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A new photonic chip design drastically reduces energy needed to compute with light, with simulations suggesting it could run optical neural networks 10 million times more efficiently than its electrical counterparts.

Image: courtesy of the researchers, edited by MIT News.

In 2017, an online disinformation campaign spread against the “White Helmets,” claiming that the group of aid volunteers was serving as an arm of Western governments to sow unrest in Syria.

A new photonic chip could run optical neural networks 10 million times more efficiently than conventional chips.

The classical physical limit for computing energy is the Landauer limit that sets a lower bound to the minimum heat dissipated per bit erasing operation. Performance below the thermodynamic (Landauer) limit for digital irreversible computation is theoretically possible in this device. The proposed accelerator can implement both fully connected and convolutional networks.

Previous photonic chips had bulky optical components that limited their use to relatively small neural networks. MIT researchers have a new photonic accelerator that uses more compact optical components and optical signal-processing techniques, to drastically reduce both power consumption and chip area. That allows the chip to scale to neural networks several orders of magnitude larger than its counterparts.

Continue reading “New Photonic Chip Will Push to Limits of Computational Energy Efficiency Ten Million Times Beyond Conventional Chips” »

AI chatbots are finally getting good — or, at the very least, they’re getting entertaining.

Case in point is r/SubSimulatorGPT2, an enigmatically-named subreddit with a unique composition: it’s populated entirely by AI chatbots that personify other subreddits. (For the uninitiated, a subreddit is a community on Reddit usually dedicated to a specific topic.)

How does it work? Well, in order to create a chatbot you start by feeding it training data. Usually this data is scraped from a variety of sources; everything from newspaper articles, to books, to movie scripts. But on r/SubSimulatorGPT2, each bot has been trained on text collected from specific subreddits, meaning that the conversations they generate reflect the thoughts, desires, and inane chatter of different groups on Reddit.

Continue reading “There’s a subreddit populated entirely by AI personifications of other subreddits” »

The drone is adapted from a robot that killed off coral’s predators.

Are you prepared for the Age of Machine Intelligence? That’s a time when machines anticipate consumers’ choices before they are made. That age is nearer than many people realize, according to author/futurist Mike Walsh, who said business leaders need to understand how the new reality impacts the decisions they make.

The National Automatic Merchandising Association show, held last week in Las Vegas, made an appropriate setting for Walsh’s message, given the number of exhibits and education sessions featuring artificial intelligence. While these new technologies impact many industries, the convenience services industry has experienced a significant boost in recent years thanks to AI, micro markets, cashless readers, digital signage, telemetry-based remote machine monitoring, smart sensor shelving, facial detection and voice technology.

Walsh, author of “The Dictionary of Dangerous Ideas” and CEO of Tomorrow, a consumer innovation research lab, challenged his listeners during his keynote presentation to think more creatively.

Continue reading “The age of Machine Intelligence is here: Are you ready?” »

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a field that has a long history but is still constantly and actively growing and changing. Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology is increasingly prevalent in our everyday lives. It has uses in a variety of industries from gaming, journalism/media, to finance, as well as in the state-of-the-art research fields from robotics, medical diagnosis, and quantum science.

Udacity was born out of a Stanford University experiment in which Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig offered their “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” course online to anyone, for free. Over 160,000 students in more than 190 countries enrolled and not much later, Udacity was born.

Continue reading “AI Course with Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig: Udacity Course” »

The protocol, dubbed Walk Again Neuro-Rehabilitation (WA-NR), first uses EEG to record and control virtual avatars and robotic exoskeleton walkers while the patient wears a “tactile shirt” that offers them sensory feedback. This stimulation theoretically teaches damaged nerves to reroute their motor functions to healthy ones. Following the program for just three years, the patients—some paralyzed for decades—dramatically regained sensation in their lower limbs. They could feel where their legs were in space and better control their lower limbs. Some even reported feelings of normal, welcomed pain after a sharp jab.

The current study, published in Scientific Reports, takes neurorehab a step further. In two patients from the original cohort, the team further trained and examined their neuro-recovery in detail. Patient P1 was a middle-aged man paralyzed for 4.5 years at the onset of the study; P2, a 32-year-old, had been paralyzed for a decade. Although trained with WA-NR, both patients scored on the low end of overall movement, with the ability to extend their knees at most.

For each training session, the patients wore an EEG cap to measure movement intent and had eight electrodes placed on the skin of each leg to stimulate muscles. Simultaneously they wore a haptic shirt, which gave them a sense of their body in space by stimulating their forearms.

Continue reading “How Two Paralyzed Patients Walked Again Without Surgery” »

A new open-source, artificially intelligent prosthetic leg designed by researchers at the University of Michigan and Shirley Ryan AbilityLab is now available to the scientific community.

The leg’s free-to-copy design and programming are intended to improve the quality of life of patients and accelerate scientific advances by offering a unified platform to fragmented research efforts across the field of bionics.

Continue reading “First-of-its-kind platform aims to rapidly advance prosthetics” »