Lifeboat Foundation

No one has ever seen any airplane like this, except on computer animation. Now, some of the world’s top aeronautical engineers are going to build it for real.

The plan calls for constructing a six-ton unmanned, remote controlled plane the size of a business jet with 24 spinning propellers embedded in its huge moveable wings that allow it to magically hover in midair.

It’s an experimental airplane they call LightningStrike.

A growing cadre of startups is pursuing iterative cycles of machine learning, wet-lab experimentation and human feedback to accelerate target drug discovery.

A new AI diagnostic tool trained on crowdsourced symptom data can predict whether someone likely has COVID-19 without testing.

The model was trained on data from more than 2.5 million users of the COVID Symptom Study app developed at King’s College London, which anyone can download to report their daily health status.

Conclusion

The race is on to develop the hardware that will power the upcoming era of AI. More innovation is happening in the semiconductor industry today than at any time since Silicon Valley’s earliest days. Untold billions of dollars are in play.

This next generation of chips will shape the contours and trajectory of the field of artificial intelligence in the years ahead. In the words of Yann LeCun: “Hardware capabilities…motivate and limit the types of ideas that AI researchers will imagine and will allow themselves to pursue. The tools at our disposal fashion our thoughts more than we care to admit.”

Motion picture animation and video games are impressively lifelike nowadays, capturing a wisp of hair falling across a heroine’s eyes or a canvas sail snapping crisply in the wind. Collaborators from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Carnegie Mellon University have adapted this sophisticated computer graphics technology to simulate the movements of soft, limbed robots for the first time.

Next-generation VTOL concepts are rising to meet the future needs of a modern-day battlefield.

Vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) concepts for unmanned aerial systems (UAS) certainly aren’t new. Their reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering roles date back to the 1950s, and there’s been a gradual path toward technological advancements in the decades since.

Researchers at Northwestern University have developed a garment designed to confuse digital surveillance algorithms into thinking you don’t exist.

What can you say Eric Klien.

The Vatican announced its plan for an ethical approach to AI development, arguing for things like transparency, inclusion, impartiality, and privacy.

Reason has done a great video and article on AI facial recognition, surveillance, etc, and combined it with fashion ideas. It’s created by Zach Weissmueller and Justin Monticello. My interview (as well as others) show up throughout the 11 min video. This is really important watching for the coming future:

Privacy activists say we should be alarmed by the rise of automated facial recognition surveillance. Transhumanist Zoltan Istvan says it’s time to embrace the end of privacy as we know it.