The fast food franchise is leveraging a special device to help customers choose their meal by age, mood, and gender.
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Category: robotics/AI – Page 2,335
Computer boffins Juan Echeverria and Shi Zhou at University College London have chanced across a dormant Twitter botnet made up of more than 350,000 accounts with a fondness for quoting Star Wars novels.
Twitter bots have been accused of warping the tone of the 2016 election. They also can be used for entertainment, marketing, spamming, manipulating Twitter’s trending topics list and public opinion, trolling, fake followers, malware distribution, and data set pollution, among other things.
In a recently published research paper, the two computer scientists recount how a random sampling of 1 per cent of English-speaking Twitter accounts – about 6 million accounts – led to their discovery.
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Over the past half year, bots have been a widely discussed topic. Experts and the media heavily discussed all the possible benefits, the future, and the value bots could create for businesses and consumers. Arguably, the tipping point was Facebook’s F8 conference in April. Since then, many developers and consumers have massively experimented with bots and tested their limits to find the most suitable use cases for bots.
During this trend, the U.S. market has proven to be highly interested in bots. Several published surveys are showing strong U.S. bot companies, as you can see in VentureBeat’s Bots Landscape. But Europe is not far behind.
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In Brief:
- Predictions from the co-chair of the World Economic Forum’s Future Council, Melanie Walker, say we’ll soon enter a post-hospital world due to advances in personalized medicine, health monitoring, and nanotechnology.
- New and evolving technologies in medical science convince Walker we’ll live in a society not dependent on hospitals by 2030.
As the world of medicine is increasingly changed by biology, technology, communications, genetics, and robotics, predicting the outlook of the next few decades of medicine becomes harder. But that is exactly what Melanie Walker of the World Economic Forum does, and she predicts a bright new future for healthcare.
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Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk told CNBC on Friday that economies would most likely need a form of ‘universal basic income’ as more and more industries become automated.
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Elon musk: moving toward universal basic income due to automation | CNBC
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Back in June, China debuted the world’s fastest supercomputer, the Sunway TaihuLight (pictured), with a Linpack benchmark result of 93 petaflop/s. That machine contains 40,960 locally developed ShenWei processors, each with 260 cores and roughly comparable with Intel’s Knight’s Landing Xeon Phi CPU. China also developed a 136GB/sec memory controller and custom interconnect that delivers 16GB/sec of peak bandwidth between nodes.
Now China is working on a prototype exascale (1,000-petaflop) system that it aims to complete by the end of this year, according to state media. An exascale computer is capable of a quintillion calculations per second, and could deliver vast dividends in deep learning and big data across a variety of disciplines as varied as nuclear test research, code breaking, and weather forecasting.
“A complete computing system of the exascale supercomputer and its applications can only be expected in 2020, and will be 200 times more powerful than the country’s first petaflop computer Tianhe-1, recognized as the world’s fastest in 2010,” said Zhang Ting, an application engineer at Tianjin’s National Super Computer Center, to Xinhua news agency (via AFP).
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It was when we tried virtual reality (VR) for the first time that we realized our method of controlling computers is likely to change. When you realize your VR headset is acting as a pointer in virtual reality, and you begin using your head like a mouse without even thinking about it, you start to grasp that there are much easier ways to control computers. Take foveated rendering (eye tracking) as an example. Soon computers will know exactly where you are looking – blink twice for double click!
Last November 2016, we posted an article, “Brain Implants that Augment the Human Brain Using AI” where we talked about exploring the hippocampus to solve brain disorders associated with memory loss. Much work has been done by Dr. Theodore W. Berger into neurobiological issues related to the hippocampus, primarily around implants to explore signal processing of hippocampal neurons. As it turns out, the hippocampus is the storage for our short-term memory working much like the RAM does in your computer. This is the motivation behind Bryan Johnson’s $100 million investment into his brain augmentation startup Kernel.
A Brain Computer Interface (BCI) or Brain Machine Interface (BMI) has numerous definitions, but the common elements found among all the definitions are as follows:
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Artificial intelligence (AI) is in its crucial developmental stages and the government doesn’t seem to be to keen on shaping the way forward, according to experts during a senate inquiry into the dawn of AI.
The senate’s Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, under the helm of Texas Senator (R) Ted Cruz, convened November 30 to discuss the state of AI research and development, and its policy effects and implications on commerce. According to experts present at the hearing, the government isn’t doing much to provide guidelines and directions on AI research.
The experts, including Microsoft Research’s managing director Eric Horvitz, believe the government is in a unique position to shape the future of AI – especially since AI is still in its developmental stages. Horvitz said AI innovation can help in areas such as homelessness and addiction where there’s not much investment from the industry yet — which the government can help pursue.
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Scientists have now made metamaterials scalable in their purpose and usage.
Metamaterials — materials whose function is determined by structure, not composition — have been designed to bend light and sound, transform from soft to stiff, and even dampen seismic waves from earthquakes. But each of these functions requires a unique mechanical structure, making these materials great for specific tasks, but difficult to implement broadly.
But what if a material could contain within its structure, multiple functions and easily and autonomously switch between them?
Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute of Biologically Inspired Engineering have developed a general framework to design reconfigurable metamaterials. The design strategy is scale independent, meaning it can be applied to everything from meter-scale architectures to reconfigurable nano-scale systems such as photonic crystals, waveguides and metamaterials to guide heat.
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