Lifeboat Foundation

Deep Learning in Action | A talk by Juergen Schmidhuber, PhD at the Deep Learning in Action talk series in October 2015. He is professor in computer science at the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research, part of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland.

Juergen Schmidhuber, PhD | I review 3 decades of our research on both gradient based and more general problem solvers that search the space of algorithms running on general purpose computers with internal memory.

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Interstellar is one of the best sci-fi movies of the last decade, imagining a post-apocalyptic human population that needs to be saved from a dying Earth. A nearby black hole has the answers to humanity’s problems, and the brilliant script tells us we can enter a black hole and then use it to transcend space and time. In the film, the black hole also leaks out information that can save us, and it is captured by a complex computer as it’s being entered. That might seem implausible, but since we don’t know a lot about how black holes work, we can certainly accept such an outlandish proposition in the context of the movie.

In real life, however, physicists are trying to figure out how to access the secrets of a black hole. And it looks like some researchers have a theory to retrieve information from it, though it’s not quite as exciting as the complex bookcase that Interstellar proposes.

DON’T MISS: The biggest ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ plot holes explained

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Andrew Ng hands me a tiny device that wraps around my ear and connects to a smartphone via a small cable. It looks like a throwback—a smartphone earpiece without a Bluetooth connection. But it’s really a glimpse of the future. In a way, this tiny device allows the blind to see.

Ng is the chief scientist at Chinese tech giant Baidu, and this is one of the company’s latest prototypes. It’s called DuLight. The device contains a tiny camera that captures whatever is in front of you—a person’s face, a street sign, a package of food—and sends the images to an app on your smartphone. The app analyzes the images, determines what they depict, and generates an audio description that’s heard through to your earpiece. If you can’t see, you can at least get an idea of what’s in front of you.

Artificial intelligence is changing not only the way we use our computers and smartphones but the way we interact with the real world.

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Artificial intelligence is moving so fast that within a decade, we will even be able to swallow computers so they can perform internal operations and release drugs.

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Samsung’s already wide product family is getting even bigger thanks to its new chip dubbed the “Samsung Bio-Processor.” As the company tells it, it’s already in mass production and is “specifically designed to allow accelerated development of innovative wearable products for consumers who are increasingly monitoring their health and fitness on a daily basis.” Phew. The announcement post goes on to say that the processor is the first all-in-one health solution chip and that since it’s packing a number of different control and sensor units (like a quintet of Analog Front Ends, a microcontroller unit, digital signal processor and eFlash memory) it can do all these tricks without the need for external processing.

The idea behind the silicon is to be the one-stop wearable fitness resource. Those five AFEs? One keeps track of bioelectrical impedance analysis, while the others focus on volumetric measurements of organs, an electrocardiogram and skin temperature, among other things. Bear in mind that Samsung’s latest smartwatch, the Gear S2, only tracks your heart rate. Same goes for the Apple Watch. Considering how err… interesting Samsung wearables tend to be, a possible scenario here is that the tech giant won’t keep the Bio-Processor all to itself. Nope, the real money here lies in potentially licensing it out to other folks, as it’s wont to do with its other self-made parts.

We won’t have to wait too long to see these in the wild, either: Samsung promises it’ll be packed into devices available early next year. If you’re wondering where, the inevitable follow-up to the aforementioned Gear S2 successor is a pretty likely bet. Whether that shows its face at CES or Mobile World Congress is the real question, though.

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The combination of human and computer intelligence might be just what we need to solve the “wicked” problems of the world, such as climate change and geopolitical conflict, say researchers from the Human Computation Institute (HCI) and Cornell University.

In an article published in the journal Science, the authors present a new vision of human computation (the science of crowd-powered systems), which pushes beyond traditional limits, and takes on hard problems that until recently have remained out of reach.

Humans surpass machines at many things, ranging from simple pattern recognition to creative abstraction. With the help of computers, these cognitive abilities can be effectively combined into multidimensional collaborative networks that achieve what traditional problem-solving cannot.

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Small Form Factor Technology Solves Complexities of Thought-Controlled Leg Prosthetics

Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago has developed the first neural-controlled bionic leg, using no nerve redirection surgery or implanted sensors. It’s a powerful advancement in prosthetics, including motorized knee and ankle, and control enabled by the patient’s own neural signals. Powered by a tiny but powerful Computer-on-Module platform, this thought-controlled prosthetic represents a significant breakthrough in medical embedded design, improving patients’ lives and mobility with a prosthetic that more closely than ever acts like a fully-functioning natural limb.

The technology of prosthetic limbs has come a long way over time, yet options are still limited for leg amputees. While simple peg legs have evolved to more sophisticated and realistic artificial limbs, the patient was forced to undergo nerve surgery or endure invasive implants. And even though the technology to produce through-controlled mechanized arms has existed for some time, the complexities of leg motion have kept it from being successfully applied in leg prosthetics. Without the ability to move and control the knee and ankle, the prosthetic leg remained a passive solution for patients struggling to replicate natural leg motion.

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Researchers from the University Of New South Wales(UNSW) in Australia have successfully demonstrated that they can write and control the quantum version of computer code on a silicon microchip. Computers, at the moment, use binary language to operate, 0 and 1. Together, these two bits generate code words that can be used to program complex commands. But in quantum computing language there’s also the option for bits to be in superposition, what this actually means is that they can be 1 and 0 at the very exact same time. This unlocks a massively more powerful programming language, but until now scientists haven’t been able to figure out how to write it.

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Better cameras, along with more powerful algorithms for computer vision and emotion-sensing facial analysis software, could transform the way we interact with our devices.

By Andrew Moore on December 28, 2015.

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