Lifeboat Foundation

Back in the Sixties, one of the hottest toys in history swept America. It was called Etch-A-Sketch, and its popularity was based on a now-laughably simple feature. It was a handheld small-laptop-sized device that allowed users to create crude images by turning two control knobs that drew horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines composed of aluminum particles sealed in a plastic case. It allowed experienced artists to compose simple and sometimes recognizable portraits. And it allowed inexperienced wannabe artists who could barely draw stick-figure characters to feel like masters of the genre by generating what, frankly, still looked pretty much like mush. But Etch-A-Sketch was fun, and it went on to sell 100 million units to this day.

Six decades later, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and City University of Hong Kong have come up with an invention that actually does what so many wishful enthusiasts imagined Etch-A-Sketch did all those years ago.

Continue reading “AI creates realistic faces from crude sketches” »

The Spot Explorer is likely not coming to a workplace near you. The high price point makes it impractical to all but a few institutions, like high-end construction firms, energy companies, and government agencies. But just seeing out in the world, doing more than dancing to “Uptown Funk,” is surely a sign of progress.

These viral robots have ranked up big YouTube numbers for years. Now, they’re about to start their day jobs.

Administrator Jim Bridenstine, leadership and a panel of scientists and engineers will preview the upcoming mission at 2 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, June 17. Submit your questions during the briefing using #AskNASA!

Perseverance is a robotic scientist that will search for signs of past microbial life on Mars and characterize the planet’s climate and geology. It will also collect rock and soil samples for future return to Earth and pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet. The mission is scheduled to launch from Space Launch Complex 41 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 9:15 a.m. EDT July 20. It will land at Mars’ Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021. #CountdownToMars

A rejuvenation roadmap, and some info on Rejuvenate Bio.

Ray Kurzweil predicted the Technological Singularity will be reached in 2045. This actually means there will be strong AI, something like AGI that is 1 billion times more capable than the human brain in many aspects.

In a paper, researchers at DeepMind propose a system that can efficiently navigate virtual city environments it hasn’t seen before.

CLEW, an Israeli medtech firm specializing in real-time AI analytics platforms, received approval from the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its “Predictive Analytics Platform in Support of COVID-19 Patients,” the company announced Tuesday.

The Intensive Care Unit (ICU) solution was given Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) by the FDA so that it may be implemented within the United States’ health system as soon as possible.

Robots capable of the sophisticated motions that define advanced physical actions like walking, jumping, and navigating terrain can cost $50,000 or more, making real-world experimentation prohibitively expensive for many.

Now, a collaborative team at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) in Tübingen and Stuttgart, Germany, has designed a relatively low-cost, easy-and-fast-to-assemble quadruped robot called “Solo 8” that can be upgraded and modified, opening the door to sophisticated research and development to teams on limited budgets, including those at startups, smaller labs, or teaching institutions.

The researchers’ work, “An Open Torque-Controlled Modular Robot Architecture for Legged Locomotion Research,” accepted for publication in Robotics and Automation Letters, will be presented later this month at ICRA, the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, one of the world’s leading robotic conferences, to be held virtually.

The system studied 17,000 celebrity headshots before learning to make its own.

In the last few years, most of the data such as books, videos, pictures, medical and even the genetic information of humans are moving toward digital formats. Laptops, tablets, smartphones and wearable devices are the major source of this digital data transformation and are becoming the core part of our daily life. As a result of this transformation, we are becoming the soft target of various types of cybercrimes. Digital forensic investigation provides the way to recover lost or purposefully deleted or hidden files from a suspect’s device. However, current man power and government resources are not enough to investigate the cybercrimes. Unfortunately, existing digital investigation procedures and practices require huge interaction with humans; as a result it slows down the process with the pace digital crimes are committed. Machine learning (ML) is the branch of science that has governs from the field of AI. This advance technology uses the explicit programming to depict the human-like behaviour. Machine learning combined with automation in digital investigation process at different stages of investigation has significant potential to aid digital investigators. This chapter aims at providing the research in machine learning-based digital forensic investigation, identifies the gaps, addresses the challenges and open issues in this field.