Lifeboat Foundation

The Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality is working on an artificial intelligence (AI) project to ease the city’s notorious traffic jams, daily Milliyet has reported.

“By analyzing images from junctions, the system will activate traffic lamps and turn them green in a short time to ease traffic flow,” said Esat Temimhan, the director of Istanbul IT and Smart City Technologies (İSBAK), an sub unit of the municipality.

The AI system has started in two pilot regions, he said.

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, with collaborators at Technische Universität Berlin, have demonstrated the shortest wavelength ever reported of a vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL). This can pave the way for future use in, for example, disinfection and medical treatment. The results were recently published in the scientific journal ACS Photonics.

“Although there is still much work to be done, especially to enable electrically driven devices, this demonstration provides an important building block for the realization of practical VCSELs covering the major part of the UV spectral range,” says Filip Hjort, Ph.D. student at the Photonics Laboratory at mc² and first author of the article.

A vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSEL) is a compact semiconductor laser and has seen widespread application in, for example, facial recognition in smartphones and for optical communication in data centers. So far, these lasers are only available commercially with red and infrared wavelengths, but also other visible-emitting VCSELs, that could find applications in adaptive headlamps for cars or projection displays, will soon be commercialized.

Nuro’s autonomous vehicles will take to the streets as early as 2021.

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The US space agency releases an animation to show how its Perseverance robot will land on Mars.

The world’s first robotic kitchen is officially launched this month. The Moley Kitchen, created by British technology company, Moley Robotics, is a fully automated unit that prepares freshly cooked meals at the touch of a button. It consists of cabinets, robotic arms, a motion capture system, a connected graphical user interface with access to a library of recipes, and a full set of kitchen appliances and equipment, optimised for both robot and human use.

The Moley Kitchen – first revealed publicly in April 2015 – is the product of six years of research and development by an international team of 100 engineers, product and luxury interior designers and three award-winning chefs.

At the heart of this new technology are two robotic arms featuring fully articulated ‘hands’, developed in collaboration with world-leading German robotics company SCHUNK. Following 11 exhaustive development cycles, they can now reliably reproduce the movements of human hands. This means the robot can retrieve ingredients from the smart fridge, adjust hob temperature, use the sink to fill pans and pour, mix and plate up just as a human cook would. The robot even cleans up after itself.

Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have discovered a way to make self-assembled nanowires of transition metal chalcogenides at scale using chemical vapor deposition. By changing the substrate where the wires form, they can tune how these wires are arranged, from aligned configurations of atomically thin sheets to random networks of bundles. This paves the way to industrial deployment in next-gen industrial electronics, including energy harvesting, and transparent, efficient, even flexible devices.

Electronics is all about making things smaller—smaller features on a chip, for example, means more computing power in the same amount of space and better efficiency, essential to feeding the increasingly heavy demands of a modern IT infrastructure powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence. And as devices get smaller, the same demands are made of the intricate wiring that ties everything together. The ultimate goal would be a wire that is only an atom or two in thickness. Such nanowires would begin to leverage completely different physics as the electrons that travel through them behave more and more as if they live in a one-dimensional world, not a 3D one.

In fact, scientists already have materials like carbon nanotubes and transition metal chalcogenides (TMCs), mixtures of transition metals and group 16 elements which can self-assemble into atomic-scale nanowires. The trouble is making them long enough, and at scale. A way to mass produce nanowires would be a game changer.

Summary: Artificial intelligence technology redesigned a bacterial protein that helps researchers track serotonin in the brain in real-time.

Source: NIH

Serotonin is a neurochemical that plays a critical role in the way the brain controls our thoughts and feelings. For example, many antidepressants are designed to alter serotonin signals sent between neurons.

Continue reading “AI-Designed Serotonin Sensor May Help Scientists Study Sleep and Mental Health” »

In the past twenty years, one of the biggest developments to take place in the realm of space exploration has been the growth of the commercial space industry (aka. NewSpace). As a result of growing demand and declining costs, more companies are coming to the fore to offer launch services that are making space more accessible and cost-effective.

One such company is the space delivery services company Aevum, an Alabama-based startup specializing in Autonomous Launch Vehicles (AuLVs). On Dec. 3rd, 2020, Aevum unveiled their prototype vehicle, the RAVN-X. Once operational, this autonomous suborbital spaceplane will be able to send satellites and other small payloads to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) in just three hours.

The term Aevum (derived from the Latin word for age) comes from the Scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages. Basically, it refers to the state of existence experienced by the angles, between the temporal realm (where the mortals live) and eternity (God in heaven). In the context of aerospace, it refers to LEO, the region that lies between Earth and outer space.

Flippy’s first iteration was already pretty impressive. It used machine learning software to locate and identify objects in front of it (rather than needing to have objects lined up in specific spots), and was able to learn from experience to improve its accuracy. Sensors on its grill-facing side took in thermal and 3D data to gauge the cooking process for multiple patties at a time, and cameras allowed the robot to ‘see’ its surroundings.

A system that digitally sent tickets to the kitchen from the restaurant’s front counter kept Flippy on top of how many burgers it should be cooking at any given time. Its key tasks were pulling raw patties from a stack and placing them on the grill, tracking each burger’s cook time and temperature, and transferring cooked burgers to a plate.

The new and improved Flippy can do all this and more. It can cook 19 different foods, including chicken wings, onion rings, french fries, and even the Impossible Burger (which, as you may know, isn’t actually made of meat, and that means it’s a little trickier to grill it to perfection).