Lifeboat Foundation

LONDON – ASML, a Dutch firm that makes high-tech machines used in semiconductor manufacturing, will see its market value climb from $302 billion to more than $500 billion next year, according to two tech investors.

Nathan Benaich, founder and general partner of boutique VC firm Air Street Capital, and Ian Hogarth, who sold his AI start-up Songkick to Warner Music Group, wrote in their annual “State of AI” report Tuesday that Europe’s largest tech company is the little-known “linchpin” in the global semiconductor industry.

Founded in 1,984 ASML provides chip makers with essential hardware, software and services to mass produce patterns on silicon using a method called lithography.

Most organizations successfully stood up with new ways for employees to work remotely or interact with customers far faster than previously thought possible.

But as we transition from focusing on maintaining business continuity toward driving growth, we should not lose sight of the forest for the trees.

The leaps forward companies made in response to the COVID crisis set them up to benefit from virtuous cycles that complement and reinforce each other to turbocharge growth.

New research, published in the journal Patterns and led by the University of Glasgow’s School of Psychology and Neuroscience, uses 3D modeling to analyze the way Deep Neural Networks—part of the broader family of machine learning—process information, to visualize how their information processing matches that of humans.

It is hoped this new work will pave the way for the creation of more dependable AI technology that will process information like humans and make errors that we can understand and predict.

One of the challenges still facing AI development is how to better understand the process of machine thinking, and whether it matches how humans process information, in order to ensure accuracy. Deep Neural Networks are often presented as the current best model of human decision-making behavior, achieving or even exceeding human performance in some tasks. However, even deceptively simple visual discrimination tasks can reveal clear inconsistencies and errors from the AI models, when compared to humans.

Today, Microsoft announced that Microsoft Translator, its AI-powered text translation service, now supports more than 100 different languages and dialects. With the addition of 12 new languages including Georgian, Macedonian, Tibetan, and Uyghur, Microsoft claims that Translator can now make text and information in documents accessible to 5.66 billion people worldwide.

Its Translator isn’t the first to support more than 100 languages — Google Translate reached that milestone first in February 2016. (Amazon Translate only supports 71.) But Microsoft says that the new languages are underpinned by unique advances in AI and will be available in the Translator apps, Office, and Translator for Bing, as well as Azure Cognitive Services Translator and Azure Cognitive Services Speech.

“One hundred languages is a good milestone for us to achieve our ambition for everyone to be able to communicate regardless of the language they speak,” Microsoft Azure AI chief technology officer Xuedong Huang said in a statement. “We can leverage [commonalities between languages] and use that … to improve whole language famil[ies].”

2021 is only halfway complete, and we cannot yet be said to have defeated the pandemic, but yet at the same time, the travel and tourism industry is said to be poised for a pretty rapid boom. In many ways and places, the recovery has already begun.

A live Globaldata poll showed that people are desperate to enjoy travels and trips again with a majority of them opting for longer trips than before. 26% of their respondents showed a desire to enjoy trips that spanned a minimum of 10 nights. As lockdowns and travel restrictions continue to be eased and countries continue to open up, we will likely see a surge in new tourists and travelers.

Jason Fong, a veteran of the industry, is the brain behind the Boss of Bali brand, a brand that has garnered over 2 million followers on Instagram. Fong shared his knowledge of all things tourism and how he has used his platform to promote the evolution of travel and tourism more sustainably.

The historic mission is still going strong.

A Chinese lander and rover are still up and running more than 1,000 Earth days after they made a historic first-ever landing on the far side of the moon.

The Chang’e 4 lander carrying the Yutu 2 rover touched down in Von Kármán Crater on Jan. 2 2019, and the robotic mission has been exploring the unique area of our celestial neighbor ever since.

Elon Musk said: In the future, you will be able to save and replay memories by Neuralink This is sounding increasingly like a Black Mirror episode.

Elon Musk says you will even be able to store your memories as a backup, and then download them into a robot body. It sounds like science fiction but Neuralink believes it could make that happen one day with a chip.

It is a brain-machine interface or BMI – a device that connects your brain to a computer. But before chasing these futuristic goals, the startup is focusing on one thing: ending human suffering.

The Pentagon’s first chief software officer said he resigned in protest at the slow pace of technological transformation in the US military, and because he could not stand to watch China overtake America.

In his first interview since leaving the post at the Department of Defense a week ago, Nicolas Chaillan told the Financial Times that the failure of the US to respond to Chinese cyber and other threats was putting his children’s future at risk.

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Continue reading “US has already lost AI fight to China, says ex-Pentagon software chief” »

Speaking of cars, consider the future of transportation and mobility, entailing the advent of self-driving cars.

It would seem that self-driving cars will be a welcomed boon to humanity. Predictions are that the regrettable 40,000 annual fatalities due to car crashes in the United States alone will be reduced enormously, and likewise, the estimated 2.3 million car crash injuries will nearly disappear.

What’s not to like about the emergence of self-driving cars?

Continue reading “Bothering And Even Spying On Your Neighbors Via An AI Self-Driving Car” »