Lifeboat Foundation

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has selected the teams for two research programs that the agency hopes will provide technologies to transcend the limits of Moore’s Law.

As part of DARPA’s $1.5 billion Electronics Resurgence Initiative (ERI) to “jumpstart innovation in the electronics industry,” the Three Dimensional Monolithic System-on-a-Chip (3DSoC) program and the Foundations Required for Novel Compute (FRANC) program are focused on developing chip-level innovations that lead to more powerful and efficient computing systems. We reported on both programs last September, just after they were announced.

Last week, during DARPA’s first ERI Summit in San Francisco, the agency revealed the research teams selected to drive each of these efforts. For the 3DSoC program, groups from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Skywater Technology Foundry were tapped. The corresponding research teams for the FRANC program will come from HRL Laboratories; Applied Materials, Inc.; Ferric, Inc.; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of Minnesota; and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Continue reading “DARPA Picks Research Teams for Post-Moore’s Law Work” »

AI is a buzzword that gets tossed around often in the business world and in the media, but it is already having tangible effects for a slew of industries — not least those that rely on a significant amount of manual labor.

As AI comes increasingly closer to maturity, and businesses continue to ramp up investments in it, some worry that not enough attention is being paid to the broader social and moral implications of the technology.

CNBC spoke with some experts to see what they think are the five scariest potential future scenarios for AI.

Continue reading “Five of the scariest predictions about artificial intelligence” »

Google Maps is shutting down flat-Earthers with its new zoom feature.

The biggest breakthrough in AI, deep learning, has hit a wall, and a debate is raging about how to get to the next level.

Next time you eat a blueberry (or chocolate chip) muffin consider what happened to the blueberries in the batter as it was baked. The blueberries started off all squished together, but as the muffin expanded they started to move away from each other. If you could sit on one blueberry you would see all the others moving away from you, but the same would be true for any blueberry you chose. In this sense galaxies are a lot like blueberries.

Since the Big Bang, the universe has been expanding. The strange fact is that there is no single place from which the universe is expanding, but rather all galaxies are (on average) moving away from all the others. From our perspective in the Milky Way galaxy, it seems as though most galaxies are moving away from us – as if we are the centre of our muffin-like universe. But it would look exactly the same from any other galaxy – everything is moving away from everything else.

To make matters even more confusing, new observations suggest that the rate of this expansion in the universe may be different depending on how far away you look back in time. This new data, published in the Astrophysical Journal, indicates that it may time to revise our understanding of the cosmos.

Continue reading “New Physics Needed to Resolve Universe Expansion Debate?” »

But only if employees have the authority and the skills to make the call.

The city of Cupertino is hoping Apple will be willing to heavily subsidize the construction of a hyperloop to ease the city’s transportation woes.

At a pier in San Diego, researchers on Wednesday recorded the warmest sea surface temperature since record-keeping began there in 1916.

Every day, researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego collect data — by hand — from the Ellen Browning Scripps Memorial Pier.

Wednesday’s 78.6 degrees Fahrenheit at the pier surpassed a previous record of 78.4 degrees in 1931, researchers said in a statement on Thursday.

Continue reading “San Diego Researchers Measure The Highest Ocean Surface Temperature In A Century” »

A BASIC income (BI) is defined as a modest, regular payment to every legal resident in the community, paid unconditionally as a right, regardless of income, employment or relationship status.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the case for BI does not rest on the assumption that robots and artificial intelligence will cause mass unemployment or that it would be a more efficient way of relieving poverty than present welfare systems (although it would). The main arguments are ethical and relate to social justice, individual freedom and the need for basic security.