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We Created AI, and Now They Are Teaching Us

Google’s DeepMind AI is using elastic weight consolidation to get around the problem of catastrophic forgetting. These advances in artificial neural networks are helping us better understand our own brains.

The latest research from DeepMind is proving how inspired the idea to model neural networks of the human mind truly was. The strength of the association between the human brains and and their computational models is revealing weaknesses in our own minds and teaching us how to overcome them.

Floating City Project Wants To Make An ‘Unregulated’ Hub Of Scientific Research

In the hopes of rising above the laws and regulations of terrestrial nations, a group of Silicon Valley millionaires has bold plans to build a floating city in Tahiti, French Polynesia. It sounds like the start of a sci-fi dystopia (in fact, this is the basic premise behind the video game Bioshock), but the brains behind the project say their techno-libertarian community could become a paradise for technological entrepreneurship and scientific innovation.

The Seasteading Institute was set up in 2008 by billionaire PayPal founder Peter Thiel and software engineer, poker player, and political economic theorist Patri Friedman. Both ardent libertarians, their wide-eyed mission is to “establish permanent, autonomous ocean communities to enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems.”

“Seasteading will create unique opportunities for aquaculture, vertical farming, and scientific and engineering research into ecology, wave energy, medicine, nanotechnology, computer science, marine structures, biofuels, etc,” their website reads.

How to run faster, smarter AI apps on smartphones

(credit: iStock)

When you use smartphone AI apps like Siri, you’re dependent on the cloud for a lot of the processing — limited by your connection speed. But what if your smartphone could do more of the processing directly on your device — allowing for smarter, faster apps?

MIT scientists have taken a step in that direction with a new way to enable artificial-intelligence systems called convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to run locally on mobile devices. (CNN’s are used in areas such as autonomous driving, speech recognition, computer vision, and automatic translation.) Neural networks take up a lot of memory and consume a lot of power, so they usually run on servers in the cloud, which receive data from desktop or mobile devices and then send back their analyses.

Installing microchips in employees is ‘the right thing to do,’ CEO says

Forget swiping a credit card or badge to buy food at work. One Wisconsin-based tech firm is offering to install rice-size microchips in its employees’ hands.

Three Square Market will be the fir st firm in the U.S. to use the device, which was approved by the FDA in 2004, CEO Todd Westby told CNBC on Monday.

“We think it’s the right thing to do for advancing innovation just like the driverless car basically did in recent months,” he said in an interview with “Closing Bell.

Fast, Efficient bloodstream robots

The unique swimming strategies of natural microorganisms have inspired recent development of magnetic micro/nanorobots powered by artificial helical or flexible flagella. However, as artificial nanoswimmers with unique geometries are being developed, it is critical to explore new potential modes for kinetic optimization. For example, the freestyle stroke is the most efficient of the competitive swimming strokes for humans. Here we report a new type of magnetic nanorobot, a symmetric multilinked two-arm nanoswimmer, capable of efficient “freestyle” swimming at low Reynolds numbers. Excellent agreement between the experimental observations and theoretical predictions indicates that the powerful “freestyle” propulsion of the two-arm nanorobot is attributed to synchronized oscillatory deformations of the nanorobot under the combined action of magnetic field and viscous forces. It is demonstrated for the first time that the nonplanar propulsion gait due to the cooperative “freestyle” stroke of the two magnetic arms can be powered by a plane oscillatory magnetic field. These two-arm nanorobots are capable of a powerful propulsion up to 12 body lengths per second, along with on-demand speed regulation and remote navigation. Furthermore, the nonplanar propulsion gait powered by the consecutive swinging of the achiral magnetic arms is more efficient than that of common chiral nanohelical swimmers. This new swimming mechanism and its attractive performance opens new possibilities in designing remotely actuated nanorobots for biomedical operation at the nanoscale.

Each bot is 5 micrometres long and has three main parts, connected together like sausage links by two silver hinges. Its gold body is flanked by two magnetic arms made of nickel, and applying a magnetic field to the tiny robot makes the arms move.

The next generation bloodstream will be made from biodegradable materials before they can be used in the bloodstream. Less complicated areas in the human body like the urinary tract or the eyeballs should see clinical trials begin within the next five to 10 years. Injecting a single swimmer into an eyeball, where it could deliver medication directly to the retina and then be removed, would be much less complicated than letting a swarm of them swim throughout the entire circulatory system.

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