Lifeboat Foundation

The sense of touch is often taken for granted. For someone without a limb or hand, losing that sense of touch can be devastating. While highly sophisticated prostheses with complex moving fingers and joints are available to mimic almost every hand motion, they remain frustratingly difficult and unnatural for the user. This is largely because they lack the tactile experience that guides every movement. This void in sensation results in limited use or abandonment of these very expensive artificial devices. So why not make a prosthesis that can actually “feel” its environment?

That is exactly what an interdisciplinary team of scientists from Florida Atlantic University and the University of Utah School of Medicine aims to do. They are developing a first-of-its-kind bioengineered robotic hand that will grow and adapt to its environment. This “living” robot will have its own peripheral nervous system directly linking robotic sensors and actuators. FAU’s College of Engineering and Computer Science is leading the multidisciplinary team that has received a four-year, $1.3 million grant from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering of the National Institutes of Health for a project titled “Virtual Neuroprosthesis: Restoring Autonomy to People Suffering from Neurotrauma.”

Killer robots, an increasingly real fiction.

Mindfire is dedicated to cracking the “brain code” to develop AI with human-level capabilities. The first mission will begin in the spring of next year.

As the common tropes of science fiction continue to break out into reality, from humanoid robots to self-driving cars, there’s one concept that has seemingly remained beyond our grasp: time travel.

But, jumping through time might not be impossible, after all, according to one astrophysicist.

Continue reading “Traveling back in time could be possible, physicist says” »

They taught ATLAS Kung Fu 😮

Really impressive, only things that need to be worked on. Shrink the Torso A Lot, so it’s comparable to a person. And, someone is going to have finance coming up with a set of robotic human like hands.

Continue reading “What’s new, Atlas?” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=YJB3RpKZ8fs

The U.S. intelligence community is upping its early-stage investments in machine-learning companies — but Beijing is pouring in far more.

A trio of new investments in Silicon Valley machine-learning startups shows that the U.S. intelligence community is deeply interested in artificial intelligence. But China is investing even more in these kinds of U.S. companies, and that has experts and intelligence officials worried.

Continue reading “China and the CIA Are Competing to Fund Silicon Valley’s AI Startups” »

Guess who won:

Like most cerebral movies, Ex Machina leaves the conclusion up to the viewer: was Ava actually conscious? In doing so, it also cleverly avoids a thorny question that has challenged most AI-centric movies to date: what is consciousness, and can machines have it?

Hollywood producers aren’t the only people stumped. As machine intelligence barrels forward at breakneck speed—not only exceeding human performance on games such as DOTA and Go, but doing so without the need for human expertise—the question has once more entered the scientific mainstream.

Are machines on the verge of consciousness?

Continue reading “Here’s How to Get to Conscious Machines, Neuroscientists Say” »

Two-thirds of the world’s population doesn’t have access to medical imaging. A company called Butterfly Network is trying to change that.