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VIDEO: Creator of DeepMind working to build an AI agent as smart as a rat this year

Dr. Demis Hassabis is the Co-Founder and CEO of DeepMind, the world’s leading General Artificial Intelligence (AI) company, which was acquired by Google in 2014 in their largest ever European acquisition. Demis will draw on his eclectic experiences as an AI researcher, neuroscientist and video games designer to discuss what is happening at the cutting edge of AI research, including the recent historic AlphaGo match, and its future potential impact on fields such as science and healthcare, and how developing AI may help us better understand the human mind.

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A robotic dinner plate with a human-like arm is revolutionizing the lives of the differently abled

Golf, offshore powerboat racing, sky diving: David Hare had led an active lifestyle. Then, in February 2011, he was diagnosed with ALS, a neurological disease that leads to rapid progressive degeneration of nerve cells, the loss of the ability to control muscle movement, and eventually death. The 56-year-old Michigan resident, who was told by doctors that he had less than five years to live, found a new lease of life last year with Obi, a robot that helps the differently abled feed themselves.

Our Post-Human Future

In 15 years the human specie is going to develop super human level machine intelligence.

-What it means to be Super-Human?
–The country with Artificial Intelligence will be the country on top.

David Simpson is the best-selling novelist of the Post-Human series, a Kindle All-Star and has been ranked the most popular scifi Author in America by Amazon.com. He has filmed a short proof-of-concept based on his series, is an award-winning teacher and holds a Master’s degree in literature from the University of British Columbia.

David is a full example of believing in the story in your head and getting it published. He is been part of the story-telling business since his twenties. He went out of the ‘Book Industry Professionals ways’ and took the risk of not hearing the voice of those ‘who knew’ about scifi books. Now he is living his dream of been a full time scifi author and maybe he can help us dream into the realms of a Post-Human not so far future.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.

AI: NASA’s Curiosity rover can now choose its own laser targets on Mars

Nice.


Who’s calling the shots now? After nearly four years on the job, NASA’s Curiosity rover is finally making certain scientific decisions on its own. The Martian explorer now picks some of the rock targets to blast with the laser on its ChemCam instrument.

A software upgrade known as AEGIS allows the rover to make key decisions when Mars is out of sync with Curiosity’s handlers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, delivering more data in less time. It’s the first time a robot has been able to choose such science targets autonomously on any planetary mission.

“Time on Mars is valuable and we get more data this way and we get the data much faster,” said AEGIS team member Raymond Francis, a scientific applications software engineer at JPL.

An AI Watched 600 Hours of TV and Started to Accurately Predict What Happens Next

MIT researchers have created an algorithm that hopes to understand human visual social cues and predict what would happen next. Giving AI the ability to understand and predict human social interaction could one day pave the way to efficient home assistant systems as well as intelligent security cameras that can call an ambulance or the police ahead of time.

MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory created an algorithm that utilizes deep learning, which enables artificial intelligence (AI) to use patterns of human interaction to predict what will happen next. Researchers fed the program with videos featuring human social interactions and tested it to see if it “learned” well enough to be able to predict them.

The researchers’ weapons of choice? 600 hours of Youtube videos and sitcoms, including The Office, Desperate Housewives, and Scrubs. While this lineup may seem questionable, MIT doctoral candidate and project researcher Carl Vondrick reasons out that accessibility and realism were part of the criteria.