Lifeboat Foundation

Why aren’t there more robots in homes? This a surprising complex question — and our homes are surprisingly complex places. A big part of the reason autonomous systems are thriving on warehouse and factory floors first is the relative ease of navigating a structured environment. Sure, most systems still require a space be mapped prior to getting to work, but once that’s in place there tends to be little in the way of variation.

Homes, on the other hand, are kind of a nightmare. Not only do they vary dramatically from unit to unit, they’re full of unfriendly obstacles and tend to be fairly dynamic, as furniture is moved around or things are left on the floor. Vacuums are the most prevalent robots in the home, and they’re still being refined after decades on the market.

This week, researchers at MIT CSAIL are showcasing PIGINet (Plans, Images, Goal, and Initial facts), which is designed to bring task and motion planning to home robotic systems. The neural network is designed to help streamline their ability to create plans of action in different environments.

YouTube is experimenting with AI-generated quizzes on its mobile app for iOS and Android devices, which are designed to help viewers learn more about a subject featured in an educational video. The feature will also help the video-sharing platform get a better understanding of how well each video covers a certain topic.

The AI-generated quizzes, which YouTube noted on its experiments page yesterday, are rolling out globally to a small percentage of users that watch “a few” educational videos, the company wrote. The quiz feature is only available for a select portion of English-language content, which will appear on the home feed as links under recently watched videos.

Not all of YouTube’s experiments make it to the platform, so it will be interesting to see if this one sticks around. We’re not sure how many people — especially if they’re no longer in school — want to take a quiz while they scroll through videos.

The regulatory crackdown that has shaken up China’s fintech industry since late 2020 appears to be coming to a close with the imposition of hefty fines on the country’s two digital payments giants.

Tencent, along with its payments subsidiary Tenpay, has been fined approximately 2.99 billion yuan ($410 million) by the People’s Bank of China for “its past regulatory breaches in relation to the provision of payment services in the mainland of China,” the company said in a filing on Friday.

On the same day, the central bank announced it will slap a 7.123 billion yuan (roughly $1 billion) fine on Ant Group, the fintech affiliate of Alibaba, for a range of illegal activities, including those concerning corporate governance, consumer protection, banking and insurance, payments and settlement, anti-money laundering practices and fund sales.

The Mayo Clinic has reportedly been testing the system since April.

Google’s Med-PaLM 2, an AI tool designed to answer questions about medical information, has been in testing at the Mayo Clinic research hospital, among others, since April, The Wall Street Journal.

Continue reading “Google’s medical AI chatbot is already being tested in hospitals” »

Assistive technology services are integrating OpenAI’s GPT-4, using artificial intelligence to help describe objects and people.

In January 2021, EPFL engineers announced in Advanced Science their concept of a novel cardiac assist device that is devoid of rigid metallic components. It consists of a soft, artificial muscle wrapped around the aorta that can constrict and dilate the vessel, ultimately enhancing the aorta’s natural function and aiding the heart to pump blood to the rest of the body.

Now June 2021, EPFL engineers led by Yves Perriard of the Laboratory of Integrated Actuators in collaboration with University of Bern, have successfully implanted their first artificial tubular muscle, in vivo, in a pig. During the 4-hour long operation, their cardiac assist device maintained 24 000 pulsations, of which 1,500 were activated artificially by the augmented aorta.

More information with downloadable pdf:

Continue reading “Researchers successfully implanted the first artificial tubular muscle in vivo” »

More earbuds, these from Waverly Labs. They also have the pilot. The Interpreter arrives as a pair of over-the-ear headphones, one for your right ear and one for your friend’s. You download the Ambassador mobile app—where all the translation work gets done—and pair both headphones to your phone using Bluetooth.

Ambassador has three operational modes. Converse mode is a two-way system: You both pick one of the 20 languages and 42 dialects available, and the app translates your language to his and his to yours. (Up to four people at once can talk this way through the app, if you have enough earphones.) Lecture mode is a one-way system that translates your speech and streams it through your smartphone’s speaker in another tongue. Listen mode goes the other way, listening for the language of your choice, translating it into your own language, and piping it into your earpiece.

The Ambassador app-connected earphones translate human speech into multiple tongues, enabling multilingual conversations.

Artificial intelligence algorithms, such as the sophisticated natural language processor ChatGPT, are raising hopes, eyebrows and alarm bells in multiple industries. A deluge of news articles and opinion pieces, reflecting both concerns about and promises of the rapidly advancing field, often note AI’s potential to spread misinformation and replace human workers on a massive scale. According to Jonathan Chen, MD, PhD, assistant professor of medicine, the speculation about large-scale disruptions has a kernel of truth to it, but it misses another element when it comes to health care: AI will bring benefits to both patients and providers.

Chen discussed the challenges with and potential for AI in health care in a commentary published in JAMA on April 28. In this Q&A, he expands on how he sees AI integrating into health care.

The algorithms we’re seeing emerge have really popped open Pandora’s box and, ready or not, AI will substantially change the way physicians work and the way patients interact with clinical medicine. For example, we can tell our patients that they should not be using these tools for medical advice or self-diagnosis, but we know that thousands, if not millions, of people are already doing it — typing in symptoms and asking the models what might be ailing them.

A genetic editing system similar to CRISPR-Cas9 has been uncovered for the first time in eukaryotes – the group of organisms that include fungi, plants, and animals. The system, based on a protein called Fanzor, can be guided to precisely target and edit sections of DNA, and that could open up the possibility of its use as a human genome editing tool.

The research team, led by Professor Feng Zhang at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, began to suspect that Fanzor proteins might act as nucleases – enzymes that can chop up nucleic acids, like DNA – during a previous investigation.

Continue reading “Newfound CRISPR-Like System In Animals Could Be Used To Manipulate Human Genomes” »