Lifeboat Foundation

AI services like Apple’s Siri and others operate by sending your queries to faraway data centers, which send back responses. The reason they rely on cloud-based computing is that today’s electronics don’t come with enough computing power to run the processing-heavy algorithms needed for machine learning. The typical CPUs most smartphones use could never handle a system like Siri on the device. But Dr. Chris Eliasmith, a theoretical neuroscientist and co-CEO of Canadian AI startup Applied Brain Research, is confident that a new type of chip is about to change that.

For the most part, the AI achievements touted in the media aren’t evidence of great improvements in the field. The AI program from Google that won a Go contest last year was not a refined version of the one from IBM that beat the world’s chess champion in 1997; the car feature that beeps when you stray out of your lane works quite differently than the one that plans your route. Instead, the accomplishments so breathlessly reported are often cobbled together from a grab bag of disparate tools and techniques. It might be easy to mistake the drumbeat of stories about machines besting us at tasks as evidence that these tools are growing ever smarter—but that’s not happening.

Public discourse about AI has become untethered from reality in part because the field doesn’t have a coherent theory. Without such a theory, people can’t gauge progress in the field, and characterizing advances becomes anyone’s guess. As a result the people we hear from the most are those with the loudest voices rather than those with something substantive to say, and press reports about killer robots go largely unchallenged.

I’d suggest that one problem with AI is the name itself—coined more than 50 years ago to describe efforts to program computers to solve problems that required human intelligence or attention. Had artificial intelligence been named something less spooky, it might seem as prosaic as operations research or predictive analytics.

Baxter can read your mind to learn if it’s getting a simple task right or wrong, possibly setting up a foundation for thought-controlled machines.

At its Cloud Next conference in San Francisco, Google today announced the launch of a new machine learning API for automatically recognizing objects in videos and making them searchable.

The new Video Intelligence API will allow developers to build applications that can automatically extract entities from a video. Until now, most similar image recognition APIs available in the cloud only focused on doing this for still images, but with the help of this new API, developers will be able to build applications that let users search and discover information in videos. That means you can search for “dog” or “flower,” for example.

Besides extracting metadata, the API allows you to tag scene changes in a video.

Continue reading “Google’s new machine learning API recognizes objects in videos” »

“At JPMorgan Chase & Co., a learning machine is parsing financial deals that once kept legal teams busy for thousands of hours.”

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Several companies will collectively be launching about 20,000 satellites over the next few years. SpaceX, OneWeb, Telesat, O3b Networks and Theia Holdings — all told the FCC they have plans to field constellations of V-band satellites in non-geosynchronous orbits to provide communications services in the United States and elsewhere. So far the V-band spectrum of interest, which sits directly above Ka-band from about 37 GHz to the low 50 GHz range, has not been heavily employed for commercial communications services.

* SpaceX, for example, proposes a “VLEO,” or V-band low-Earth orbit (LEO) constellation of 7,518 satellites to follow the operator’s initially proposed 4,425 satellites that would function in Ka- and Ku-band.

Continue reading “Massive commercial space push and a variety of new robotic capabilities could self supporting and rapidly growing space economy” »

It’s easy to see which creatures inspired these robots.

If you think that the march of automation isn’t going to affect jobs in the medical profession, then, uh, you better sit down. A Belgian company called BeWell is showing off WellPoint, a self-service kiosk that’s designed for patients entering hospitals or clinics. The WellPoint is a touchscreen-enabled booth that operates as a first port of call for visitors, quickly checking your basic vitals before you see a medical professional.

Sometimes, you hear about a futuristic concept that just makes you laugh—until you learn more about it and realize how utterly genius it is. Well, go ahead and laugh at Goodyear’s concept for autonomous-car tires: they’re spherical. Now keep reading, and get ready to have your mind blown.