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Mar 28, 2017

I Took the AI Class Facebookers Are Literally Sprinting to Get Into

Posted by in categories: food, internet, mobile phones, robotics/AI

Chia-Chiunn Ho was eating lunch inside Facebook headquarters, at the Full Circle Cafe, when he saw the notice on his phone: Larry Zitnick, one of the leading figures at the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab, was teaching another class on deep learning.

Ho is a 34-year-old Facebook digital graphics engineer known to everyone as “Solti,” after his favorite conductor. He couldn’t see a way of signing up for the class right there in the app. So he stood up from his half-eaten lunch and sprinted across MPK 20, the Facebook building that’s longer than a football field but feels like a single room. “My desk is all the way at the other end,” he says. Sliding into his desk chair, he opened his laptop and surfed back to the page. But the class was already full.

Internet giants have vacuumed up most of the available AI talent—and they need more.

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Mar 28, 2017

These 3 Companies Are Making Big Bets on Artificial Intelligence

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

With so many players jumping headlong into AI, it’s understandable that investors may not be aware of them all. Here are a few you may not know about.

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Mar 28, 2017

Moon Temple: Art Project Probes Spiritual, Cultural Needs of Lunar Colony

Posted by in category: space

Humanity’s first church on another world could be a dome perched on the rim of a huge crater near the moon’s south pole.

European Space Agency (ESA) artist-in-residence Jorge Mañes Rubio has drawn up plans for a “moon temple” that would help meet the spiritual, social and psychological needs of lunar settlers.

Those needs will likely be considerable, given that the pioneers will be isolated from the rest of humanity on a world hostile to life as we know it, Rubio said. [Visit the Moon Temple: Jorge Mañes Rubio’s Lunar Art in Pictures].

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Mar 28, 2017

How to prepare for employment in the age of artificial intelligence

Posted by in categories: employment, robotics/AI

For centuries, humans have been fretting over “technological unemployment” or the loss of jobs caused by technological change. Never has this sentiment been accentuated more than it is today, at the cusp of the next industrial revolution.

With developments in artificial intelligence continuing at a chaotic pace, fears of robots ultimately replacing humans are increasing.

TNW Conference won best European Event 2016 for our festival vibe. See what’s in store for 2017.

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Mar 28, 2017

Unraveling the Mysteries of Aging

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

Scientists have uncovered a critical step in DNA repair and cellular aging.

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Mar 28, 2017

Trump to unveil new White House office led by Jared Kushner

Posted by in categories: business, Elon Musk, government, law

The innovation office has a particular focus on technology and data, and it is working with such titans as Apple chief executive Tim Cook, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff, and Tesla founder and chief executive Elon Musk. The group has already hosted sessions with more than 100 such leaders and government officials.


The Office of American Innovation aims to overhaul government functions using ideas from the business sector. The president’s son-in-law will lead the Office of American Innovation, which wants to overhaul government by using ideas from the business sector.

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Mar 28, 2017

Elon Musk launches Neuralink, a venture to merge the human brain with AI

Posted by in categories: biological, Elon Musk, robotics/AI

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk is backing a brain-computer interface venture called Neuralink, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company, which is still in the earliest stages of existence and has no public presence whatsoever, is centered on creating devices that can be implanted in the human brain, with the eventual purpose of helping human beings merge with software and keep pace with advancements in artificial intelligence. These enhancements could improve memory or allow for more direct interfacing with computing devices.

Musk has hinted at the existence of Neuralink a few times over the last six months or so. More recently, Musk told a crowd in Dubai, “Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence.” He added that “it’s mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output.” On Twitter, Musk has responded to inquiring fans about his progress on a so-called “neural lace,” which is sci-fi shorthand for a brain-computer interface humans could use to improve themselves.

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Mar 28, 2017

Automated Industrial Drones

Posted by in categories: drones, robotics/AI

To address the unique needs of the world’s most complex industrial environments,

Airobotics has developed a platform that is fully automated, industrial grade, on-demand and multi-purpose.

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Mar 27, 2017

Musk Is Preparing to Release “Brain Hacking Tech,” And He’s Not Alone

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, Elon Musk, robotics/AI

Today, Elon Musk stated that updates regarding his neural lace, which is meant to augment the human mind, are coming next month. In October, Bryan Johnson announced a $100 million investment to put computers in our brains. And so, a race is on to hack human intelligence.

The age of the machine is well underway, and there is a very good chance that humanity will be left behind. Artificial intelligence is beating us at poker. It is beating us at Go. It is saving lives by identifying diseases when human doctors fail. It is running our grocery stores. It is driving our cars. AI is even making other AI.

Soon, very soon, our computers will surpass us in every skill imaginable.

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Mar 27, 2017

Scientists convert spinach leaves into human heart tissue — that beats

Posted by in categories: bioengineering, biotech/medical, food

If an overhyped vegetable existed before marketers coined the term superfood — and long before Oprah Winfrey chatted up acai berries with Dr. Oz — look no further than spinach. (Here’s to Popeye, eating the stuff by the can to inflate his biceps.) Spinach alone, of course, won’t pump anyone up. But it does have a few physical properties of the type that excite biomedical engineers. Spinach grows a network of veins, for instance, that thread through its leaves in a way similar to blood vessels through a human heart.

These leafy veins allowed researchers at Massachusetts’s Worcester Polytechnic Institute to give a new meaning to heart-healthy spinach. The tissue engineers, as they reported recently in the journal Biomaterials, stripped green spinach leaves of their cells. The spinach turned translucent. The scientists seeded the gaps that the plant cells left behind with human heart tissue. Heart cells, in clusters, beat for up to three weeks in this unusual environment.

The inspiration for the human-plant fusion came over lunch — and, yes, the leafy greens were involved — when WPI bioengineers Glenn Gaudette and Joshua Gershlak began to brainstorm new ways to tackle a deadly medical problem: the lack of donor organs. Of the more than 100,000 people on the donor list, nearly two dozen people die each day while waiting for an organ transplant.

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