“The clothing industry is said to be the world’s second most polluting business, runner-up in grubbiness to oil.”
GUN violence in America gets plenty of attention, but cars kill more. Around 40,000 people a year die on American roads, more than all fatalities caused by firearms (of which two-thirds are suicides, not homicides). The death rate in America, around 12 people per 100,000, is more than twice that of western Europe. The grim toll of motor-vehicle deaths is widely seen as unavoidable, given that the United States is a large, sprawling country primarily designed around the automobile. However, around a third of these deaths involved drunk drivers, suggesting that there is, in fact, substantial room for improvement. And fortunately, it appears that the advent of ride-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft has had a welcome impact on road safety.
According to a working paper by Jessica Lynn Peck of the Graduate Centre at the City University of New York, the arrival of Uber to New York City may have helped reduce alcohol-related traffic accidents by 25–35%. Uber was first introduced in the city in May 2011, but did not spread through the rest of the state. The study uses this as a natural experiment. To control for factors unrelated to Uber’s launch such as adverse weather conditions, Ms Peck compares accident rates in each of New York’s five boroughs to those in the counties where Uber was not present, picking those that had the most similar population density and pre-2011 drunk-driving rate.
Libratus, an AI built by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), racked up over $US1.7 million ($2.2 million) worth of chips against four of the top professional poker players in the world in a 20-day marathon poker tournament that ended in Philadelphia on Tuesday…
While machines have beaten humans over the last two decade in chess, checkers, and most recently in the ancient game of Go, Libratus’ victory is significant because poker is an imperfect information game — similar to the real world where not all problems are laid out.
The difficulty in figuring out human behaviour is one of the main reasons why poker was considered immune to machines.
Continue reading “Artificial intelligence beats humans in poker for first time” »
The United States Air Force may become a sort of space cop in the not-too-distant future.
An off-Earth economy cannot truly take off unless moon miners and other pioneering entrepreneurs are able to operate in a safe and stable environment, said Air Force Lt. Col. Thomas Schilling, of Air University.
China has made the precision medicine field a focus of its 13th five-year plan, and its companies have been embarking on ambitious efforts to collect a vast trove of genetic and health data, researching how to identify cancer markers in blood, and launching consumer technologies that aim to tap potentially life-saving information. The push offers insight into China’s growing ambitions in science and biotechnology, areas where it has traditionally lagged developed nations like the United States.
Precision medicine a focus of latest five-year plan.
PUBLISHED : Thursday, 09 February, 2017, 1:42pm.
Continue reading “Chinese biotech scientists plan to use big data in war on cancer” »
NASA has announced the recipients of its most recent round of highly experimental projects it deems promising enough to fund. These NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts aren’t guaranteed to go all the way, but are rather sort of low-risk, high potential reward moonshots — science fiction they hope will be more the former than the latter.
The awards are a regular occurrence and divided into Phase I and Phase II: Phase I projects are more or less in the concept stage and will get around $125,000 over 9 months to see if they’re at all viable, essentially from “might work” to “should work.” Phase II projects get a more flexible amount, but as much as half a million dollars over 2 years, to see about going from “should work” to “works.”
The full list of awards can be found here, but I’ve selected a few I think are especially promising.
Continue reading “Stellar echoes, Venusian automatons and more gain NASA moonshot funding” »
A tsunami of change is already arriving. Artificial intelligence is now capable of doing desk jobs that were previously safe from automation. The social and economic effects remain to be seen, but is AI what we think it is?
Workplaces that include artificial intelligence (AI) will soon be reality, say researchers who believe the rise of AI in all areas of life is not only inevitable, it’s set to reshape the way we think about consciousness and human identity.
From Metropolis to 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Terminator, robots and super-intelligent AIs in film have seduced and terrified our collective consciousness, having an impact on how we view artificial intelligence. But will they really crush the puny humans and take over the world?
Continue reading “Workplace diversity will soon include artificial intelligence” »
Microsoft is bringing its Cognitive Toolkit version 2.0 out of beta today and should be helping out a ton of companies who depend on tools to deploy deep learning at scale.
The Cognitive Toolkit or CNTK to some is a deep learning tool that helps companies speed up the process of image and speech recognition. Thanks to today’s update, CNTK can now be used by companies either on-premises or in the cloud combined with Azure GPUs.
Cognitive Toolkit is being used extensively by a wide variety of Microsoft products, by companies worldwide with a need to deploy deep learning at scale, and by students interested in the very latest algorithms and techniques. The latest version of the toolkit is available on GitHub via an open source license. Since releasing the beta in October 2016, more than 10 beta releases have been deployed with hundreds of new features, performance improvements and fixes.
