Lifeboat Foundation

Amazon Prime Air has cleared a regulatory hurdle, moving the online retail giant one step closer to dropping packages off at your doorstep with drones. The US Federal Aviation Administration on Saturday issued Amazon Prime Air a “a Part 135 air carrier certificate,” allowing it to begin commercial drone deliveries in the US.

“Amazon Prime Air’s concept uses autonomous [unmanned aircraft systems] to safely and efficiently deliver packages to customers,” said a spokesperson for the FAA on Monday. “The FAA supports innovation that is beneficial to the public, especially during a health or weather-related crisis.”

Amazon and other companies are trying to make drones the future of deliveries.

Scientists have unveiled the first ever “living robot,” an organism made up of living cells, which can move around, carry payloads, and even heal itself.

“All of the computational people on the project, myself included, were flabbergasted,” said Joshua Bongard, a computer scientist at the University of Vermont.

Continue reading “Scientists create a robot made entirely of living cells” »

FRAMOS, the global partner for Vision Technologies, has developed an industrial grade version of Intel’s® RealSense™ Suite to provide Gigabit Ethernet connectivity and an IP66 rated housing. The D435e industrial 3D GigE Vision camera leverages the advantages of easy-to-integrate 3D vision in rugged environments; enabling real-time positioning, orientation and tracking of robots, automated guided vehicles, and smart machines.

Christopher Scheubel, Product Manager for Intel at FRAMOS, says: “Providing an ethernet solution in combination with Intel’s® RealSense™ Technology is key to enabling 3D vision applications for industry that require longer cable lengths, dust and water resistance, and locked connections. Applications like robotic pick and place systems, automated guided vehicles (AGVs), retail observation, or automatic patient positioning, benefit from the very robust implementation and high usability.”

When Gary Kasparov was dethroned by IBM’s Deep Blue chess algorithm, the algorithm did not use Machine Learning, or at least in the way that we define Machine Learning today.

Adji Bousso Dieng will be Princeton’s School of Engineering’s first Black female faculty.

Not only has Adji Bousso Dieng, an AI researcher from Senegal, contributed to the field of generative modeling and about to become one of the first black female faculty in Computer Science in the Ivy League, she is also helping Africans in STEM tell their own success stories.

Dieng, who is currently a researcher at Google and an incoming computer science faculty at Princeton, works in an area of Artificial Intelligence called generative modeling.

IAIFI will advance physics knowledge — from the smallest building blocks of nature to the largest structures in the universe — and galvanize AI research innovation.

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) announced last week an investment of more than $100 million to establish five artificial intelligence (AI) institutes, each receiving roughly $20 million over five years. One of these, the NSF AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions (IAIFI), will be led by MIT ’s Laboratory for Nuclear Science (LNS) and become the intellectual home of more than 25 physics and AI senior researchers at MIT and Harvard, Northeastern, and Tufts universities.

By merging research in physics and AI, the IAIFI seeks to tackle some of the most challenging problems in physics, including precision calculations of the structure of matter, gravitational-wave detection of merging black holes, and the extraction of new physical laws from noisy data.

Autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have shown great potential for a wide range of applications, including automated package delivery and the monitoring of large geographical areas. To complete missions in real-world environments, however, UAVs need to be able to navigate efficiently and avoid obstacles in their surroundings.

Researchers at Luleå University of Technology in Sweden and California Institute of Technology have recently developed a nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC)-based computational technique that could provide UAVs with better navigation and obstacle avoidance capabilities. The NMPC approach they used, presented in a paper published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, is based on the structure of OpEn (Optimization Engine), a parametric optimization software developed by Dr. Pantelis Sopasakis at Queen’s University Belfast.

Continue reading “A model for autonomous navigation and obstacle avoidance in UAVs” »

This is an excerpt of a conversation between Dr. Daniel Stickler and Brian Rose.
Dr. Stickler is the Medical Director for the Neurohacker Collective, a consultant for Google on epigenetics and AI in healthcare, and a lecturer at Stanford University.
Brian Rose is the founder of London Real, a curator of people worth watching. Its mission is to promote personal transformation through inspiration, self-discovery and empowerment.
CUENTA CON SUBTÍTULOS EN ESPAÑOL
To watch the entire conversation clic here: https://youtu.be/ynbaJ2038K0

Tesla scraps plans for its bargain version of the Model Y.

Elon Musk unveiled Tesla’s mid-size electric SUV, the Model Y, Thursday night in Hawthorne, Calif.

The most-affordable Model Y will have a base price of $39,000 and a 230-mile battery range, but customers will have to wait until at least 2021 to own one of the five-seater SUVs. Tesla will first sell more expensive versions of the Model Y — with prices starting from $47,000 to $60,000, and offering more battery range. Those will ship starting in 2020, according to the company. There are additional charges for Tesla’s autopilot software, a third row of seats and colors other than black. A panoramic glass roof comes standard.

Continue reading “Tesla Model Y: Elon Musk’s second electric SUV is here” »