Lifeboat Foundation

Satya Nadella bounded into the conference room, eager to talk about intelligence. I was at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, WA, and the company’s CEO was touting the company’s progress in building more intelligent apps and services. Each morning, he told me, he puts on a HoloLens, which enables him to look at a virtual, interactive calendar projected on a wall of his house. Nadella appeared giddy as he described it. The system was intelligent, productive, and futuristic: everything he hopes Microsoft will be under his leadership.

No matter where we work in the future, Nadella says, Microsoft will have a place in it. The company’s “conversation as a platform” offering, which it unveiled in March, represents a bet that chat-based interfaces will overtake apps as our primary way of using the internet: for finding information, for shopping, and for accessing a range of services. And apps will become smarter thanks to “cognitive APIs,” made available by Microsoft, that let them understand faces, emotions, and other information contained in photos and videos.

Continue reading “Inside Microsoft’s plan to outsmart Google” »

Robots so small they can enter the bloodstream and perform surgeries are one step closer, a research team from Monash University has discovered.

Led by Dr Zhe Liu, the Monash Engineering team has focused on graphene oxide — which is a single atom thick — as an effective shape memory material.

Graphene has captured world scientific and industrial interest for its miracle properties, with potential applications across energy, medicine, and even biomedical nano-robots.

Continue reading “Fantastic voyage to the nanoverse one step closer” »

Nice.

July 1, 2016 – C-RAD has received an order from its Chinese distributor for Catalyst™ and Sentinel™ systems, to be installed at leading cancer centers in China. The order has a total value of approximately 7.6 MSEK.

The Catalyst™ systems will be installed on Varian True Beam™ and Elekta Versa HD™ linear accelerators. The systems are delivered in different software configurations containing software modules for Patient Setup and Positioning and Respiratory Gating, including respective interfaces for communication with the treatment system. The interfaces allow a seamless integration for patient synchronization and an automated patient setup and beam control to treat tumors that may be moving due to respiratory motion.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies offer great promise for creating new and innovative products, growing the economy, and advancing national priorities in areas such as education, mental and physical health, addressing climate change, and more. Like any transformative technology, however, AI carries risks and presents complex policy challenges along a number of different fronts. The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is interested in developing a view of AI across all sectors for the purpose of recommending directions for research and determining challenges and opportunities in this field. The views of the American people, including stakeholders such as consumers, academic and industry researchers, private companies, and charitable foundations, are important to inform an understanding of current and future needs for AI in diverse fields. The purpose of this RFI is to solicit feedback on overarching questions in AI, including AI research and the tools, technologies, and training that are needed to answer these questions.

General Motors is working with NASA and medical technologies company Bioservo to develop a battery-assisted robotic glove that can be used in assembly plants.

The technology was initially developed from a partnership between GM and NASA that resulted in RoboGlove, a force-multiplying tool that looks like a large electrified work glove.

The RoboGlove uses sensors and actuators comparable to the nerves, muscles and tendons in a human hand.

Continue reading “GM working on ‘robo-glove’ for factories” »

I told folks just the other day; US Manufacturing in the next 3 to 5 years will primarily be robots, 3-/4-D printers, other AI systems, and a couple of line managers to spot check quality of the operation. Just surprised Amazon wasn’t already fully robotic.

Amazon’s progress toward an army of helpful robots is one step closer: a prize for the best warehouse-working “picker” machine has gone to a robot designed by a team from TU Delft Robotics Institute and Delft Robotics, both based in the Netherlands.

Continue reading “Amazon moves one step closer toward army of warehouse robots” »

An unmanned Israeli vessel has test-fired a torpedo.

The Seagull, from Elbit Systems, demonstrated its weapons capability by launching a torpedo off the Israeli coast near Haifa, according to Israeli news site Ynetnews.

“The test was carried out in the Haifa area, and its primary goal was to determine if it’s possible to arm and launch a relatively large precision missile from an unmanned ship,” Ynetnews said. “The next phases in the development of the system are expected to include launching the torpedo at a target to destroy it.”

Continue reading “Israeli robot ship fires torpedo” »

“Numerous commercial satellites — including newly emerging CubeSats — cover large areas with higher revisit rates and deliver high-quality imagery in near real-time to customers,” according to IARPA Program Manager HakJae Kim. “Although the entire Earth has been — and continues to be — imaged multiple times, fully automated data exploitation remains limited.”

The two-phase Multi-View Stereo 3D Mapping Challenge will kick off July 11 with the ultimate goal of creating a 3D mapping system, as well as a community citizen scientists interested in working on future crowdsourcing challenges.

The challenge includes a total of $14,000 in prizes during the initial Explorer phase, though the full challenge has a prize pool of $100,000. Prize allocations for the Master contest have yet to be determined.

Continue reading “IARPA puts up $100K for 3D satellite mapping solution” »

Podcast with “Andreessen Horowitz Distinguished Visiting Professor of Computer Science … Fei-Fei Li [who publishes under Li Fei-Fei], associate professor at Stanford University.”