Lifeboat Foundation

In Brief:

• Using reservoir computing and backpropagation, researchers were able to push an analog computer past its own boundaries.
• By combining established technologies with new innovations, we can speed up development with tech having the ability to improve itself.

(Phys.org)—Over the past few decades, quantum effects have greatly improved many areas of information science, including computing, cryptography, and secure communication. More recently, research has suggested that quantum effects could offer similar advantages for the emerging field of quantum machine learning (a subfield of artificial intelligence), leading to more intelligent machines that learn quickly and efficiently by interacting with their environments.

In a new study published in Physical Review Letters, Vedran Dunjko and coauthors have added to this research, showing that quantum effects can likely offer significant benefits to machine learning.

“The progress in machine learning critically relies on processing power,” Dunjko, a physicist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, told Phys.org. “Moreover, the type of underlying information processing that many aspects of machine learning rely upon is particularly amenable to quantum enhancements. As quantum technologies emerge, quantum machine learning will play an instrumental role in our society—including deepening our understanding of climate change, assisting in the development of new medicine and therapies, and also in settings relying on learning through interaction, which is vital in automated cars and smart factories.”

Continue reading “How quantum effects could improve artificial intelligence” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=khjY5LWF3tg

We live in an age of transformative scientific powers, capable of changing the very nature of the human species and radically remaking the planet itself.

Advances in information technologies and artificial intelligence are combining with advances in the biological sciences; including genetics, reproductive technologies, neuroscience, synthetic biology; as well as advances in the physical sciences to create breathtaking synergies — now recognized as the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Continue reading “The 4 big ethical questions of the Fourth Industrial Revolution” »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHhJ1cpQWWw&feature=share

I hope the fickle gods of entertainment see fit to make this a regular show or movie…

Hollywood futuristic sci-fi | sci-fi short film.

Continue reading “Archetype: Love this one” »

Self-driving cars, trucks and buses might get the bulk of the headlines, but a team at the University of Washington Bothell (UWB) is developing a smaller kind of autonomous vehicle. With the aim of providing a relatively inexpensive alternative to owning an autonomous car, the team is creating a self-driving trike that may even open up the possibility of an automated ride-sharing network, like a bike version of Uber’s or NuTonomy’s proposed services.

When we type in a search query, access our email via the cloud or stream a viral video, chances are we don’t spend any time thinking about the technological plumbing that is behind that instant gratification.

Sitaram Lanka and Derek Chiou are two exceptions. They are engineers who spend their days thinking about ever-better and faster ways to get you all that information with the tap of a finger, as you’ve come to expect.

Now, they have a new superpower to help them out.

Continue reading “The moonshot that succeeded: How Bing and Azure are using an AI supercomputer in the cloud” »

We’re already experiencing the rise of artificial intelligence. Here’s one dark vision of what this future might look like.

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The bunker door will be opened because the igniter, also called nitrocellulose, burns very rapidly and is only explosive when confined, Brian Salvatore, chairman of the chemistry and physics department at Louisiana State University in Shreveport and a member of the Camp Minden citizens’ advisory committee, said last week.

A magazine holding 114,000 pounds of igniter is scheduled for burning Saturday. Another one holding 84,000 pounds of igniter and 40,000 pounds of M6 artillery propellant is to be burned Oct. 29.