Lifeboat Foundation

With help from Microsoft’s artificial intelligence systems, the BeachBot learns how to better find the strewn filters, even if they’re partially buried in the sand. It then scoops these cigarette butts up from the sand and disposes of them in an internal bin. Later, people empty that bin into a trash container. Rolling atop the sand on four puffy-looking wheels, the beach-cleaning robot uses two onboard cameras to look ahead (to avoid people and objects) and to look down.

The BeachBot is still in early learning via the software giant’s Trove AI system, which helps provide image sets for this kind of machine learning task. Teaching the bot how to find its prey requires a lot of people. TechTics must show the beach rover (and, specifically, the AI system) thousands of photos of cigarette butts, all lying about in various states, such as partially hidden, so it can recognize and remember them.

Continue reading “AI-enabled BeachBot robot to clean up cigarette butts on beaches” »

A new wearable brain-machine interface (BMI) system could improve the quality of life for people with motor dysfunction or paralysis, even those struggling with locked-in syndrome—when a person is fully conscious but unable to move or communicate.

A multi-institutional, international team of researchers led by the lab of Woon-Hong Yeo at the Georgia Institute of Technology combined wireless soft scalp electronics and virtual reality in a BMI system that allows the user to imagine an action and wirelessly control a wheelchair or robotic arm.

The team, which included researchers from the University of Kent (United Kingdom) and Yonsei University (Republic of Korea), describes the new motor imagery-based BMI system this month in the journal Advanced Science.

The prediction of protein structures from amino acid sequence information alone, known as the “protein folding problem,” has been an important open research question for more than 50 years. In the fall of 2020, DeepMind’s neural network model AlphaFold took a huge leap forward in solving this problem, outperforming some 100 other teams in the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) challenge, regarded as the gold-standard accuracy assessment for protein structure prediction. The success of the novel approach is considered a milestone in protein structure prediction.

This week, the DeepMind paper Highly Accurate Protein Structure Prediction with AlphaFold was published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature. The paper introduces AlphaFold2, a completely redesigned and open-sourced model that can predict protein structures with atomic-level accuracy.

Although machine learning researchers have long sought to develop computational methods for predicting 3D protein structures from protein sequences, there had been limited progress along this path, chiefly due to the computational intractability of molecular simulation, the context-dependence of protein stability, and the difficulty of producing sufficiently accurate models for protein physics.

BlueOcean, a startup leveraging AI and machine learning to measure brand sentiment, has raised $15 million in capital.

Saving $100 billion in lost productivity over the next decade.

Boston Dynamics’ Spot could be going to Mars. The dog-like robot is now equipped with AI and could be sent on missions to autonomously explore caves.

GPT-J and GPT-Neo, the open-source alternatives to GPT-3, are among the best NLP models as of this writing. But using them effectively can take practice. Few-shot learning is an NLP technique that works very well with these models.

GPT-J and GPT-Neo.

GPT-Neo and GPT-J are both open-source NLP models, created by EleutherAI (a collective of researchers working to open source AI).

The future of fighter jets is coming, seemingly with more international power and disruptive technologies than predicted. As the US forges ahead to become 1st nation field sixth-generation fighter jet, other major air forces fear falling behind in the competitive race. The US, Europe, Japan, and China have made unbelievable investments looking for unique next-level capabilities like stealth, robust avionics, and navigation systems to present the most technologically advanced fighter jet. But one particular trend is crucial for all 6th gen prototypes. Artificial Intelligence is about to begin a new era of air combat.