Johns Hopkins gets the grant to use artificial intelligence to promote healthy aging. The National Institute of Aging has allocated over $20M to Hopkins for them to execute their plans to promote healthy aging.
This new development will considerably help in providing a better lifestyle and living experience to senior citizens. Johns Hopkins will use the allocated funds over five years to build an AI and technology collaboratory (AITC).
The new collaboratory will have members from the Johns Hopkins University schools of medicine and nursing, the Whiting School of Engineering, and the Carey Business School. The collaboratory will also have members from various industries, senior citizens of the country, and technology developers.
Americans have become accustomed to images of Hellfire missiles raining down from Predator and Reaper drones to hit terrorist targets in Pakistan or Yemen. But that was yesterday’s drone war.
A revolution in unmanned aerial vehicles is unfolding, and the U.S. has lost its monopoly on the technology.
Some experts believe the spread of the semi-autonomous weapons will change ground warfare as profoundly as the machine gun did.
In recent years, computational tools based on reinforcement learning have achieved remarkable results in numerous tasks, including image classification and robotic object manipulation. Meanwhile, computer scientists have also been training reinforcement learning models to play specific human games and videogames.
To challenge research teams working on reinforcement learning techniques, the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) annual conference introduced the MineRL competition, a contest in which different algorithms are tested on the same task in Minecraft, the renowned computer game developed by Mojang Studios. More specifically, contestants are asked to create algorithms that will need to obtain a diamond from raw pixels in the Minecraft game.
The algorithms can only be trained for four days and on 8,000,000 samples created by the MineRL simulator, using a single GPU machine. In addition to the training dataset, participants are also provided with a large collection of human demonstrations (i.e., video frames in which the task is solved by human players).
Harvard University on Tuesday launched the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence, a new University-wide initiative standing at the intersection of neuroscience and artificial intelligence, seeking fundamental principles that underlie both human and machine intelligence. The fruits of discoveries will flow in both directions, enhancing understanding of how humans think, perceive the world around them, make decisions, and learn, thereby advancing the rapidly evolving field of AI.
The institute will be funded by a $500 million gift from Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, which was announced Tuesday by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The gift will support 10 new faculty appointments, significant new computing infrastructure, and resources to allow students to flow between labs in pursuit of ideas and knowledge. The institute’s name honors Zuckerberg’s mother, Karen Kempner Zuckerberg, and her parents — Zuckerberg’s grandparents — Sidney and Gertrude Kempner. Chan and Zuckerberg have given generously to Harvard in the past, supporting students, faculty, and researchers in a range of areas, including around public service, literacy, and cures.
“The Kempner Institute at Harvard represents a remarkable opportunity to bring together approaches and expertise in biological and cognitive science with machine learning, statistics, and computer science to make real progress in understanding how the human brain works to improve how we address disease, create new therapies, and advance our understanding of the human body and the world more broadly,” said President Larry Bacow.
Working with two teams of mathematicians, DeepMind engineered an algorithm that can look across different mathematical fields and spot connections that previously escaped the human mind. The AI doesn’t do all the work—when fed sufficient data, it finds patterns. These patterns are then passed on to human mathematicians to guide their intuition and creativity towards new laws of nature.
“I was not expecting to have some of my preconceptions turned on their head,” said Dr. Marc Lackenby at the University of Oxford, one of the scientists collaborating with DeepMind, to Nature, where the study was published.
The AI comes just a few months after DeepMind’s previous triumph in solving a 50-year-old challenge in biology. This is different. For the first time, machine learning is aiming at the core of mathematics—a science for spotting patterns that eventually leads to formally-proven ideas, or theorems, about how our world works. It also emphasized collaboration between machine and man in bridging observations to working theorems.
Skills shortages are easily brushed off as Covid collateral, but in fact, they are much more troubling signs of an education system that is not preparing people for the future of work. These issues stem from a union of education and employment that has been designed to fill specific criteria for the workforce, but the job market that young people are training for today will require a much greater emphasis on human skills to complement the repetitive tasks handled by AI and automation.
But bringing up young people with the human skills they need for a changing world of work is a mammoth task that must combine the powers of government, businesses, and dedicated organizations to reshape our education systems and integrate them with the communities they serve. I spoke with Justin van Fleet, Executive Director of the Global Business Coalition for Education (GBC-Education), about the need for a holistic and skills-centered approach to education, and how change needs to start as early as possible.
Could we interest you in a humanoid vessel to transfer your consciousness into?
Humans have always been fascinated with the concept of immortality but what seems to be even more exciting to some is the thought of using technology to make immortality a real-world application. A movement called transhumanism is even devoted to using science and technology to augment our bodies and our minds, and to allow humans to merge with machines, eradicating old age as a cause of death. So the big question is — can we really evade death?
From Hans Moravec’s classic book Mind Children to Gene Roddenberry’s iconic TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation, the idea of uploading a person’s feelings, memories, and experiences onto a machine, has been explored in many popular non-fiction and fiction works. However, whether or not mind uploading could become a reality, like 3D printers, robots, and driverless cars? We are yet to find out.
Transhumanism, briefly explained, means the modification of human beings through technology and engineering. It employs a variety of methods used to cure ailments, or upgrading humans just for the sake of it. Creating people that are smarter, stronger, healthier, or more productive.
It comes with plenty of social and ethical implications and challenges. How will we face this future? Let’s find out today.
Notes and References: [1] Harari, N.Y. (2017). Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. HarperCollins Publishing: New York, NY [2] Niller, E. (2018, August 10). Why Gene Editing Is the Next Food Revolution. Time. Retrieved from https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/food-…ne-editing. [3] Epstein, L.R., Lee, S.S., Miller, M.F., & Lombardi, H.A. (2021). CRISPR, animals, and FDA oversight: Building a path to success. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(22) e2004831117, doi:10.1073/pnas.2004831117 [4] Park, A. (2019, August 6). CRISPR Gene Editing Is Being Tested in Human Patients, and the Results Could Revolutionize Health Care. Time. Retrieved from https://time.com/5642755/crispr-gene-editing-humans/ [5][Neuralink]. (2021, April 8). Monkey MindPong[Video]. YouTube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsCul1sp4hQ [6] Ritchie, H., Ortiz-Ospina E. & Roser, M. (2013). Life Expectancy. OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy. [7] Sinclair, D.A. & LaPlante, M.D. (2019). Lifespan: Why We Age and Why We Don’t Have To. Atria Books: New York, NY. [8] Kharpal, A. (2017, February 13). Elon Musk: Humans must merge with machines or become irrelevant in AI age. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/13/elon-musk-humans-merge-machi…obots.html. [9] Humanity+ —World Transhumanist Association. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://humanityplus.org.
Do you want to learn more about Transhumanism? Check out these sources! [Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell]. (2020, December 10). Can You Upload Your Mind & Live Forever?[Video]. YouTube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b33NTAuF5E. [Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell]. (2017, October 20). Why Age? Should We End Aging Forever?[Video]. YouTube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoJsr4IwCm4&t=1s. [Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell]. (2017, November 3). How to Cure Aging – During Your Lifetime?[Video]. YouTube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjdpR-TY6QU [BBC Ideas]. (2019, December 31). Transhumanism: Will humans evolve to something smarter? | A-Z of ISMs Episode 20 — BBC Ideas[Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVmuU04-X5E
