Interview with George Church.
Harvard researcher Dr. George Church has developed an innovative gene editing technology called CRISPR/Cas9 that could transform senescent cells. He predicts this technology may reverse aging in humans. Life Extension Foundation® assisted by providing Dr. Church with gene sequencing data from its super-centenarian project.
Deep learning owes its rising popularity to its vast applications across an increasing number of fields. From healthcare to finance, automation to e-commerce, the RE•WORK Deep Learning Summit (27−28 April) will showcase the deep learning landscape and its impact on business and society.
Of notable interest is speaker Jeffrey De Fauw, Research Engineer at DeepMind. Prior to joining DeepMind, De Fauw developed a deep learning model to detect Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) in fundus images, which he will be presenting at the Summit. DR is a leading cause of blindness in the developed world and diagnosing it is a time-consuming process. De Fauw’s model was designed to reduce diagnostics time and to accurately identify patients at risk, to help them receive treatment as early as possible.
Joining De Fauw will be Brian Cheung, A PhD student from UC Berkeley, and currently working at Google Brain. At the event, he will explain how neural network models are able to extract relevant features from data with minimal feature engineering. Applied in the study of physiology, his research aims to use a retinal lattice model to examine retinal images.
SAN FRANCISCO, April 4, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — Enlitic, a medical deep learning company, is pleased to announce that it has executed a Memorandum of Understanding (“MOU”) with Beijing Hao Yun Dao Information & Technology Co., Ltd (“Paiyipai”) to provide Enlitic’s deep learning solution to Paiyipai for diagnostic imaging in Health Check centers across China.
Paiyipai is a medical big data company. The company is a market leader in China in the analysis of individual laboratory medical test results, and the storage and distribution of user medical records.
The MOU forms the basis of collaboration for the first large-scale commercial deployment of Enlitic’s deep learning technology in China. It was executed following a successful 10,000 chest x-ray trial of Enlitic’s patient triage platform.
Earlier this month, Moscow’s Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week showcased some spectacular 3D printed prosthetic arms made by designer Nikita Replyanski and Russian prosthesis manufacturer Motorica. The 3D printed prostheses, inspired by robots and butterflies, were made using Autodesk Fusion 360.
Fashion weeks, whether they’re being held in the “Big Four” fashion capitals of the world or elsewhere, tend to favor style over substance. It’s called a fashion week, after all, not a function week. But that doesn’t mean that the industry events don’t occasionally showcase items that are as sensible as they are stylish. Just have a look at what was on show at Moscow’s Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week earlier this month.
While not usually an event of major global interest like Paris Fashion Week, the Russian fashion show brought together a host of top designers looking to show off their fall/winter 2017–2018 collections. Amongst those designers was Nikita Replyanski, a Russian designer and concept artist who left the computer games industry three years ago to focus on designing physical, non-virtual items. But rather than show off dresses, shoes, hats, Replyanski was presenting something totally different: 3D printed prosthetic arms.
I do not think, at least at first, that any brain interfaces for the masses will be anything other than organic. Possibly a synthetic virus that can be inserted and removed without the invasion of instruments. Those things we might have to deal with either way are summarized here.
How closely will we live with the technology we use in the future? How will it change us? And how close is “close”? Ghost in the Shell imagines a futuristic, hi-tech but grimy and ghetto-ridden Japanese metropolis populated by people, robots, and technologically-enhanced human cyborgs.
Beyond the superhuman strength, resilience, and X-ray vision provided by bodily enhancements, one of the most transformative aspects of this world is the idea of brain augmentation, that as cyborgs we might have two brains rather than one. Our biological brain—the “ghost” in the “shell”—would interface via neural implants to powerful embedded computers that would give us lightning-fast reactions and heightened powers of reasoning, learning and memory.
First written as a Manga comic series in 1989 during the early days of the internet, Ghost in the Shell’s creator, Japanese artist Masamune Shirow, foresaw that this brain-computer interface would overcome the fundamental limitation of the human condition: that our minds are trapped inside our heads. In Shirow’s transhuman future our minds would be free to roam, relaying thoughts and imaginings to other networked brains, entering via the cloud into distant devices and sensors, even “deep diving” the mind of another in order to understand and share their experiences.
Interest in rejuvenation biotechnology is growing in the investment quarter.
Mainstream interest in rejuvenation biotechnology is growing.
“Investment in the development of rejuvenation therapies represents an enormous opportunity for profit; these are products for which every adult human being much over the age of 30 is a potential customer at some price point. That is larger than near every existing industry, either within or outside the field of medicine, even given that customers will only purchase such a therapy once every few years, for clearance of metabolic waste, or even just once, for treatments like the SENS approach of allotopic expression of mitochondrial genes. Among the first successful companies in this space, some will grow to become among the largest in the world: I’d wager that the Ford or Microsoft of rejuvenation will be a lot larger than the actual Ford of automobiles or Microsoft of personal computing.”
The key to this all working is the design of the nanostructures. If you just have a laser in free space, the particle will just oscillate back and forth, pushing it one way and then the other. It won’t ever gain in total energy. So you need some kind of structure that channels or modulates the fields in such a way that the particle will travel along mainly the peaks of the electromagnetic wave and not into the troughs so that it gets kicks but not deceleration.
In all of the experiments done so far, England explains that the particles are basically filling the whole wave, occupying and seeing both the peaks and troughs. This results in some particles being accelerated while others get decelerated.
“In the future, as one of the next experimental steps what we want is to bunch the particles to make very short little packets of particles that are spaced at exactly the right distance between the peaks so that they will ride only on the peaks,” says England. “So you can think of it as like… ocean waves, and you want your surfers to be positioned only on the peaks of the waves and not in the troughs.”
Artificial intelligence has reached peak hype. News outlets report that companies have replaced workers with IBM Watson and that algorithms are beating doctors at diagnoses. New AI startups pop up everyday, claiming to solve all your personal and business problems with machine learning.
Ordinary objects like juicers and Wi-Fi routers suddenly advertise themselves as “powered by AI.” Not only can smart standing desks remember your height settings, they can also order you lunch.
Much of the AI hubbub is generated by reporters who’ve never trained a neural network and by startups or those hoping to be acqui-hired for engineering talent despite not having solved any real business problems. No wonder there are so many misconceptions about what AI can and cannot do.
What’s Watson working on today? He’s working with 1–800-Flowers to help find the perfect bouquet out of trillions of combinations. He’s working with the New York Genome Center to help doctors find treatments as personal as DNA. And he’s working with Sesame Street to make education as unique as every child.
Working with Watson, we can outthink anything. http://ibm.co/2bTJ7BY
