Lifeboat Foundation

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” »

The news: IBM has built a new chemistry lab called RoboRXN in the cloud. It combines AI models, a cloud computing platform, and robots to help scientists design and synthesize new molecules while working from home.

How it works: The online lab platform allows scientists to log on through a web browser. On a blank canvas, they draw the skeletal structure of the molecular compounds they want to make, and the platform uses machine learning to predict the ingredients required and the order in which they should be mixed. It then sends the instructions to a robot in a remote lab to execute. Once the experiment is done, the platform sends a report to the scientists with the results.

Why it matters: New drugs and materials traditionally require an average of 10 years and $10 million to discover and bring to market. Much of that time is taken up by the laborious repetition of experiments to synthesize new compounds and learn from trial and error. IBM hopes that a platform like RoboRXN could dramatically speed up that process by predicting the recipes for compounds and automating experiments. In theory, it would lower the costs of drug development and allow scientists to react faster to health crises like the current pandemic, in which social distancing requirements have caused slowdowns in lab work.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has had a global impact on all aspects of health care, including surgical procedures. For urologists, it has affected and will continue to influence how we approach the care of patients preoperatively, intraoperatively, and postoperatively. A risk-benefit assessment of each patient undergoing surgery should be performed during the COVID-19 pandemic based on the urgency of the surgery and the risk of viral illness and transmission. Patients with advanced age and comorbidities have a higher incidence of mortality. Routine preoperative testing and symptom screening is recommended to identify those with COVID-19. Adequate personal protective equipment (PPE) for the surgical team is essential to protect health care workers and ensure an adequate workforce. For COVID-19 positive or suspected patients, the use of N95 respirators is recommended if available. The anesthesia method chosen should attempt to minimize aerosolization of the virus. Negative pressure rooms are strongly preferred for intubation/extubation and other aerosolizing procedures for COVID-19 positive patients or when COVID status is unknown. Although transmission has not yet been shown during laparoscopic and robotic procedures, efforts should be made to minimize the risk of aerosolization. Ultra-low particulate air filters are recommended for use during minimally invasive procedures to decrease the risk of viral transmission. Thorough cleaning and sterilization should be performed postoperatively with adequate time allowed for the operating room air to be cycled after procedures. COVID-19 patients should be separated from noninfected patients at all levels of care, including recovery, to decrease the risk of infection. Future directions will be guided by outcomes and infection rates as social distancing guidelines are relaxed and more surgical procedures are reintroduced. Recommendations should be adapted to the local environment and will continue to evolve as more data become available, the shortage of testing and PPE is resolved, and a vaccine and therapeutics for COVID-19 are developed.

The first reported cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), which is caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), originated in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China in December 2019. This respiratory disease spread outside of China, leading to outbreaks in Korea, Iran, Italy, and, eventually, the United States and the rest of the world. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak to be a pandemic. At the time of this writing, there are currently more than 1.3 million confirmed cases worldwide, with the total deaths numbering more than 74,000.¹ This pandemic is unlike anything that has been seen in recent history.

From a urologic surgery perspective, many questions arise regarding the immediate and long-term care of our patients. The goal of this article is to summarize some of the current information available on preoperative, intraoperative, and postoperative care. As we gain more knowledge about how the virus behaves, this body of literature will inevitably change.