Lifeboat Foundation

By 2025, the World Economic Forum estimates that 97 million new jobs may emerge as artificial intelligence (AI) changes the nature of work and influences the new division of labor between humans, machines and algorithms. Specifically in banking, a recent McKinsey survey found that AI technologies could deliver up to $1 trillion of additional value each year. AI is continuing its steady rise and starting to have a sweeping impact on the financial services industry, but its potential is still far from fully realized.

The transformative power of AI is already impacting a range of functions in financial services including risk management, personalization, fraud detection and ESG analytics. The problem is that advances in AI are slowed down by a global shortage of workers with the skills and experience in areas such as deep learning, natural language processing and robotic process automation. So with AI technology opening new opportunities, financial services workers are eager to gain the skills they need in order to leverage AI tools and advance their careers.

Today, 87% of employees consider retraining and upskilling options at workplaces very important, and at the same time, more companies ranked upskilling their workforce as a top-5 business priority now than pre-pandemic. Companies that don’t focus on powering AI training will fall behind in a tight hiring market. Below are some key takeaways for business leaders looking to prioritize reskilling efforts at their organization.

❤️ Check out Fully Connected by Weights & Biases: https://wandb.me/papers.

📝 The paper “Human Dynamics from Monocular Video with Dynamic Camera Movements” is available here:
https://mrl.snu.ac.kr/research/ProjectMovingCam/MovingCam.html.

Continue reading “This AI Makes You A Virtual Stuntman! 💪” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=yfl6Lu3xQW0

One of the things I really enjoy is bacon sandwiches, but that’s not what I wanted to talk about here. Another thing I enjoy is watching a startup company evolve from being a twinkle in its founder’s eye to purveying its first product.

Way back in the mists of time we used to call May 2020 (which is two long years ago as I pen these words), Jim Turley wrote a column on the topic of Creating the Universal Processor here on EE Journal. The focus of this column was a new type of processor called Prodigy that was under development by a startup called Tachyum.

Continue reading “Are You Ready to Lay Your Hands on the World’s First Universal Processor?” »

Algorithms could increasingly influence human culture, even though we don’t have a good understanding of how they interact with us or each other.

A team of researchers at the Human Brain Project (HBP) are working with Intel to advance neuromorphic technology and bring AI closer to the energy efficiency of the human brain. Neuromorphic technology is more energy efficient for large deep learning networks when compared to other AI systems.

Researchers in the HBP and Intel carried out a set of experiments demonstrating this efficiency. The experiments involved a new Intel chip that relies on neurons similar to those in the human brain. This was the first time that such results were demonstrated.

The research was published in Nature Machine Intelligence.

If you want to grow human cells, try to approximate a human body.

Scientist have grown human cells on a robot skeleton, hoping that by moving the skeleton they can better approximate the cells’ natural growing environment. The cells certainly grew, but it’s not clear yet if they would be any better for medical treatments.

Is this true?

The Perseverance rover has been on Mars for two weeks and has now spun its wheels and began its maiden trek over the red planet’s surface. According to new images transmitted to Earth by the one-ton robot on Friday, the voyage was a quick one.

Engineers have worked tirelessly to get the vehicle and its numerous equipment up and operating, including instruments and a robotic arm. Perseverance’s mission is to look for indications of alien life in the Jezero crater, which is located near the equator. This will take roughly 15 kilometers throughout the following Martian year (approximately two Earth years).

Continue reading “The Perseverance Rover of NASA captured a flying object on Mars” »

Men like Zuckerberg and Musk are the subject of fascination. Their character, their genius, their flaws — all are treated to feverish scrutiny. Since Musk’s bid for Twitter, there has been a predictable flurry of speculation: does he know what he’s doing? Is he a troll or a revolutionary? Will he improve conditions of free speech? What, if anything, will he do about online harassment and extremism?

Though valuable and interesting, it is possible that these kinds of questions obscure the deeper issue, or at least the longer-term one. At root, the big question for the future of powerful technologies is this: whether they are ultimately economic entities which should be governed according to market principles, or whether they are in fact political in nature, and so should be governed by democratic norms and principles. In the long run, the answer we provide to this question will significantly affect the course of democracy around the world — more, in any event, than whether Musk himself understands the concept of “free speech absolutism.”

Many other advanced democracies are tacking toward the political/democratic option. The UK is considering a landmark Online Safety Bill, which will place strict duties on social media platforms. Off the back of the General Data Protection Regulation, the EU is readying a swathe of new measures — an Artificial Intelligence Act, a Digital Services Act, a Digital Markets Act — all of which will curb the power of tech firms.

For the first time TU Graz’s Institute of Theoretical Computer Science and Intel Labs demonstrated experimentally that a large neural network can process sequences such as sentences while consuming four to sixteen times less energy while running on neuromorphic hardware than non-neuromorphic hardware. The new research based on Intel Labs’ Loihi neuromorphic research chip that draws on insights from neuroscience to create chips that function similar to those in the biological brain.

The research was funded by The Human Brain Project (HBP), one of the largest research projects in the world with more than 500 scientists and engineers across Europe studying the human brain. The results of the research are published in Nature Machine Intelligence (“Memory for AI Applications in Spike-based Neuromorphic Hardware”).

The close-up shows an Intel Nahuku board, each of which contains eight to 32 Intel Loihi neuromorphic research chips. (Image: Tim Herman, Intel Corporation)