Lifeboat Foundation

Learn More.

UNDRR

The waters are rising! Japan is using Augmented Reality to teach children about the dangers of flash floods 🌊

Continue reading “Status of Science and Technology in Disaster Risk Reduction in Asia-Pacific 2020” »

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have successfully revived human heart tissue after it had been preserved in a subfreezing, supercooled state for up to three days.

A truck fleet accident costs an average of $16,500 in damages and $57,500 in injury-related costs for a total of $74,000. “This does not include a broad range of ‘hidden’ costs, including reduced vehicle value (typically anywhere from $500 to $2,000), higher insurance premium, legal fees, driver turnover (the average driver replacement cost = $8,200), lost employee time, lost vehicle-use time, administrative burden, reduced employee morale and bad publicity,” said Yoav Banin, chief product officer at Nauto, which provides artificial intelligence driver and fleet performance solutions.

Emphasis on truck driving safety is well placed, considering other challenges that the trucking industry is facing.

Ranking first is a chronic shortage of truck drivers nationwide that could force fleet operators to hire less-experienced drivers who require operator and safety training. Driver compensation and truck parking ranked second and third, but immediately behind them in fourth and fifth position were driver truck fleet safety and insurance availability, which depends on safe driving records.

Artificial intelligence expert Timnit Gebru on the challenges researchers can face at Big Tech companies, and how to protect workers and their research.

Artificial intelligence research leads to new cutting-edge technologies, but it’s expensive. Big Tech companies, which are powered by AI and have deep pockets, often take on this work — but that gives them the power to censor or impede research that casts them in an unfavorable light, according to Timnit Gebru, a computer scientist, co-founder of the nonprofit organization Black in AI and the former co-leader of Google’s Ethical AI team.

The situation imperils both the rights of AI workers at those companies and the quality of research that is shared with the public, said Gebru, speaking at the recent EmTech MIT conference hosted by MIT Technology Review.

China is pulling ahead of global rivals when it comes to innovative AI “unicorns” that are pushing the technology forward. Research from GlobalData has found that — of the 45 international AI unicorns identified — China has the largest share with 19 based in the country.

Collectively, the Chinese AI unicorns are valued at $43.5 billion.

Beijing has been on a regulatory crackdown in recent months, especially on Chinese companies doing business in, and with, the US.

Continue reading “GlobalData: China is ahead of global rivals for AI ‘unicorns’” »

It’s been a hot, hot year in the world of data, machine learning, and AI. Just when you thought it couldn’t grow any more explosively, the data/AI landscape just did: the rapid pace of company creation, exciting new product and project launches, a deluge of VC financings, unicorn creation, IPOs, etc.

It has also been a year of multiple threads and stories intertwining.

One story has been the maturation of the ecosystem, with market leaders reaching large scale and ramping up their ambitions for global market domination, in particular through increasingly broad product offerings. Some of those companies, such as Snowflake, have been thriving in public markets (see our MAD Public Company Index), and a number of others (Databricks, Dataiku, DataRobot, etc.) have raised very largely (or in the case of Databricks, gigantic) rounds at multi-billion valuations and are knocking on the IPO door (see our Emerging MAD company Index).

Arm is releasing new chip design offerings in the internet of things (IoT), virtual hardware, and 5G sectors.

Cambridge, United Kingdom-based Arm designs the architecture that other licensed chip makers use to build their chips. Arm likes to make it easier for those licensees to come up with their applications and create a foundation for an IoT economy.

So the company said its Arm Total Solutions for IoT now delivers a full-stack solution to significantly accelerate the development and return-on-investment for IoT chip products. And Arm Virtual Hardware removes the need to develop on physical silicon, enabling software and hardware co-design and accelerating product design by up to two years, the company claimed.

Multidisciplinary team of materials physicists and geophysicists combine theoretical predictions, simulations, and seismic tomography to find spin transition in the Earth’s mantle.

The interior of the Earth is a mystery, especially at greater depths (660 km). Researchers only have seismic tomographic images of this region and, to interpret them, they need to calculate seismic (acoustic) velocities in minerals at high pressures and temperatures. With those calculations, they can create 3D velocity maps and figure out the mineralogy and temperature of the observed regions. When a phase transition occurs in a mineral, such as a crystal structure change under pressure, scientists observe a velocity change, usually a sharp seismic velocity discontinuity.

In 2,003 scientists observed in a lab a novel type of phase change in minerals — a spin change in iron in ferropericlase, the second most abundant component of the Earth’s lower mantle. A spin change, or spin crossover, can happen in minerals like ferropericlase under an external stimulus, such as pressure or temperature. Over the next few years, experimental and theoretical groups confirmed this phase change in both ferropericlase and bridgmanite, the most abundant phase of the lower mantle. But no one was quite sure why or where this was happening.

China has unveiled the crew for its Shenzou 13 mission to the country’s brand new Tiangong space station, including the first female astronaut to venture to the outpost, the South China Morning Post reports.

Wang Yaping will spend six months on board the space station — the country’s longest crewed mission to date — alongside astronauts Zhai Zhigang and Ye Guangfu. She could also become the first female Chinese astronaut to complete a spacewalk.

“After eight years of relentless effort, I am going back to space again,” Wang told reporters on Thursday, as quoted by SCMP. “Students, let me know what you want to learn this time. I will prepare a great lecture for you in orbit.”