Lifeboat Foundation

Engineers from Johns Hopkins reinvent the humble stethoscope to save lives.

This is not a story about how the polar vortex is bad—bad for the human body, bad for public transportation, bad for virtually everything in its path. This is a story about how one being among us is actually taking advantage of the historic cold snap: Cassie the bipedal robot. While humans suffer through the chill, this trunkless pair of ostrich-like legs is braving the frozen grounds of the University of Michigan, for the good of science.

“When we saw the announcement for the polar vortex, we started making plans to see how long we could operate in that kind of weather,” says roboticist Jessy Grizzle. “We were going to tie a scarf on her just so it looked cute, but we decided people would think that was keeping her warm and affecting the experiment, so we didn’t.”

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Continue reading “The Punishing Polar Vortex Is Ideal for Cassie the Robot” »

Welcome to the future.

In the first experiment of its kind, scientists have been able to translate brain signals directly into intelligible speech. It may sound like wild science fiction at first, but this feat could actually help some people with speech issues.

And yes, we could also get some futuristic computer interfaces out of this.

Continue reading “Scientists Have Found a Way to Convert Human Brain Signals Directly Into Speech” »

Last year, Microsoft Corp.’s Azure security team detected suspicious activity in the cloud computing usage of a large retailer: One of the company’s administrators, who usually logs on from New York, was trying to gain entry from Romania. And no, the admin wasn’t on vacation. A hacker had broken in.

Microsoft quickly alerted its customer, and the attack was foiled before the intruder got too far.

Chalk one up to a new generation of artificially intelligent software that adapts to hackers’ constantly evolving tactics. Microsoft, Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Amazon.com Inc. and various startups are moving away from solely using older “rules-based” technology designed to respond to specific kinds of intrusion and deploying machine-learning algorithms that crunch massive amounts of data on logins, behavior and previous attacks to ferret out and stop hackers.

Continue reading “Microsoft, Google Use Artificial Intelligence to Fight Hackers” »

Generative adversarial networks are not just good for causing mischief. They can also show us how AI algorithms “think.”

Journalist Ashlee Vance travels to Montreal, Canada to meet the founders of Lyrebird, a startup that is using AI to clone human voices with frightening precision.

Hello World is a Webby and Emmy-nominated video series from Bloomberg that invites the viewer to come on a journey across the globe to find the inventors, scientists and technologists shaping our future. Join journalist and best-selling author Ashlee Vance on a quest to find the freshest, weirdest tech creations and the beautiful freaks behind them.

Continue reading “This AI Can Clone Any Voice, Including Yours” »

The rise of “self-aware” robots has come a major step closer following the invention of a machine capable of thinking for itself from scratch, scientists have said.

Engineers at Columbia University claim to have smashed one of the biggest barriers in the field of robotics after a mechanical arm, which had not been programmed with any instructions, began performing practical tasks after just a few hours.

The team said this is the first time a robot has shown the ability to “imagine itself”, thereby working out what its purpose is and how to perform it.

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Global thermonuclear war. The slight possibility that a massive asteroid could boop Earth. Jenga. These are a few of the things that give humans debilitating anxiety.

Robots can’t solve any of these problems for us, but one machine can now brave the angst that is the crumbling tower of wooden blocks: Researchers at MIT report today in Science Robotics that they’ve engineered a robot to teach itself the complex physics of Jenga. This, though, is no game—it’s a big step in the daunting quest to get robots to manipulate objects in the real world.

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In a stark contrast to focusing on the disruptive potential of narrow forms of AI, in this lecture by OxAI, David Wood will be reviewing Artificial General Intelligence on topics including:

• Scenarios in which AGI might arrive within ten years

• What sceptics about AGI tend to get wrong about superintelligence.

Continue reading “OxAI: Why AGI Deserves Immediate Serious Attention” »