Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: robotics/AI – Page 1,462

Circa 2020

Autopilot has been around longer than you think. Indeed, in 1914, just 11 years after the Wright Brothers first ushered humanity into the aviation age, a fellow named Lawrence Sperry built a gyroscopic self-stabilization system into a Curtiss C-2. It was capable, he claimed, of keeping an aircraft straight and level and pointed in a consistent direction on the compass, and he put on a spectacular public demonstration at the Seine just outside Paris to prove it.

First, he did a pass by the crowd with his hands clearly up in the air. Then, he did the same with an assistant standing on one of the wings, moving about to throw the weight balance off. Then he made a third pass where both pilot and passenger went out and stood on the wings. The crowd went bananas. Those magnificent men and their flying machines!

But Sperry was not satisfied. Through World War 1, he worked on a number of designs for a fully self-flying aircraft, including the Hewitt-Sperry Automatic Aircraft and the Curtiss-Sperry Flying Bomb, which is regarded by some as an early precursor of today’s cruise missiles. These were never fully successful, and the relevant Wikipedia page makes for some entertaining reading with phrases like “When last seen, the N-9 was cruising over Bayshore Air Station at about 4,000 feet (1,200 m), heading east. It was never seen again.”

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Drone manufacturer and automated flight specialist Skydio says it has won a contract to supply its X2D UAVs to the US Army’s Short-Range Reconnaissance Program (SRR). Valued at $20.2 million annually, the fixed-price provisionment agreement is expected to be worth $99.8 million over its five-year duration.

The fact that the final decision looked closely at feedback from soldiers themselves on overall product performance and quality, meanwhile, is an indicator that the company’s UAVs impressed people from the boots on the ground all the way up to the top brass. The pitch for the contract involved 30 small-scale drone manufacturers, from which Skydio’s craft was judged the most ready to fulfill the US Army’s SRR operational requirements from day one.

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The U.S. Army has awarded a $20 million a year contract to a California-based drone manufacturer, named Skydio, as part of its efforts to move away from foreign-made and commercially available off-the-shelf drones. Skydio revealed in a press release that it would supply its X2D drones for the U.S. Army’s Short Range Reconnaissance (SSR) Program.

With an aim to equip its soldiers with rapidly deployable aerial solutions that can conduct reconnaissance and surveillance activities over short ranges, the Army’s SSR program has been considering small drones for some time now. More than 30 vendors submitted their proposals to the Army, and five finalists were shortlisted for rigorous testing.

The Drive accessed a federal contract from 2017 that listed the minimal specifications of the SSR program which include a flight time of 30 minutes, a range of 1.86 nautical miles (3 km), and the ability to tolerate winds up to 15 knots. With the singular purpose of reconnaissance, the drone does not need to have swappable payloads but it should support mapping missions and the ability to geotag imagery. U.S. Army has awarded a $20 million a year contract to a California-based drone manufacturer, named Skydio, as part of its efforts to move away from foreign-made and commercially available off-the-shelf drones. Skydio revealed in a press release that it would supply its X2D drones for the U.S. Army’s Short Range Reconnaissance (SSR) Program.

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IBM has just announced a partnership with the Government of Quebec to create the Quebec-IBM Discovery Accelerator in Bromont, Quebec. The accelerator will focus on using quantum computing, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and High-Performance Computing (HPC) to develop new projects, business/scientific/academia collaborations, and skills-building initiatives in research areas including energy, life sciences (genomics and drug discovery), new materials development, and sustainability. This is the fourth such center that IBM has announced. The three previously announced partnerships are with Cleveland Clinic, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council Hartree Centre. IBM’s formal mission statement for these Discovery Accelerators is: “Accelerate scientific discovery and societal impact with a convergence of AI, quantum, and hybrid cloud in a community of discovery with research, academic, industry, startup, and government organizations working together.” IBM’s formal mission statement for these Discovery Accelerators is:

“Accelerate scientific discovery and societal impact with a convergence of AI, quantum, and hybrid cloud in a community of discovery with research, academic, industry, startup, and government organizations working together.”

In addition, the company has developed individual mission statements for each of the four Discovery Accelerators:

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The ESA is investigating hibernation technology that could allow astronauts to remain healthy during long-duration missions to Mars and beyond.

A renewed era of space exploration is upon us, and many exciting missions will be headed to space in the coming years. These include crewed missions to the Moon and the creation of permanent bases there. Beyond the Earth-Moon system, there are multiple proposals for crewed missions to Mars and beyond. This presents significant challenges since a one-way transit to Mars can take six to nine months. Even with new propulsion technologies like nuclear rockets, it could still take more than three months to get to Mars.

In addition to the physical and mental stresses imposed on the astronauts by the duration and long-term exposure to microgravity and radiation, there are also the logistical challenges these types of missions will impose (i.e., massive spacecraft, lots of supplies, and significant expense). Looking for alternatives, the European Space Agency (ESA) is investigating hibernation technology that would allow their astronauts to sleep for much of the voyage and arrive at Mars ready to explore.

This researcher was the subject of a recent study led by Alexander Choukér, a professor of Medicine at the Hospital of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU), and Thu Jennifer Ngo-Anh – a payload coordinator with the ESA’s Directorate of Human and Robotic Exploration Programs. The paper that describes their findings was recently published in the journal Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.

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Smart cities are supposed to represent the pinnacle of technological and human advancement. They certainly deliver on that promise from a technological standpoint. Smart cities employ connected IoT networks, AI, computer vision, NLP, blockchain and similar other technologies and applications to bolster urban computing, which is utilized to optimize a variety of functions in law enforcement, healthcare, traffic management, supply chain management and countless other areas. As human advancement is more ideological than physical, measuring it comes down to a single metric—the level of equity and inclusivity in smart cities. Essentially, these factors are down to how well smart city administrators can reduce digital exclusivity, eliminate algorithmic discrimination and increase citizen engagement. Addressing the issues related to data integrity and bias in AI can resolve a majority of inclusivity problems and meet the above-mentioned objectives. make smart cities more inclusive for people and communities from all strata of society, issues related to digital exclusion and bias in AI need to be addressed by public agencies in these regions.

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Artificial Intelligence is the ability of machines to seemingly think and act as humans do. Humans absorb data through our various senses, process data using our cognitive abilities, and then act. Machines also, in their own narrow way, absorb whatever information is made available to them and take relevant actions when prompted. Those actions may take the form of a conversational bot or a recommender engine. Over time, our decision-making sophistication has increased. We began making decisions relying solely on our judgment. We progressed to summarizing large swaths of data and then applying our judgment to that summary. And at present, we entrust AI with taking decisions across data and recommending actions. In narrow problems, machines have a greater ability than humans to process volumes of data and accurately identify the trends within. Was AI wrong about Nadal? Not really. It said that Nadal had a 4% chance of winning; at that snapshot in time, and based on all past data of similar matches, perhaps that was a fair assessment of his chances against Medvedev. Most humans would also have predicted a Medvedev win even if they hoped for a different outcome. I am sure that as the fifth set played out, the odds of Nadal winning rose steadily in his favor. So, the earlier prediction should not be considered wildly inaccurate just because Nadal ultimately won.

Full Story:

Can AI measure the heart of a champion?

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The recent advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence, coupled with increases in computational power, have led to a lot of interest and hype in longevity biotechnology 30114–2). Hundreds of data scientists and companies are taking advantage of this hype to propel research and discovery of new technologies in aging research.

One of the major new areas in aging research are biomarkers of aging that give the true biological age of humans that may be different from their chronological age. One of the most advanced biomarkers of aging are deep aging clocks that can help researchers predict biological age as well as mortality of humans. In 2013, Steven Horvath published an article called ‘DNA methylation age of human tissues and cell types,’ in which he outlined the development of a multi-tissue predictor of age that allows for the estimation of the DNA methylation age of most tissues and cell types. He also formed an aging clock that can be used to address questions in developmental biology, cancer, and aging research.

There have been several more studies on such clocks since 2013. For example, I was part of a team in 2016 and we published a study on the first deep aging clock titled ‘Deep biomarkers of human aging: Application of deep neural networks to biomarker development.’ Since our study was published, many other aging clocks that can predict age as well as mortality rapidly entered into many industries. it is clear that there is a boom in the longevity biotechnology industry and huge progress in aging research is expected to be made in the next few years. AI-based aging clocks provide a very good entry point for the insurance companies to get into the field of aging research and actually contribute while protecting their business and innovating in science and technology.

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