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Category: information science – Page 302

This live stream plays endless death metal produced by an AI

This particular version of Dadabots has been trained on real death metal band Archspire, and Carr and Zukowski have previously trained the neural network on other real bands like Room For A Ghost, Meshuggah, and Krallice. In the past, they’ve released albums made by these algorithms for free on Dadabots’ Bandcamp — but having a 24/7 algorithmic death metal livestream is something new.

Carr and Zukowski published an abstract about their work in 2017, explaining that “most style-specific generative music experiments have explored artists commonly found in harmony textbooks,” meaning mostly classical music, and have largely ignored smaller genres like black metal. In the paper, the duo said the goal was to have the AI “achieve a realistic recreation” of the audio fed into it, but it ultimately gave them something perfectly imperfect. “Solo vocalists become a lush choir of ghostly voices,” they write. “Rock bands become crunchy cubist-jazz, and cross-breeds of multiple recordings become a surrealist chimera of sound.”

Carr and Zukowski tell Motherboard they hope to have some kind of audience interaction with Dadabots in the future. For now, you can listen to it churn out nonstop death metal and comment along with other people watching the livestream on YouTube.

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Scientists Unveil a ‘Brain Decoder’ That Turns Neural Activity Into Speech

The spoken word is a powerful tool, but not all of us have the ability to use it, either due to biology or circumstances. In such cases, technology can bridge the gap — and now that gap is looking shorter than ever, with a new algorithm that turns messages meant for your muscles into legible sounds.

Converting the complex mix of information sent from the brain to the orchestra of body parts required to transform a puff of air into meaningful sound is by no means a simple feat.

The lips, tongue, throat, jaw, larynx, and diaphragm all need to work together in near-perfect synchrony, requiring our brain to become a master conductor when it comes to uttering even the simplest of phrases.

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Artificial Intelligence Can Detect PTSD in Your Voice

For years, post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has been one of the most challenging disorders to diagnose. Traditional methods, like one-on-one clinical interviews, can be inaccurate due to the clinician’s subjectivity, or if the patient is holding back their symptoms.

Now, researchers at New York University say they’ve taken the guesswork out of diagnosing PTSD in veterans by using artificial intelligence to objectively detect PTSD by listening to the sound of someone’s voice. Their research, conducted alongside SRI International — the research institute responsible for bringing Siri to iPhones— was published Monday in the journal Depression and Anxiety.

According to The New York Times, SRI and NYU spent five years developing a voice analysis program that understands human speech, but also can detect PTSD signifiers and emotions. As the NYT reports, this is the same process that teaches automated customer service programs how to deal with angry callers: By listening for minor variables and auditory markers that would be imperceptible to the human ear, the researchers say the algorithm can diagnose PTSD with 89% accuracy.

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A faster method for multiplying very big numbers

The multiplication of integers is a problem that has kept mathematicians busy since Antiquity. The “Babylonian” method we learn at school requires us to multiply each digit of the first number by each digit of the second one. But when both numbers have a billion digits each, that means a billion times a billion or 1018 operations.

At a rate of a billion operations per second, it would take a computer a little over 30 years to finish the job. In 1971, the mathematicians Schönhage and Strassen discovered a quicker way, cutting calculation time down to about 30 seconds on a modern laptop. In their article, they also predicted that another algorithm—yet to be found—could do an even faster job. Joris van der Hoeven, a CNRS researcher from the École Polytechnique Computer Science Laboratory LIX, and David Harvey from the University of New South Wales (Australia) have found that algorithm.

They present their work in a new article that is available to the through the online HAL archive. But one problem raised by Schönhage et Strassen remains to be solved: proving that no quicker method exists. This poses a new challenge for theoretical science.

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Qualcomm Aims for Quantum AI Chips

Qualcomm said it plans to begin testing its new Cloud AI 100 chip with partners such as Microsoft Corp later this year, with mass production likely to begin in 2020.

Qualcomm’s new chip is designed for what artificial intelligence researchers call “inference” – the process of using an AI algorithm that has been “trained” with massive amounts of data in order to, for example, translate audio into text-based requests.

Analysts believe chips for speeding up inference will be the largest part of the AI chip market.

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Environmentalists are Wrong: Nature Isn’t Sacred and We Should Replace It

Environmentalism and climate change are increasingly being pushed on us everywhere, and I wanted to write the transhumanism and life extension counter argument on why I prefer new technology over nature and sustainability. Here’s my new article:

On a warming planet bearing scars of significant environmental destruction, you’d think one of the 21st Century’s most notable emerging social groups—transhumanists—would be concerned. Many are not. Transhumanists first and foremost want to live indefinitely, and they are outraged at the fact their bodies age and are destined to die. They blame their biological nature, and dream of a day when DNA is replaced with silicon and data.

Their enmity of biology goes further than just their bodies. They see Mother Earth as a hostile space where every living creature—be it a tree, insect, mammal, or virus—is out for itself. Everything is part of the food chain, and subject to natural law: consumption by violent murder in the preponderance of cases. Life is vicious. It makes me think of pet dogs and cats, and how it’s reported they sometimes start eating their owner after they’ve died.

Many transhumanists want to change all this. They want to rid their worlds of biology. They favor concrete, steel, and code. Where once biological evolution was necessary to create primates and then modern humans, conscious and directed evolution has replaced it. Planet Earth doesn’t need iniquitous natural selection. It needs premeditated moral algorithms conceived by logic that do the most good for the largest number of people. This is something that an AI will probably be better at than humans in less than two decade’s time.

Ironically, fighting the makings of utopia is a coup a half century in the making. Starting with the good-intentioned people at Greenpeace in the 1970s but overtaken recently with enviro-socialists who often seem to want to control every aspect of our lives, environmentalism has taken over political and philosophical discourse and direction at the most powerful levels of society. Green believers want to make you think humans are destroying our only home, Planet Earth—and that this terrible action of ours is the most important issue of our time. They have sounded a call to “save the earth” by trying to stomp out capitalism and dramatically downsizing our carbon footprint.

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