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Sophia Life: Interview with AI Researcher Tina White

I am for ethical Ai. What about you?


Sophia interviews Stanford AI Researcher Tina White about how A.I. & Robotics can help stop the spread of Covid19 through contact tracing while preserving users’ privacy.

- What are you doing to stop the spread? 0:50
- What is contact tracing? How does it help stop the spread? 2:28
- How did you get the idea for your app? 2:54
- Why is privacy important to humans? 3:46.

Check out Tina’s app here: https://www.covid-watch.org/

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This punk band is made up entirely of robots

The One Love Machine band are a scrappy crew. They have an affinity for punk rock, and members of the band play the bass, drums and flute. Oh, and they’re all robots. The band is made up of scrap metal animatronics, created from salvaged junk from scrapyards around Berlin. For creator of the band Kolja Kugler, it’s all about giving new life to discarded objects.

NASA’s ‘Robot Hotel’ Gets Its Occupants

Storage is just as important aboard the International Space Station as it is on Earth. While the space station is about the size of a football field, the living space inside is much smaller than that. Just as you wouldn’t store garden tools in a house when you could store them in a shed outside, astronauts now have a “housing unit” in which they can store tools for use on the exterior of the space station.

On Dec. 5, 2019, a protective storage unit for robotic tools called Robotic Tool Stowage (RiTS) was among the items launched to station as part of SpaceX’s 19th commercial resupply services mission for NASA. As part of a spacewalk on July 21, NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Chris Cassidy installed the “robot hotel” where the tools are stored to the station’s Mobile Base System (MBS), where it will remain a permanent fixture. The MBS is a moveable platform that provides power to the external robots. This special location allows RiTS to traverse around the station alongside a robot that will use the tools it stores.

exterior view of portion of ISS, with blue-hued Earth in background

Machine learning reveals recipe for building artificial proteins

Proteins are essential to the life of cells, carrying out complex tasks and catalyzing chemical reactions. Scientists and engineers have long sought to harness this power by designing artificial proteins that can perform new tasks, like treat disease, capture carbon, or harvest energy, but many of the processes designed to create such proteins are slow and complex, with a high failure rate.

In a breakthrough that could have implications across the healthcare, agriculture, and energy sectors, a team lead by researchers in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) at the University of Chicago has developed an -led process that uses big data to design new proteins.

By developing machine-learning models that can review protein information culled from genome databases, the researchers found relatively simple design rules for building . When the team constructed these artificial proteins in the lab, they found that they performed chemistries so well that they rivaled those found in nature.

Active divination using learning nets and M.V.T

Here is my research dissertation M.Sc. in Neural Computation, CCCN Uni Stirling. A variety of net architectures were trialed for specific use in Enochian Chess software, and the commercial version is now in its 3rd edition over 26 years on. The first section consists of a literature review of artificial neural nets and their application to a variety of classic boardgames. Although quite old now, there haven’t been any or many other papers on nets and divination games. This paper has proved very prescient! Today neural nets are commonly used by game developers. The race amongst super computer developers to ‘predict’ stock markets, or weather systems, or winners of horse races, is fierce. MVT unconstrained hardware may offer some synergies when used in conjunction with nets or trad AI.

My interest in active divination (rather than passive divination) goes back a bit now. Enochian Chess software is one example, but Tsakli can also be used in divination. Passive forms of fortune-telling rely on pure chance without any skill or judgement asked of the questioner. Astrology is a good example. You cannot change or ameliorate your date and time of birth or effect the course of the stars. It is essentially fatalistic. What is the point trying to discern information about which you can do absolutely nothing? Brainstorming and the jumping up and down excitement generated by unexpected game episodes, plus the many ideas generated by the move by move conversation and thrown up by wide consideration of the particular divination question, can be of real psychomorphological value in helping plan your future life moves.

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