“Alphabet Inc.’s Google division last week hired the director of Stanford University’s artificial intelligence lab to lead a new AI unit, the latest in a long line of academic stars in artificial intelligence lured away by tech giants.”
Category: business – Page 263
Ageing Societies 2016
Posted in business, economics, finance, health, life extension
Longevity a challenge or an opportunity?
This autumn, The Economist Events will bring global leaders from business, finance and health care together with policymakers to explore the opportunities of an ageing world.
Together they will discuss how best to adapt financial products and realign business and public policies in ways that will drive economic growth and mitigate problems that ageing societies could otherwise bring.
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“In October, the commercial giant teamed up with IBM and Tsinghua University in Beijing to track pork in China as it moves from the farm to the shelves.”
” … Apple is considering the idea of producing digital glasses. The specs would, we’re told, “connect wirelessly to iPhones, show images and other information in the wearer’s field of vision, and may use augmented reality.””
SALT LAKE CITY, Nov. 14, 2016 /PRNewswire/ IBM (NYSE: IBM) and NVIDIA (NVDA)today announced collaboration on a new deep learning tool optimized for the latest IBM and NVIDIA technologies to help train computers to think and learn in more human-like ways at a faster pace.
Deep learning is a fast growing machine learning method that extracts information by crunching through millions of pieces of data to detect and rank the most important aspects from the data. Publicly supported among leading consumer web and mobile application companies, deep learning is quickly being adopted by more traditional business enterprises.
Deep learning and other artificial intelligence capabilities are being used across a wide range of industry sectors; in banking to advance fraud detection through facial recognition; in automotive for self-driving automobiles and in retail for fully automated call centers with computers that can better understand speech and answer questions.
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Wonder how Tim Cook, Satya & Bill, and Eric and Sergey will respond.
Overseas critics of the law argue it threatens to shut foreign technology companies out of various sectors. PHOTO: REUTERS
BEIJING: China adopted a controversial cybersecurity law on Monday to counter what Beijing says are growing threats such as hacking and terrorism, although the law has triggered concern from foreign business and rights groups.
The legislation, passed by China’s largely rubber-stamp parliament and set to come into effect in June 2017, is an “objective need” of China as a major internet power, a parliament official said.
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Last month in Paris, the Hello Tomorrow Global Summit brought together entrepreneurs and inventors, investors and industry for a two-day event exploring the science shaping the future.
Now in its third year, the conference is unique in the sci-and-tech futures circuit for putting scientists, academics and inventors centre stage, and in the same room as the investors and business types who can help bring their ideas to life. Some of the leading minds of tomorrow were there to present, discuss and debate their work.
Among them were some 500 startups battling for the Hello Tomorrow Challenge, a prize awarding early-stage science and tech ventures across 10 categories – from air quality to aeronautics – with equity-free cash, mentoring and exposure.
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More commentary about the Steve Aoki Party for Science and the Aoki Foundation.
Music business entrepreneur Steve Aoki has been a supporter of the SENS rejuvenation research programs for a while now. I’m always pleased to see successful people being vocal about their support for SENS, putting it front and center when talking to their audiences. Placing this important scientific work — as well as the prospects for near future therapies, and the need for philanthropic funding — in front of a bigger audience is a vital to the continued growth of our community and continued progress towards the medical control of aging. We need to reach out to entirely new networks of people, those who would never seek out the longevity science community on their own, as among their numbers are many who will be turn out to be interested, pleasantly surprised, and enthusiastic. Today, I’d wager, a large fraction of those people who will go on to be significant advocates and philanthropic donors of the late 2020s have no idea that we even exist, or that bringing an end to age-related disease, frailty, and suffering is possible outside the realm of science fiction.
Bootstrapping a cause never stops being hard. It was hard when small groups were striving to raise a few thousand dollars for SENS advocacy here and there, when having regular research programs and a million dollar fund looked to be an impossible distance away. It is hard today, when the SENS Research Foundation is trying to make the leap from a few million dollars in yearly research budgets to something ten times that size. Building greater public awareness and enthusiasm for the medical science of human rejuvenation is a very necessary part of that work. The sooner we collectively manage to change the zeitgeist to one in which charitable support for rejuvenation research is just as normal and lauded as support for cancer research, the better off we all are, and the more money that can be raised for scientific projects. So thanks are due to Steve Aoki for stepping up to the plate and taking a swing at this.
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