Lifeboat Foundation

CAMBRIDGE, MA —The Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard University announces the appointment of Dr. Kanaka Rajan, the first faculty member hired within the recently launched Kempner Institute. As a founding faculty member at the Kempner, Dr. Rajan will serve as an institute investigator. She will also have a dual appointment, serving as a member of the faculty in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School.

Working jointly with the HMS Department of Neurobiology and the Kempner Institute, Dr. Rajan will support the intersecting research, scientific, and educational missions of both communities. Dr. Rajan starts in September 2023.

“We are thrilled to have Dr. Rajan join the Kempner, where she will play a key role in helping to shape and advance the institute’s research program,” said Kempner Co-Director Bernardo Sabatini. “She is a true leader in the field, using innovative techniques to tackle big, difficult questions, and expanding the possibilities for how we use artificial intelligence and machine learning to understand the enduring mysteries of the brain.”

Evolutionary robotics is a sub-field of robotics aimed at developing artificial “organisms” that can improve their capabilities and body configuration in response to their surroundings, just as humans and animals evolve, adapting their skills and appearance over time. A growing number of roboticists have been trying to develop these evolvable robotic systems, leveraging recent artificial intelligence (AI) advances.

A key challenge in this field is to effectively transfer robots from simulations to real-world environments without compromising their performance and abilities. A paper by researchers at University of York, Edinburgh Napier University, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, University of the West of England and University of Sunderland, published in Frontiers in Robotics and AI, investigated the impact that hardware can have on the development space of evolvable robots.

“One of the greatest challenges for evolutionary robotics is bringing it into the hardware space and creating real, useful robots,” Mike Angus, a research engineer who designed hardware for the study, told Tech Xplore.

Intel demoed a non-x86 chip with eight cores, 528 threads, and 1TB/s of optical I/O at Hot Chips 2023.

The novel photosynthetic biocomposite material is a 3D-printed structure made of a seaweed-based polymer combined with genetically engineered cyanobacteria to produce an enzyme that transforms various organic pollutants into benign molecules.

Summary: New findings challenge our understanding of fruit fly social behaviors. While traditionally thought to rely primarily on chemical receptors for social interactions, the fruit fly’s visual system plays a pivotal role too.

By manipulating the visual feedback neurons in male fruit flies, researchers discovered that their social inhibitions were altered, leading males to court other males. This novel insight can potentially enlighten our comprehension of social behaviors in humans, including those with bipolar disorder and autism.

Wobbly jets blasting out from active galaxies are ‘smoking gun’ evidence for supermassive black hole binary systems that elude astronomers, a new study reports.

Summary: Toddlers as young as 19 months old exhibit natural logical thinking, independent of language knowledge. This ability, manifesting as exclusion by elimination, allows toddlers to make conclusions about unknown realities by discounting known impossibilities.

Through analyzing gaze movement patterns in tests, they discerned this innate reasoning process. The study further found no significant differences between bilingual and monolingual toddlers, suggesting that this logic doesn’t hinge on linguistic experience.

Astronomers have observed the outer edge of a disk of matter surrounding a feeding supermassive black hole for the first time.

These observations could help scientists better measure the structures that surround these cosmic monsters, understand how black holes feed on those structures and put together how this feeding influences the evolution of galaxies that house such phenomena.

Male fruit flies don’t usually like each other. Socially, they reject their fellow males and zero in on the females they discern via chemical receptors—or so scientists thought.

New research from Cornell University biologists suggests the fruit fly’s visual system, not just chemical receptors, are deeply involved with their social behaviors. The work sheds light on the possible origin of differences in human social behaviors, such as those seen in people with bipolar disorder and autism.

The paper is published in Current Biology.