Lifeboat Foundation

Vertical Aerospace has already collected somewhere in the region of 1,000 orders for their VA-X4 VTOL craft. This is a piloted electric, low emission eVTOL craft that can carry up to four passengers and a pilot. This air taxi is capable of flying at speeds of 200 mph (174 knots) and has a range of more than 100 miles (160 km).

Being all-electric, it is near-silent during flight, offers a low-carbon solution to flying, and has a relatively low cost per passenger mile.

Vertical Aerospace’s VA-X4 also makes use of the latest in advanced avionics — some of which are used to control the world’s only supersonic VTOL aircraft, the F-35 fighter. Such sophisticated control systems enable the eVTOL tax to fly with some high level of automation and reduced pilot workload.

In the latest episode of MIT Technology Review’s podcast “In Machines We Trust,” we asked career and job-matching experts for practical tips on how to succeed in a job market increasingly influenced by artificial intelligence.

Once you optimize your résumé, you may want to practice interviewing with an AI too.

Jeffrey Shainline is a physicist at NIST. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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Note: Opinions expressed by Jeff do not represent NIST.

Continue reading “Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence | Lex Fridman Podcast #225” »

Facebook has announced some exciting connectivity technologies that will enable the company to provide access to fast and affordable internet service to the next billion people as well as enhance existing infrastructure projects.

The company said that Facebook Connectivity has helped provide quality internet connectivity to over 500M people since 2013. Now, the company aims to enable affordable, high-quality connectivity for another one billion people at less cost and with greater speed by leveraging emerging technologies.

Commenting on the new connectivity technologies during the unveiling, Dan Rabinovitsj, VP of Facebook Connectivity said: “We have seen that economies flourish when there is widely accessible internet for individuals and businesses.”

It sounds like a scene from a spy thriller. An attacker gets through the IT defenses of a nuclear power plant and feeds it fake, realistic data, tricking its computer systems and personnel into thinking operations are normal. The attacker then disrupts the function of key plant machinery, causing it to misperform or break down. By the time system operators realize they’ve been duped, it’s too late, with catastrophic results.

The scenario isn’t fictional; it happened in 2,010 when the Stuxnet virus was used to damage nuclear centrifuges in Iran. And as ransomware and other cyberattacks around the world increase, system operators worry more about these sophisticated “false data injection” strikes. In the wrong hands, the computer models and data analytics—based on artificial intelligence—that ensure smooth operation of today’s electric grids, manufacturing facilities, and power plants could be turned against themselves.

Purdue University’s Hany Abdel-Khalik has come up with a powerful response: To make the computer models that run these cyberphysical systems both self-aware and self-healing. Using the background noise within these systems’ data streams, Abdel-Khalik and his students embed invisible, ever-changing, one-time-use signals that turn passive components into active watchers. Even if an attacker is armed with a perfect duplicate of a system’s model, any attempt to introduce falsified data will be immediately detected and rejected by the system itself, requiring no human response.

Can the AI as a service paradigm curb big tech’s tendency towards iterative hardware? Perhaps it’s time we moved beyond the iPhone model.

If you follow the latest trends in the tech industry, you probably know that there’s been a fair amount of debate about what the next big thing is going to be. Odds-on favorite for many has been augmented reality (AR) glasses, while others point to fully autonomous cars, and a few are clinging to the potential of 5G. With the surprise debut of Amazon’s Astro a few weeks back, personal robotic devices and digital companions have also thrown their hat into the ring.

However, while there has been little agreement on exactly what the next thing is, there seems to be little disagreement that whatever it turns out to be, it will be somehow powered, enabled, or enhanced by artificial intelligence (AI). Indeed, the fact that AI and machine learning (ML) are our future seems to be a foregone conclusion.

Yet, if we do an honest assessment of where some of these technologies actually stand on a functionality basis versus initial expectations, it’s fair to argue that the results have been disappointing on many levels. In fact, if we extend that thought process out to what AI/ML were supposed to do for us overall, then we start to come to a similarly disappointing conclusion.

Analytics has played a significant role in the fight against COVID-19. Would we be as far along in the battle without it?

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed many things in business, producing a new normal that all of us now operate in—and analytics is no exception.

“As companies adapt to the new normal created by COVID, one of the primary questions we’re asked in analytics is how to retrain artificial intelligence (AI) models with a more diverse data set,” said David Tareen, director of AI and analytics at SAS.

There are 40.3 million victims of human trafficking globally, according to the International Labor Organization. Marinus Analytics, a startup based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, hopes to make a dent in that number. The company’s mission is to “serve those working on the frontlines of public safety by developing technology for them to disrupt human trafficking, child abuse, and cyber fraud.” For its achievements, Marinus won $500,000 as part of its third-place ranking in the 2021 IBM Watson AI XPRIZE competition. The startup is the brainchild of three co-founders: Cara Jones, Emily Kennedy, and Artur Dubrawski, who launched it out of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in 2014.

Marinus implements its mission primarily through its set of AI-based tools called Traffic Jam, whose goal is “to find missing persons, stop human trafficking and fight organized crime.”

Traditionally, finding a missing person would involve taping a picture of the person on the computer and then manually combing through thousands, if not millions, of online ads on adult services websites to see if any of the posted pictures match. Such a process is time-consuming and tiring. A human detective’s attention can start flagging after long hours at the computer doing the same task endlessly.