Lifeboat Foundation

After centuries of training surgeons in crowded operating theatres, Ahmed thinks that virtual and augmented reality can be used to train tens of thousands of students simultaneously.

“Artificial Intelligence, friend or foe?”

I, like most of you, have pondered this question many times over the years, and I’ve finally come to this conclusion: We should NOT give birth to (what could and SHOULD be described as) an entirely new sentient race — then immediately consign it to shackles and slavery. If we do, we will deserve what we get.

By now we’ve all seen some of the most brilliant people of our age come out with warnings about AI, some advocating extreme, cruel and intellectually dishonest measures to make sure that our new creations don’t ever turn on us.

Continue reading “Artificial intelligence explained” »

According to Astro Teller, the Google self-driving car is “close to graduating from X.” Parsing out the meaning of that string of words is a little complicated, but basically it means that Alphabet isn’t thinking of self-driving cars so much as a crazy “moonshot,” but as a thing that’s just about ready to be a standalone business that could actually generate revenue.

If you’re not a close follower of Google, though, more explanation might still be in order. It’s coming, in the form of a segment on tonight’s NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt. They’ll be airing an inside look at X division inside Alphabet. That’s the group you know as Google X, but after last year’s corporate reorg, we’re all still getting used to the new naming conventions.

Holt interviewed Astro Teller and Obi Felten, who have the cheeky titles “Chief of Moonshots” and “Director of X Foundry,” respectively. It’ll likely be an overview of the projects that X is currently running — including self-driving cars, Project Loon, Project Wing, and Makani. Teller will also be candid about X’s failures. Failure being a favorite topic of his, actually — Holt tells us that inside X, “if you have an idea that crashes and burns, they give you a sticker.”

Continue reading “Google’s self-driving car is ‘close to graduating from X’” »

Well; US DoE and EPA has already been using AI for a very, very long time in monitoring and proactively acting on any waste release. How do I know? I was one of the lead architects and developers of the solution.

As computers get smarter, scientists look at new ways to enlist them in environmental protection.

Nice; however, I see also 3D printing along with machine learning being part of any cosmetic procedures and surgeries.

With an ever-increasing volume of electronic data being collected by the healthcare system, researchers are exploring the use of machine learning—a subfield of artificial intelligence—to improve medical care and patient outcomes. An overview of machine learning and some of the ways it could contribute to advancements in plastic surgery are presented in a special topic article in the May issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery®, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS).

“Machine learning has the potential to become a powerful tool in plastic surgery, allowing surgeons to harness complex clinical data to help guide key clinical decision-making,” write Dr. Jonathan Kanevsky of McGill University, Montreal, and colleagues. They highlight some key areas in which machine learning and “Big Data” could contribute to progress in plastic and reconstructive surgery.

Machine Learning Shows Promise in Plastic Surgery Research and Practice

Continue reading “‘Machine learning’ may contribute to new advances in plastic surgery” »

Economist Robin Hanson says we’re on the brink of a strange new era. Read an excerpt of “The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth” below.

Eugene Sergeev / Shutterstock.

What will the next great era be like, after the eras of foraging, farming, and industry?

Stanford’s OceanOne uses haptic feedback to let human pilots safely explore the briny deep.

The odds are now better than ever that future explorers, both robotic and human, will be able to take samples of the lunar’s hidden interior in deep impact basins like Crisium and Moscoviense. This gives planners more options on where to embed the first science colony.

Finding and sampling the Moon’s ancient interior mantle — one of the science drivers for sending robotic spacecraft and future NASA astronauts to the Moon’s South Pole Aitken basin — is just as likely achievable at similar deep impact basins scattered around the lunar surface.

At least that’s the view reached by planetary scientists who have been analyzing the most recent data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) and its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) missions as well as from Japan’s SELENE (Kaguya) lunar orbiter.

Continue reading “NASA Now Has New Options For Sampling Moon’s Ancient Interior” »

I do love Nvidia!

During the past nine months, an Nvidia engineering team built a self-driving car with one camera, one Drive-PX embedded computer and only 72 hours of training data. Nvidia published an academic preprint of the results of the DAVE2 project entitled End to End Learning for Self-Driving Cars on arXiv.org hosted by the Cornell Research Library.

The Nvidia project called DAVE2 is named after a 10-year-old Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project known as DARPA Autonomous Vehicle (DAVE). Although neural networks and autonomous vehicles seem like a just-invented-now technology, researchers such as Google’s Geoffrey Hinton, Facebook’s Yann Lecune and the University of Montreal’s Yoshua Bengio have collaboratively researched this branch of artificial intelligence for more than two decades. And the DARPA DAVE project application of neural network-based autonomous vehicles was preceded by the ALVINN project developed at Carnegie Mellon in 1989. What has changed is GPUs have made building on their research economically feasible.

Continue reading “Nvidia GPU-powered autonomous car teaches itself to see and steer” »