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A pioneer in Emotion AI, Rana el Kaliouby, Ph.D., is on a mission to humanize technology before it dehumanizes us.

At LiveWorx 2020, Rana joined us to share insights from years of research and collaboration with MIT’s Advanced Vehicle Technology group.

Part demo and part presentation, Rana breaks down the facial patterns that cameras can pick up from a tired or rested driver, and observations from the first ever large-scale study looking at driver behavior over time.

Learn how these inferences can be used to change the driving experience ➡️ https://archive.liveworx.com/sessions/artificial-emotional-i…it-matters


Today’s devices work hand-in-hand with humans –at work, home, school and play. Dr. Rana el Kaliouby believes they can do much more. An expert in artificial emotional intelligence, or “Emotion AI,” Dr. el Kaliouby explores the valuable applications of humanized technology in media and advertising, gaming, automotive, robotics, health, education and more. She explains how machine learning works, explores the potential for the development of emotion chips, and addresses the ethics and privacy issues of Emotion AI. In her talks, Dr. el Kaliouby gives participants an inside look at the world’s largest emotion data repositoryresults from her research studying more than 5 million faces around the world, and reveals that the emoji mindset may soon be a thing of the past.

The emergence of artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques is changing the world dramatically with novel applications such as internet of things, autonomous vehicles, real-time imaging processing and big data analytics in healthcare. In 2020, the global data volume is estimated to reach 44 Zettabytes, and it will continue to grow beyond the current capacity of computing and storage devices. At the same time, the related electricity consumption will increase 15 times by 2030, swallowing 8% of the global energy demand. Therefore, reducing energy consumption and increasing speed of information storage technology is in urgent need.

Berkeley researchers led by HKU President Professor Xiang Zhang when he was in Berkeley, in collaboration with Professor Aaron Lindenberg’s team at Stanford University, invented a new data storage method: They make odd numbered layers slide relative to even-number layers in tungsten ditelluride, which is only 3nm thick. The arrangement of these atomic layers represents 0 and 1 for data storage. These researchers creatively make use of quantum geometry: Berry curvature, to read information out. Therefore, this material platform works ideally for memory, with independent ‘write’ and ‘read’ operation. The using this novel data storage method can be over 100 times less than the traditional method.

This work is a conceptual innovation for non-volatile storage types and can potentially bring technological revolution. For the first time, the researchers prove that two-dimensional semi-metals, going beyond traditional silicon material, can be used for information storage and reading. This work was published in the latest issue of the journal Nature Physics. Compared with the existing non-volatile (NVW) memory, this new material platform is expected to increase speed by two orders and decrease energy cost by three orders, and it can greatly facilitate the realization of emerging in-memory computing and neural network computing.

This is my second video presentation on the topic of GEO space-based solar power (astroelectricity). This was also given via video at a conference in Portugal on 22 Aug 2020. After a brief introduction to astroelectricity, the 24-minute presentation addresses how global astroelectricity will enable most of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals to be addressed and, especially, how affordable middle-class housing can be built. We are living in an exciting time (in a positive sense) where emerging technologies will enable us to push through these difficult times. The key is to undertake an orderly transition from fossil carbon fuels to astroelectricity and not be sidetracked by poorly developed “solutions” such as the Paris Climate Agreement and the Green New Deal.


The world needs a peaceful, orderly plan to transition from fossil carbon fuels to globally decentralized sustainable energy sufficient to enable worldwide middle-class prosperity. Nuclear power, wind power, and ground solar power—“solutions” often tied to the Green New Deal—cannot practically achieve this. Astroelectricity, generated in space by space-based solar power, can meet this need. This presentation builds on the “(Em)powering World Peace and Prosperity Using Astroelectricity” to discuss the global benefits that will arise from transitioning to astroelectricity.

In this presentation, astroelectricity is described followed by examples of how global astroelectricity will enable most of the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals to be realized this century. The presentation ends with describing how astroelectricity, 3D-printing, and humanoid construction robots can revolutionize building affordable middle class homes to boost the world’s standard of living, ending energy impoverishment and substandard housing while providing high-quality science, technology, engineering, architecture, manufacturing and construction jobs worldwide.

This invited presentation was made, via video, at the 22 August 2020 Planet Masters conference in Portugal.

When we came out of the financial crisis of 2008, cloud computing kicked into high gear and started to become a pervasive, transformational technology. The current COVID-19 crisis could provide a similar inflection point for AI applications. While the implications of AI continue to be debated on the world stage, the rapid onset of a global health crisis and concomitant recession will accelerate its impact.

Times of crisis bring rapid change. Efforts to harness AI technologies to discover new drugs – either vaccine or treatment – have kicked into hyperdrive. Startups are racing to find solutions and established companies are forming partnerships with academia to find a cure. Other companies are researching existing drugs for their potential applicability. AI is proving a useful tool for dramatically reducing the time needed to identify potential drug candidates, possibly saving years of research. AI uses already put into action are screening for COVID-19 symptoms, decision support for CT scans, and automating hospital operations. A variety of healthcare functions have started to be performed by robots, from diagnosis to temperature monitoring.

Whatever the new normal becomes in the aftermath of the current crisis, it’s apparent that AI will be an even larger part of the technology landscape going forward — and not only for healthcare.

As the coronavirus spreads around the world, the urgency of being able to scale up a vaccine is even more critical.

Delays in production can occur at any point in time, from timely receipt and testing of raw materials, to characterization of the drug substance, to quality testing and release.

Automation technologies can help both speed up the manufacturing process and make the process safer and more efficient by reducing manual errors.

AI has found religion.

Or at least one engineer and quantum researcher has brought a bit of religion to his AI project.

George Davila Durendal fed the entire text of the King James Bible into his algorithms designed to churn out dialogue in the style of the Old Testament.

Durendal claimed his project, AI Jesus, learned and absorbed “every word more thoroughly than all the monks of all the monasteries that have ever been,” offering a little biblical style verse of his own.

An artificial intelligence (AI) technology made by a firm co-founded by billionaire Elon Musk has won praise for its ability to generate coherent stories, novels and even computer code but it remains blind to racism or sexism.

GPT-3, as Californian company OpenAI’s latest AI language is known, is capable of completing a dialogue between two people, continuing a series of questions and answers or finishing a Shakespeare-style poem.

Start a sentence or text and it completes it for you, basing its response on the gigantic amount of information it has been fed.