shields, which grew in thickness as the testing phase went on. The first was made at 1.1mm thick, the second at 3.3mm and the third at 10mm, all in ABS plastic.

The shields include within them channels which hold Radiation Enclosure Monitors (REM), sensors being used on the BEAM to test for radiation, recording the measurements. Astronauts aboard the ISS would change these devices at regular intervals between April and end of June, when the project concluded.

Continue reading “Made In Space announces completion of 3D printed radiation shields project” »

Death, taxis and technology: titles in the running for this year’s Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year give a new twist to the old maxim about certainty.

The 17 books on the 2017 longlist include analyses of the implications of world-changing innovations, from the iPhone to drones; a lively account of the rise of Uber; and a sobering history of the role war, plague and catastrophe have played in shaping our economies.

Titles about the relentless march of technology dominate the FT/McKinsey annual prize.

Researchers have recently discovered two different types of memory use completely different processes in the same nerves, opening the way for a new pharmaceutical solution for treating anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The find challenges earlier research that had suggested memories of traumatic events used the same nerves in the same ways, making them impossible to physically distinguish.

A team of scientists from Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) and McGill University analysed neurons from a marine snail called an Aplysia in order to test a hypothesis explaining why memories of incidents surrounding a bad experience can themselves trigger anxiety.

Continue reading “Scientists think they might soon be able to edit human memories” »

Abstract: Berg and Ulfberg and Amano and Maruoka have used CNF-DNF-approximators to prove exponential lower bounds for the monotone network complexity of the clique function and of Andreev’s function. We show that these approximators can be used to prove the same lower bound for their non-monotone network complexity. This implies P not equal NP.

Honey bees really are tiny hardworking superheroes of the insect world — not only do they keep our agriculture going by pollinating many of our crops, but they also produce a myriad of beneficial substances, like honey and beeswax.

For thousands of years honey has been prized for its topical antiseptic properties. But now researchers have discovered that its lesser-known cousin, royal jelly, has special molecules that speed up wound healing.

Royal jelly is the superfood worker bees secrete and feed all their larvae, especially the queen bees. While queens are developing, they basically float in a pool of this stuff, and humans have figured out how to stimulate queen larva production to then harvest the royal jelly.

Continue reading “This Molecule Found in Royal Jelly Is The Secret Ingredient to Speed Up Wound Healing” »

Famously described as ‘the deepest problem in solid state physics’ by Nobel Laureate, Philip Andersen, the glass transition, by which a liquid transforms into a solid without freezing, is shedding its mystique.

Until now, researchers’ understanding has been splintered at best, with mutually incompatible interpretations of the physical processes underlying the emergence of amorphous solids (glasses).

Now a team of scientists from the University of Bristol and Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz in Germany may have found the missing fragment, enabling the reconciliation of differing interpretations.

The research arm of the U.S. Department of Defense is marshalling an international effort to overcome what many say is the biggest obstacle to widespread adoption of artificial intelligence: teaching algorithms to explain their decision-making to humans.