Lifeboat Foundation

Some 50,000 people in the U.S. are diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease (PD) every year. The American Institute of Neurology estimates there are one million people affected with this neurodegenerative disorder, with 60 years as average age of onset. Falls and fall-related injuries are a major issue for people with Parkinson’s?up to 70 percent of advanced PD patients fall at least once a year and two-thirds suffer recurring falls. These fall rates are twice as high as those of adults of comparable age, so improving balance in patients with Parkinson’s would provide a major health advantage.

Sunil Agrawal, professor of mechanical engineering and of rehabilitation and regenerative medicine at Columbia Engineering, along with Dario Martelli, a post-doctoral researcher in his group, have been working on this issue with Movement Disorders faculty from the department of neurology at Columbia University Medical Center?Stanley Fahn, a leading expert in Parkinson’s, and Un Jung Kang, division director, and Movement Disorder Fellow Lan Luo. In their latest study, published today in Scientific Reports, the team looked at whether or not Parkinson’s disease affects patients’ balance and diminishes their ability to react and adapt to walking with perturbations. The researchers found that the ability to adapt to multiple perturbations or to modify responses to changing amplitudes or directions was not affected by PD; both the Parkinson’s and the healthy subjects controlled their reactive strategies in the same way.

This Autonomous Flying Car will be ready to take to the skies by 2018.

Researchers have developed an easy-to-build camera that produces 3D images from a single 2D image without any lenses. In an initial application of the technology, the researchers plan to use the new camera, which they call DiffuserCam, to watch microscopic neuron activity in living mice without a microscope. Ultimately, it could prove useful for a wide range of applications involving 3D capture.

The camera is compact and inexpensive to construct because it consists of only a diffuser — essentially a bumpy piece of plastic — placed on top of an image sensor. Although the hardware is simple, the software it uses to reconstruct high resolution 3D images is very complex.

“The DiffuserCam can, in a single shot, capture 3D information in a large volume with high resolution,” said the research team leader Laura Waller, University of California, Berkeley. “We think the camera could be useful for self-driving cars, where the 3D information can offer a sense of scale, or it could be used with machine learning algorithms to perform face detection, track people or automatically classify objects.”

“Unsupervised” machine learning could help translate between uncommon languages.

There are plenty of humanoid-looking robots out there, but very few actually have bodies that are particularly analogous to our own when it comes to moving and interacting with the environment. Japanese researchers are working to remedy that with a robot designed specifically to mimic not just human movements but the way humans actually accomplish those movements. Oh, and it sweats.

Kengoro is a new-ish robot (an earlier version made the rounds last year) that emphasizes flexibility and true humanoid structure rather than putting power or efficiency above all else.

As the researchers explain in their paper, published today in Science Robotics:

Continue reading “This humanoid robot works out (and sweats) like we do (or should)” »

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(Via Rahkendra Ice / AAAS)

Artificial Intelligence has been pegged as one of the most important investment themes of our time. Artificial Intelligence is not new, however, it’s applications are not widely understood by many people. In this exclusive panel session Lachlan McGregor from Alphinity Investment Management sits down with Andrew Charlton from AlphaBeta and Niki Scevak from BlackBird Ventures to discuss the applications of artificial intelligence and some of the companies at the forefront of this technology.

Livewire Markets

Continue reading “An investor’s guide to Artificial Intelligence” »

The rise of AI (Artificial Intelligence) robots can be concerning for some people but that’s not stopping them for sure. In fact, there’s a chance that the AI robots will soon have ‘children’ with their owners. Yes, human-robot babies are very much possible, according to a leading artificial intelligence expert.

Dr David Levy, who is the author of Love and Sex with Robots claims that that humans and robots will soon make babies, given the ‘recent progress in stem cell research and artificial chromosomes.’

Though Dr Levy has not given a specific timeline for robot babies, he believes that it could happen within the next 100 years.

Continue reading “Humans and robots can have babies, claims AI expert” »

Artificial Intelligence has come a long way in a short time. So at what point will it be able to emulate the great artists and writers of our time?