Lifeboat Foundation

AI that identifies people in crowds is already pervasive in China—and now it’s augmenting police officers’ eyes, too.

Smart specs: The Wall Street Journal says the hardware, made by LLVision, sends data from its camera to a handheld device, where AI software crunches through an offline database of 10,000 pictures of suspects in about 100 milliseconds to help officers spot criminals. It’s unclear how accurate it is.

How they’re used: The glasses will be used to monitor busy crowds in China as citizens travel for next week’s Lunar New Year. But the People’s Daily newspaper says they’ve already been tested in Zhengzhou railway station, catching seven wanted criminals and 26 people travelling on fake ID.

Continue reading “Chinese cops are wearing glasses that can recognize faces” »

Meet OceanOne, a robot avatar that lets humans explore deep under the Ocean’s surface, without any of the dangers or time limits associated with diving.

While a human diver is constrained by pesky things like air and pressure when doing underwater research or excavations, a robot can stay underwater for much longer, collecting samples in hostile underwater environments.

OceanOne was tested at the archeological site of the shipwreck La Lune off the coast of France. La Lune, a flagship that sank in the Mediterranean in 1664. It lies under 300 feet of water, far beyond the reach of recreational SCUBA divers, who limit themselves to 130 feet.

Continue reading “Humanoid Robot Can Dive Deep Underwater, Exploring Reefs And Shipwrecks” »

The next research priorities include wearable mobility aid devices and technology that guides people to the toilet at what it predicts is the right time.

According to Japan’s robot strategy, the government hopes that four in five care recipients accept having some support provided by robots by 2020.

Japanese government wants to increase acceptance of technology that could help fill the gap in the nursing workforce.

Continue reading “Japan lays groundwork for boom in robot carers” »

A start-up called Embark has completed a coast-to-coast test drive of its autonomous truck.

It takes an immense amount of processing power to create and operate the “AI” features we all use so often, from playlist generation to voice recognition. Lightmatter is a startup that is looking to change the way all that computation is done — and not in a small way. The company makes photonic chips that essentially perform calculations at the speed of light, leaving transistors in the dust. It just closed an $11 million Series A.

The claim may sound grandiose, but the team and the tech definitely check out. Nick Harris, Lightmatter’s CEO, wrote his thesis on this stuff at MIT, and has published in major journals like Nature Photonics several papers showing the feasibility of the photonic computing architecture.

So what exactly does Lightmatter’s hardware do?

Continue reading “Lightmatter aims to reinvent AI-specific chips with photonic computing and $11M in funding” »

Equipping nuclear submarines with AI would give China an upper hand in undersea battles while pushing applications of the technology to a new level.

The capabilities on this thing are both impressive and worrisome.

I suspect this will be the hands for ATLAS. being field tested by human volunteers to see what it needs to do for average use. And, then blow that away within a few years.

Johnny Matheny is the first person to live with an advanced mind-controlled robotic arm. Last December, researchers from Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab delivered the arm to Matheny at his home in Port Richey, Florida. Aside from the occasional demo, this is the first time the Modular Prosthetic Limb (MPL) has spent significant time out of the lab.

Continue reading “The most advanced robotic arm in the world, John Hopkins’s Modular Prosthetic Limb, is finally leaving the lab” »

PETER SINGER, AN expert on future warfare at the New America think-tank, is in no doubt. “What we have is a series of technologies that change the game. They’re not science fiction. They raise new questions. What’s possible? What’s proper?” Mr Singer is talking about artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics and big-data analytics. Together they will produce systems and weapons with varying degrees of autonomy, from being able to work under human supervision to “thinking” for themselves. The most decisive factor on the battlefield of the future may be the quality of each side’s algorithms. Combat may speed up so much that humans can no longer keep up.

Frank Hoffman, a fellow of the National Defence University who coined the term “hybrid warfare”, believes that these new technologies have the potential not just to change the character of war but even possibly its supposedly immutable nature as a contest of wills. For the first time, the human factors that have defined success in war, “will, fear, decision-making and even the human spark of genius, may be less evident,” he says.

Weapons with a limited degree of autonomy are not new. In 1943 Germany produced a torpedo with an acoustic homing device that helped it find its way to its target. Tomahawk cruise missiles, once fired, can adjust their course using a digital map of Earth’s contours. Anti-missile systems are pre-programmed to decide when to fire and engage an incoming target because the human brain cannot react fast enough.

Continue reading “Getting to grips with military robotics” »