Lifeboat Foundation

It’s 2018, and the Open Access debate has been settled: institutions, researchers, funders and the public all hate paywalled science, and only the journal publishers — whose subscription rates have gone up several thousand percent in recent decades, despite the fact that they don’t pay for research, review, editing, or (increasingly) paper — like locking up scholarship.

Virtual reality is a gateway to powerful experiences. Strap on a pair of VR goggles, look around, and the scene you see will adjust, in real time, to match your gaze. But the technology is a visual one. Virtual reality doesn’t include touch, although there are controllers that provide “hand presence,” allowing you to manipulate objects in the virtual world, or shoot a simulated gun. So while VR today could simulate a Westworld -like setting, you’re not going to be actually feeling the hug of a cowboy-robot on your body while using any of the major platforms—at least not for a while.

The Force Jacket, a garment from Disney Research, aims to address that gap. Made out of a converted life jacket, the prototype uses embedded airbags that inflate, deflate, or even vibrate to literally give its wearer a feeling of being touched. When coupled with VR software, the setup can simulate something bizarre—a snake slithering on you—or more pedestrian: getting hit by a snowball. In brief, the sensation of touch you feel on your actual body can match what you see in a virtual one. (The device is the result of a research project, so these lifejacket-garments aren’t exactly on sale on Amazon. It’s also not the first research to focus on incorporating haptics into VR.)

“If you’ve experienced virtual reality or augmented reality, it’s largely based in this immersive visual world,” says Alexandra Delazio, the lead researcher on the jacket project and currently a research engineer at the University of Pittsburgh, where she works on technology for people with disabilities. “The real world is not just visual—it’s full of force and pressure-based interaction.” The goal of the jacket is to bring that sense of touch to the virtual world, or maybe even offer a way for someone far away to give you a hug.

Continue reading “Disney’s haptic VR jacket lets you feel snowball impacts and snakes slithering” »

The United States trails key global players in preparing its workers for the upcoming artificial intelligence takeover. It’s time to get to work.

Deepcric is a deep learning system for cricket. It looks at cricket video and does scene segmentation, scene classification, automatic commentary generation, targeted highlights generation, player identification, and player stats extraction.

Deep learning has been applied everywhere. From imagenet [1] to disease identification [2] to large-scale video classification [3] to text classification [4], there are barely any areas where people have not applied deep learning. But interestingly, there has been very little work in applying data science and deep learning to the game of cricket. This post is a detailed overview of my final year project at the FAST National University. We have developed a deep learning based system that is able to do many tasks in cricket in an automated way. Some of these tasks are:

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In a few seconds flat, you’ve gone from a neatly-equipped office to a home cinema…all within the same four walls. Who needs more than one room?

This is the dream of those who work on “programmable matter.”

In his recent book about AI, Max Tegmark makes a distinction between three different levels of computational sophistication for organisms. Life 1.0 is single-celled organisms like bacteria; here, hardware is indistinguishable from software. The behavior of the bacteria is encoded into its DNA; it cannot learn new things.

Continue reading “Stuff 3.0: The Era of Programmable Matter” »

Move over, deep learning. Neuromorphic computing—the next big thing in artificial intelligence—is on fire.

Just last week, two studies individually unveiled computer chips modeled after information processing in the human brain.

The first, published in Nature Materials, found a perfect solution to deal with unpredictability at synapses—the gap between two neurons that transmit and store information. The second, published in Science Advances, further amped up the system’s computational power, filling synapses with nanoclusters of supermagnetic material to bolster information encoding.

Continue reading “Brain-Like Chips Now Beat the Human Brain in Speed and Efficiency” »

But that’s not the only reason robots are big here. It also has a lot to do with an aging and declining population.

“Japan is a strange, exotic and quirky place” — but that’s not the only reason it’s on the leading edge of a robot revolution.

Berlin 26th April 2018 – The first full scale model of the European Medium-Altitude Long-Endurance Remotely Piloted Aircraft (MALE RPAS) was unveiled today during a ceremony held at the 2018 ILA Berlin Air Show, which opened its gates at Schönefeld airport.

The reveal ceremony, led by Dirk Hoke, Airbus Defence and Space Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Eric Trappier, Dassault Aviation Chairman and CEO and Lucio Valerio Cioffi, Leonardo’s Aircraft Division Managing Director, confirms the commitment of the four European States and Industrial partners to jointly develop a sovereign solution for European Defence and Security.

The unveiling of the full scale model and the reaffirmed commitment comes after a nearly two-year definition study launched in September 2016 by the four participating nations Germany, France, Italy and Spain and follows the Declaration of Intent to work together on a European MALE unmanned aerial system signed by the countries in May 2015.

Continue reading “Airbus, Dassault Aviation and Leonardo reaffirm their total commitment in the first fully European MALE programme” »