Lifeboat Foundation

The growing population of avatars that use AI smarts to interact with us is a major clue.

In the fictional worlds of film and TV, artificial intelligence has been depicted as so advanced that it is indistinguishable from humans. But what if we’re actually getting closer to a world where AI is capable of thinking and feeling?

Tech company UneeQ is embarking on that journey with its “digital humans.” These avatars act as visual interfaces for customer service chatbots, virtual assistants, and other applications. UneeQ’s digital humans appear lifelike not only in terms of language and tone of voice, but also because of facial movements: raised eyebrows, a tilt of the head, a smile, even a wink. They transform a transaction into an interaction: creepy yet astonishing, human, but not quite.

Continue reading “Are Digital Humans the Next Step in Human-Computer Interaction?” »

Summary: A new deep neural network can accurately predict a healthy person’s brain age based on EEG data collected from a sleep study.

Source: AASM

A study shows that a deep neural network model can accurately predict the brain age of healthy patients based on electroencephalogram data recorded during an overnight sleep study, and EEG-predicted brain age indices display unique characteristics within populations with different diseases.

**A team of researchers affiliated with institutions in Singapore, China, Germany and the U.K., has developed an insect-computer hybrid system for use in search operations after disasters strike. **They have written a paper describing their system, now posted on the arXiv preprint server.

Because of the frequency of natural disasters such as earthquakes, fires and floods, scientists have been looking for better ways to help victims trapped in the rubble–people climbing over wreckage is both hazardous and inefficient. The researchers noted that small creatures such as insects move much more easily under such conditions and set upon the task of using a type of cockroach as a searcher to assist human efforts.

The system they came up with merges microtechnology with the natural skills of a live Madagascar hissing cockroach. These cockroaches are known for their dark brown and black body coloring and, of course, for the hissing sound they make when upset. They are also one of the few wingless cockroaches, which made them a good candidate for carrying a backpack.

Continue reading “An insect-computer hybrid system for search operations in disasters” »

Google claims that it has developed artificial intelligence software that can design computer chips faster than humans can.

The tech giant said in a paper in the journal Nature on Wednesday that a chip that would take humans months to design can be dreamed up by its new AI in less than six hours.

The AI has already been used to develop the latest iteration of Google’s tensor processing unit chips, which are used to run AI-related tasks, Google said.

The Hong Kong team behind celebrity humanoid robot Sophia is launching a new prototype, Grace, targeted at the healthcare market and designed to interact with the elderly and those isolated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

#RobotGrace #RobotSophia #HumanoidRobot.

Continue reading “Meet Grace, the healthcare robot COVID-19 created | Celebrity Humanoid Robot Sophia | Robot Nurse” »

We could see this across the nation in five years.

Quantum computing began in the early 1980s. It operates on principles of quantum physics rather than the limitations of circuits and electricity which is why it is capable of processing highly complex mathematical problems so efficiently. Quantum computing could one day achieve things that classical computing simply cannot. The evolution of quantum computers has been slow, but things are accelerating, thanks to the efforts of academic institutions such as Oxford, MIT, and the University of Waterloo, as well as companies like IBM, Microsoft, Google, and Honeywell.

IBM has held a leadership role in this innovation push and has named optimization as the most likely application for consumers and organizations alike.

Honeywell expects to release what it calls the “world’s most powerful quantum computer” for applications like fraud detection, optimization for trading strategies, security, machine learning, and chemistry and materials science.

IBM has released a toolkit designed to help developers measure uncertainty in an AI and machine learning model.

In their decades-long chase to create artificial intelligence, computer scientists have designed and developed all kinds of complicated mechanisms and technologies to replicate vision, language, reasoning, motor skills, and other abilities associated with intelligent life. While these efforts have resulted in AI systems that can efficiently solve specific problems in limited environments, they fall short of developing the kind of general intelligence seen in humans and animals.

In a new paper submitted to the peer-reviewed Artificial Intelligence journal, scientists at U.K.-based AI lab DeepMind argue that intelligence and its associated abilities will emerge not from formulating and solving complicated problems but by sticking to a simple but powerful principle: reward maximization.

Continue reading “DeepMind says reinforcement learning is enough to reach general AI” »