Lifeboat Foundation

At artificial-intelligence conferences, researchers are increasingly alarmed by what they see.

Onboard visual state estimation can save your quadrotor from a crash—and doesn’t need GPS to do it.

The algorithm isn’t perfect, but it vastly outperforms past attempts.

Instead of firing missiles, planes may carry and launch unmanned drones that will be able to shoot their own missiles to search and destroy targets.

Aerospace giant Northrop Grumman is wasting no time in this competition.

Just two days after DARPA named it as one of three competitors for the LongShot contract, the company released an image of its concept for an air-launched unmanned aircraft system (UAS), Aviation Week reported.

Continue reading “Grumman’s LongShot drone can search & destroy” »

Using the pressure of the sun’s rays to propel spacecraft, solar sails will allow future unmanned missions to be longer and cheaper while reaching the outer solar system—and possibly beyond.

#Moonshot #Space #BloombergQuicktake.

Continue reading “How Solar Sails Are Remaking Space Exploration” »

A new artificially intelligent ‘Ramanujan Machine’ can generate hundreds of new mathematical conjectures, which might lead to new math proofs and theorems.

It’s 2050 and you’re due for your monthly physical exam. Times have changed, so you no longer have to endure an orifices check, a needle in your vein, and a week of waiting for your blood test results. Instead, the nurse welcomes you with, “The doctor will sniff you now,” and takes you into an airtight chamber wired up to a massive computer. As you rest, the volatile molecules you exhale or emit from your body and skin slowly drift into the complex artificial intelligence apparatus, colloquially known as Deep Nose. Behind the scene, Deep Nose’s massive electronic brain starts crunching through the molecules, comparing them to its enormous olfactory database. Once it’s got a noseful, the AI matches your odors to the medical conditions that cause them and generates a printout of your health. Your human doctor goes over the results with you and plans your treatment or adjusts your meds.

Compute costs, spurious noise, and privacy problems all mean that we can’t keep moving toward bigger and bigger datasets to fuel AI progress.

A novel computer algorithm, or set of rules, that accurately predicts the orbits of planets in the solar system could be adapted to better predict and control the behavior of the plasma that fuels fusion facilities designed to harvest on Earth the fusion energy that powers the sun and stars.