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With the element of terrorists in society today; things like video data/ information and biometrics will grow increasingly in demand within the immediate years a key peice that will require improvements in the timely performance and interpretation of the information via the technologies used to collect, analyze, interpret, and present the information to users as well as respecting the privacy of innocent civilians. However, Civilians will also need to do their own part in reasonableness of when and why certain sets of data must be collected.


The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), a division of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, will host a Proposers’ Day Conference for the Deep Intermodal Video Analytics (DIVA) program on July 12, 2016, in anticipation of the release of a new broad agency announcement (BAA) solicitation.

The purpose of the conference, which will be held in Washington, DC, will be to provide information on DIVA and the research problems the program aims to address, to address questions from potential proposers and to provide a forum for potential proposers to present their capabilities for teaming opportunities.

The DIVA program will be designed to develop robust automated activity detection for a multi-camera streaming video environment. As an essential aspect of DIVA, activities will be enriched by person and object detection, as well as recognition at multiple levels of granularity. DIVA is anticipated to be a three-phase program.

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Agree. So as a tech engineer, futurist, innovator, leader you have 3 key tracks to remain relevant in the future: bio/ living technology, quantum, and a hybrid of living/ bio meets quantum computing.


Editor €™s Note: Richard van Hooijdonk is a futurist and international keynote speaker on future technologies and disruption and how these technologies change our everyday lives. Van Hooijdonk and his international team research €˜mega trends €™ on digital health, robotic surgery, drones, the internet-of-things, 3D/4D printing, Big Data and other how new technologies affects many industries.

With people living increasingly longer lives, medical care from surgeons, physicians, pharmacists and dentists will increase as well. And since the future of healthcare will look very different from what it is today, the medical field may just be the right industry for you, even if being a doctor or nurse is not your calling. Many new technologies will be incorporated into the healthcare industry and we will see things like robotic surgeries and 3D-printed organ implants, to name a few. This means we will be seeing a whole new host of career opportunities, even for jobs that don €™t actually exist yet.

1. Healthcare Navigator €“ Guides patients through the complex medical system of the future

Being sick can be extremely stressful €“ to yourself, the doctors and nursing staff. But your family and loved ones also have a lot to deal with when you are ill. Technology will make healthcare more and more complex to navigate in the future. We €™ll be introduced to bio-printers, electronic pills, 3D-printed medication, surgical robots and DNA manipulation. To make sense of all these new technologies and treatments, and guide the patient as well as family members, healthcare navigators will become indispensible.

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Over the next 3 to 5 years you will see more and more in tech (medical/ bio, chip/ semiconductors, software, AI, services, platform, etc.) adopting QC in their nextgen products and services. We’re (as in Vern B. — D-Wave co-founder and CEO terms) in the Era of Quantum Computing. I highly urge techies to learn about QC so that you remain relevant.


Google is being driven by need to prevent the NSA from breaking into its system to access confidential personal data of its millions of users. On the other hand, the NSA is bent on cracking the tough encryption systems Google and other tech firms use to shield their information from them. Quantum computers will attain this aim for both Google and the NSA.

Google recently said it’s gotten closer to building a universal quantum computer. A team of Google researchers in California and Spain has built an experimental prototype of a quantum computer that can solve a wide range of problems and has the potential to be scaled up to larger systems.

The Google prototype combines the two main approaches to quantum computing. One approach constructs the computer’s digital circuits using quantum bits or qubits in specific arrangements geared to solve a specific problem. The other approach is called adiabatic quantum computing (AQC).

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There’s a saying among futurists that a human-equivalent artificial intelligence will be our last invention. After that, AIs will be capable of designing virtually anything on their own — including themselves. Here’s how a recursively self-improving AI could transform itself into a superintelligent machine.

When it comes to understanding the potential for artificial intelligence, it’s critical to understand that an AI might eventually be able to modify itself, and that these modifications could allow it to increase its intelligence extremely fast.

Once sophisticated enough, an AI will be able to engage in what’s called “recursive self-improvement.” As an AI becomes smarter and more capable, it will subsequently become better at the task of developing its internal cognitive functions. In turn, these modifications will kickstart a cascading series of improvements, each one making the AI smarter at the task of improving itself. It’s an advantage that we biological humans simply don’t have.

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Smart man.


Android creator Andy Rubin has several tricks up his sleeve. Rubin’s company Playground is currently tinkering with quantum computing and smartphone AI, and he believes that this combination could create a conscious intelligence that would underpin all of technology.

andy rubin

Rubin and his team of roughly fifteen engineers, who hold experience in everything from computer science to mechanical engineering, are currently working with about fifteen other companies to release new and innovative products. Playground enjoys “hatching” new companies within the company and using its vast resources. One such hatchling is a quantum computing firm that Rubin refuses to name. He thinks the company could one day commercialize quantum devices using standard manufacturing processes. Quantum computing has the potential to boost processing power.

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Andy Rubin, who co-founded Android and jump-started Google’s robotics efforts, imagines a future where artificial intelligence is so powerful that it powers every connected device. Speaking at Bloomberg’s Tech Conference in San Francisco today, Rubin said a combination of quantum computing and AI advancements could yield a conscious intelligence that would underpin every piece of technology. “If you have computing that is as powerful as this could be, you might only need one,” Rubin says. “It might not be something you carry around; it just has to be conscious.”

It sounds outlandish and theoretical, and it is. But Rubin, with his investment fund Playground Global, is investing in companies trying to make that kind of wondrous future a reality. One such company, a quantum computing firm Rubin would not name, is composed of researchers he thinks may one day commercialize quantum devices using standard manufacturing processes. Quantum computing promises exponential boosts in processing power, in part by harnessing the probabilistic nature inherent to the physics discipline.

Rubin thinks there’s substantial overlap coming down the line for quantum computing, AI, and robotics. “In order for AI to blossom and fulfill consumer needs, it has to be about data,” he says. “That’s where robotics come in — robots are walking mobile sensors, who can sense their environment and interact and learn from those interactions.” Furthermore, Rubin adds, both AI and quantum computing are good at pattern matching and could greatly complement one another. “Those two things combined in hundreds of years might get us to the point of this conundrum, who is the master and who is the servant and all that,” he says.

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Good write up by Peter on Neil Jacobstein’s perspective on AI. Peter never disappoints in his articles.


Singularity University is part business incubator and part think tank founded by Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil in 2008 in the NASA Research Park in Silicon Valley. Among the topics that have risen in prominence in the curriculum of the University is artificial intelligence.

Neil Jacobstein is a former President of Singularity University, and currently he chairs the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Track at Singularity University on the NASA Research Park campus in Mountain View California. We recently spoke, and the conversation covered his thoughts on how AI can be used to augment current human capability, strategies technology executives should use to think about AI, the role the government should play in helping mitigate the potential job losses from AI, his perspectives on the dangers of artificial intelligence that have been expressed by major thought leaders, advice on how to train workers to be prepared for the coming wave of AI, and a variety of other topics.

(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the sixth interview in my artificial intelligence series. Please visit these links to interviews with Mike Rhodin of IBM Watson, Sebastian Thrun of Udacity, Scott Phoenix of Vicarious, Antoine Blondeau of Sentient Technologies, Greg Brockman of OpenAI, and Oren Etzioni of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.)

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This needs to be on the commercial carriers especially for those 4+ hour flights.


An Austin, Texas company, whose founders were commissioned by NASA to develop palatable foods for astronauts’ deep space mission to Mars, has built a device that can 3D-print pizza.

The company –known as BeeHex — boasts that its machine is efficient, clean, and capable of churning out a delicious pizza in less than half the time it takes a typical human chef. The tech is being developed for astronauts, but since NASA’s manned mission to the Red Planet isn’t planned until the 2030s, us Earthbound eaters may be able to enjoy a 3D-printed pizza at theme parks, shopping malls, or concert halls by early 2017.

Related: MIT student designs gardening robots that could grow produce for astronauts on Mars.

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