Lifeboat Foundation

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Machine Learning offers important new capabilities for solving today’s complex problems, but it’s not a panacea. To get beyond the hype, engineers and scientists must discern how and where machine learning tools are the best option — and where they are not.

A drone has successfully inspected a 19.4 meter high oil tank onboard a Floating Production, Storage and Offloading vessel. The video shot by the drone was interpreted in real-time by an algorithm to detect cracks in the structure.

Scout Drone Inspection and class society DNV GL have been working together to develop an autonomous drone system to overcome the common challenges of tank inspections. For the customer, costs can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars as the tank is taken out of service for days to ventilate and construct scaffolding. The tanks are also tough work environments, with surveyors often having to climb or raft into hard to reach corners. Using a drone in combination with an algorithm to gather and analyse video footage can significantly reduce survey times and staging costs, while at the same time improving surveyor safety.

Continue reading “Artificial intelligence and algorithms bring drone inspection breakthrough” »

February 27, 2020 — Accuray Incorporated announced that Mercy Hospital St. Louis continues to demonstrate its commitment to improving patient outcomes with the installation of the first CyberKnife M6 System in Missouri at their state-of-the-art David C. Pratt Cancer Center. The next-generation CyberKnife System has been shown to deliver precise stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) and stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) treatments with ease, making it possible for the clinical team to expand access to one of the most advanced methods for administering radiation to more cancer patients.

SRS and SBRT are non-invasive forms of radiation therapy that use high doses of very targeted radiation to destroy tumors, in just a few treatment sessions (1 to 5). SRS is commonly used to treat conditions within the brain and spine, while SBRT is used for those tumors located outside these areas. The CyberKnife M6 System is equipped with sophisticated functionality that will streamline the creation of personalized treatment plans and reduce the time to deliver radiation treatments, enabling the Mercy St. Louis team to offer precision SRS and SBRT treatments to more patients each day.

The Mercy Hospital St. Louis team uses the most advanced radiotherapy technology to design and deliver an individualized treatment plan designed to help cancer patients take control of their disease and resume their lives. The hospital is part of the Mercy system, named one of the top five large U.S. health systems from 2016 to 2019 by IBM Watson Health. Mercy announced in 2018 that it intended to work with Accuray to enhance cancer care through advanced life-saving technology, including the CyberKnife System that was recently installed as well as Accuray Radixact Systems that will be installed at other Mercy hospitals.

Do you agree Eric Klien?

In just a few short years, the new technology is entering new realms and helping cement Shanghai’s ambition to become a global leader in the sector.

DeepMind this week released Acme, a framework intended to simplify the development of reinforcement learning algorithms by enabling AI-driven agents to run at various scales of execution. According to the engineers and researchers behind Acme, who coauthored a technical paper on the work, it can be used to create agents with greater parallelization than in previous approaches.

Reinforcement learning involves agents that interact with an environment to generate their own training data, and it’s led to breakthroughs in fields from video games and robotics to self-driving robo-taxis. Recent advances are partly attributable to increases in the amount of training data used, which has motivated the design of systems where agents interact with instances of an environment to quickly accumulate experience. This scaling from single-process prototypes of algorithms to distributed systems often requires a reimplementation of the agents in question, DeepMind asserts, which is where the Acme framework comes in.

Life-saving Ai

If you had to guess how long it takes for a drug to go from an idea to your pharmacy, what would you guess? Three years? Five years? How about the cost? $30 million? $100 million?

Well, here’s the sobering truth: 90 percent of all drug possibilities fail. The few that do succeed take an average of 10 years to reach the market and cost anywhere from $2.5 billion to $12 billion to get there.

Continue reading “How AI Will Make Drug Discovery Low-Cost, Ultra-Fast, and Personalized” »

Solar power, hydrogen fuel from seawater, automatic wingsails, a 6 year journey.

The Energy Observer set sail on a six-year world tour in 2017, testing new technologies, from onboard hydrogen electrolysis to fully-automated sails. It’s hoped the rugged ocean environment will prove the techs’ durability and usefulness at home.

Continue reading “First boat to make its own hydrogen fuel from seawater” »

My prediction is that around the late 2030s machines will start to own assets and liabilities and through this, they will rise to the status of ‘banking clients’.

How did I arrive at this conclusion?

Continue reading “Intelligent Machines: The New Clients of Banks?” »

For a lot of smaller companies, AI isn’t part of the picture—not yet, at least. “Big companies are adopting,” says Brynjolfsson, “but most companies in America—Joe’s pizzeria, the dry cleaner, the little manufacturing company—they are just not there yet.”

A big study by the US Census Bureau finds that only about 9 percent of firms employ tools like machine learning or voice recognition—for now.