Lifeboat Foundation

Hyper-connectivity has changed the way we communicate, wait, and productively use our time. Even in a world of 5G wireless and “instant” messaging, there are countless moments throughout the day when we’re waiting for messages, texts, and Snapchats to refresh. But our frustrations with waiting a few extra seconds for our emails to push through doesn’t mean we have to simply stand by.

To help us make the most of these “micro-moments,” researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed a series of apps called “WaitSuite” that test you on vocabulary words during idle moments, like when you’re waiting for an instant message or for your phone to connect to WiFi.

Continue reading “Learn a language while you wait for WiFi” »

• An advisory council has urged the U.S. to establish a new body that creates plans for national biodefense and to set aside a $2 billion standby fund to address emerging bioterror threats.
• As gene editing technology advances, the potential for its use as a weapon increases, and preparing for such threats before they happen is of the utmost importance.

Though the technology promises seemingly innumerable ways to positively impact human life, gene editing is truly a double-edged sword, with nearly as many potentially negative consequences as benefits. Now, an advisory council to President Obama is urging the government to start creating countermeasures for the negative use of emerging biotechnologies.

This month, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) wrote a letter to President Obama recommending measures to address this potential for harm using new technologies. It advocates funding new research into antibiotic and antiviral drugs to combat resistance and having a $250 million fund for the stockpiling of vaccines.

Bandages which can detect how a wound is healing and send messages back to doctors could be trialled within the next 12 months, scientists have said.

The bandages would use real-time 5G technology to monitor what treatment is needed and also keep track of a patient’s activity levels.

The work is being led by Swansea University’s Institute of Life Science.

Continue reading “Swansea University smart bandage trials ‘within 12 months’” »

Drawing inspiration from the plant world, researchers have invented a new electrode that could boost our current solar energy storage by an astonishing 3,000 percent.

The technology is flexible and can be attached directly to solar cells — which means we could finally be one step closer to smartphones and laptops that draw their power from the Sun, and never run out.

A major problem with reliably using solar energy as a power source is finding an efficient way to store it for later use without leakage over time.

Continue reading “This New Graphene-Based Electrode Could Boost Solar Storage” »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BkaG-XIadU&feature=share

Good Fellows is a series of short films that focus on the unique and human stories of IBM Fellows. To be named a Fellow is to achieve the highest honor bestowed by IBM to its most outstanding technical employees.

Chieko Asakawa has been blind since the age of fourteen and for the past three decades has worked to further accessibility research and development. She was named IBM Fellow in 2009 and in 2013, the government of Japan awarded the Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon to Chieko for outstanding contributions to accessibility research.

Continue reading “Good Fellow: Chieko Asakawa” »

Money 2017 speakers Juergen Schmidhuber, Wirecard’s Joern Leogrande and Nutmeg’s Nick Hungerford discuss the changing face of AI-driven finance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTGthmNmrK4&feature=share

Google’s DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis shows that AI doesn’t only learn from human knowledge, but also creates new knowledge. AlphaGo has it own creativity and intuition, inventing new knowledge and strategies about Go Game for human professionals to study in 2017.

Go game was invented in ancient China more than 2,500 years ago, is an abstract strategy board game, aiming to surround more territory than the opponent for two players. It is believed to be the oldest board game continuously played today. Despite its relatively simple rules, Go is very complex, even more so than chess, and possesses more possibilities than the total number of atoms in the visible universe. Compared to chess, Go has both a larger board with more scope for play and longer games, and, on average, many more alternatives to consider per move.

Amper is a platform which enables anyone to make music with AI.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuqvQr7DiTQ&feature=share

At the Woodside operated Natural Gas Plant in Karratha, Western Australia, employees often work in challenging conditions. IBM Watson is making things a little easier, by allowing employees to ask technical questions via their tablets or computers. Watson has been trained with expert knowledge from thousands of employees, and can help provide project-related answers in minutes, instead of hours. Now if only he could do something about the 40-degrees Celsius average outside temperature.