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Idaho State Researcher Develops Algorithm to Model Brain Activity

Thanks to an algorithm created by an Idaho State University professor, the way engineers, doctors, and physicists tackle the hard questions in their respective fields could all change.

Emanuele Zappala, an assistant professor of mathematics at ISU, and his colleagues at Yale have developed the Attentional Neural Integral Equations algorithm, or ANIE for short. Their work was recently published in Nature Machine Intelligence and describes how ANIE can model large, complex systems using data alone.

“Natural phenomena–everything from plasma physics to how viruses spread–are all governed by equations which we do not fully understand,” explains Zappala. “One of the main complexities lies in long-distance relations between different data points in the systems over space and time. What ANIE does is it allows us to learn these complex systems using just those known data points.”

Nvidia’s Huang Teams With Asia’s Richest Man on Blackwell AI Hub

Is AI going to take your job? Here’s what Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told Bollywood star Akshay Kumar.

Read more on the chip giant’s partnerships with the biggest Indian corporates, including Ambani’s Reliance, announced at Nvidia’s AI summit in Mumbai.


Nvidia Corp.’s Jensen Huang struck a partnership with Asia’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, to build out artificial intelligence infrastructure and spur the technology’s adoption in the world’s most populous country.

China has just launched the world’s first autonomous flying taxis

China has just launched the world’s first autonomous flying taxis, cutting a 1-hour drive down to just 7 minutes!

These eVTOL (electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing) aircraft feature 16 propellers and carry two passengers up to 30–40 km. They offer a thrilling glimpse into the future of urban transport. Each pilot-free flight is safely monitored from a high-tech command center.

What do you think about this? ☝️

Development of novel flavonoid senolytics through phenotypic drug screening and drug design

Accumulation of senescent cells drives aging and age-related diseases. Senolytics, which selectively kill senescent cells, offer a promising approach for treating many age-related diseases. Using a senescent cell-based phenotypic drug discovery approach that combines drug screening and drug design, we developed two novel flavonoid senolytics, SR29384 and SR31133, derived from the senolytic fisetin. These compounds demonstrated enhanced senolytic activities, effectively eliminating multiple senescent cell types, reducing tissue senescence in vivo, and extending healthspan in a mouse model of accelerated aging. Mechanistic studies utilizing RNA-Seq, machine learning, network pharmacology, and computational simulation suggest that these novel flavonoid senolytics target PARP1, BCL-xL, and CDK2 to induce selective senescent cell death. This phenotype-based discovery of novel flavonoid senolytics, coupled with mechanistic insights, represents a key advancement in developing next-generation senolyticss with potential clinical applications in treating aging and age-related diseases.

LJN and PDR are cofounders of Itasca Therapeutics, developing senotherapeutics for aging and age-related diseases. LJZ, LJN, PDR and the University of Minnesota have filed a provisional patent on the application of flavonoid analogs, including SR29384 and SR31133, as a strategy to treat age-related diseases.

Machine Consciousness | Joscha Bach

Joscha Bach, a prominent cognitive scientist and AI researcher, explores the essence of artificial intelligence and consciousness. Bach elaborates on the history and philosophical underpinnings of AI, tracing its roots from Aristotle to contemporary deep learning. He discusses the current challenges and limitations in machine learning, particularly in achieving human-like understanding and consciousness.

Bach raises critical questions about the alignment of AI with human values and the feasibility of building systems smarter and more ethical than humans. He delves into the nature of consciousness, proposing that it is not merely a computational process but a fundamental aspect of how minds perceive and interact with the world. Bach also addresses the potential and risks of advanced AI, emphasizing the need for ethical considerations and a deeper understanding of consciousness to guide future developments.

Created by Protocol Labs and co-curated by Foresight Institute, LabWeek Field Building gathered leading individuals and teams from frontier science to drive progress. The weeklong conference took place at Edge Esmeralda, a pop-up event city in Healdsburg, CA, from June 10–16, 2024. For more info on LabWeek Field Building, go to https://www.labweek.io/24-fb.

Follow Joscha Bach.
Website: https://www.bach.ai.
X: / plinz.

Follow Protocol Labs.
Website: https://www.protocol.ai.
X: https://www.x.com/protocollabs.
LinkedIn: / protocollabs.

The 3 Body Problem Explored — Robin Hanson, Anders Sandberg & Joscha Bach

The 3 Body Problem Explored: Cosmic Sociology, Longtermism & Existential Risk — round table discussion with three great minds: Robin Hanson, Anders Sandberg and Joscha Bach — moderated by Adam Ford (SciFuture) and James Hughes (IEET).

Some of the items discussed:
- How can narratives that keep people engaged avoid falling short of being realistic?
- In what ways is AI superintelligence kept of stage to allow a narrative that is familiar and easier to make sense of?
- Differences in moral perspectives — moral realism, existentialism and anti-realism.
- Will values of advanced civilisations converge to a small number of possibilities, or will they vary greatly?
- How much will competition be the dominant dynamic in the future, compared to co-ordination?
- In a competitive dynamic, will defense or offense be the most dominant strategy?

Many thanks for tuning in!

Have any ideas about people to interview? Want to be notified about future events? Any comments about the STF series?
Please fill out this form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1mr9PIfq2ZYlQsXRIn5BcLH2onbiSI7g79mOH_AFCdIk/

Kind regards.
Adam Ford.
- Science, Technology & the Future — #SciFuture — http://scifuture.org

Is There Really a Hard Problem of Consciousness? — Joscha Bach, Artificial Intelligence Researcher

Joscha Bach is a German artificial intelligence researcher and cognitive scientist who works on on cognitive architectures, mental representation, emotion, social modeling, and multi-agent systems. We got connected over the hard problem of consciousness — namely, why do people seem to think it’s so hard? During our conversation we deal with the foundational questions of the technological future being built in Silicon Valley, the fever dream of machine intelligence, and try to understand why people seem to think that there’s even such a thing as the hard problem of consciousness in the first place.

Support the scientific revolution by joining our Patreon: https://bit.ly/3lcAasB

Tell us what you think in the comments or on our Discord: https://discord.gg/MJzKT8CQub.

00:00:00 Go!
00:04:09 Career Advice.
00:11:31 Beauty, Grace, & Hotness.
00:13:48 Putting on Airs.
00:22:32 Patreon Ask.
00:22:33 Winning for the sake of winning.
00:29:35 Transformative experiences.
00:36:25 Speciation event, or crap again?
00:42:17 Who is Joscha Bach.
00:52:39 Physics & Causality.
01:00:52 Physics vs Biology.
01:12:16 Life vs Cells.
01:20:14 Biosynthetic AGI
01:28:15 Creativity & Novelty.
01:38:52 Wetware & Neuromorphic computing.
01:50:46 The Limits of Hardware.
02:05:07 The value of Agency.
02:15:47 Layers of Society.
02:35:03 Chimp Empire.
02:52:31 Collapse.
03:05:13 The Hard Problem.
03:43:28 Computer Imagination.
04:02:52 How reasoning works.
04:14:28 Reward Functions.
04:20:01 Consciousness dreams.
04:25:35 The heart of the disagreement.
04:30:15 Consensus.

#AGI #consciousness #machinelearning.

Check our short-films channel, @DemystifySci: https://www.youtube.com/c/DemystifyingScience.

Researchers use AI to find Non-Opioid Pain Relief Options

An estimated one in five Americans live with chronic pain and current treatment options leave much to be desired. Feixiong Cheng, Ph.D., Director of Cleveland Clinic’s Genome Center, and IBM are using artificial intelligence (AI) for drug discovery in advanced pain management. The team’s deep-learning framework identified multiple gut microbiome-derived metabolites and FDA-approved drugs that can be repurposed to select non-addictive, non-opioid options to treat chronic pain.

The findings, published in Cell Press, represent one of many ways the organizations’ Discovery Accelerator partnership is helping to advance research in healthcare and life sciences.

Treating chronic pain with opioids is still a challenge due to the risk of severe side effects and dependency, says co-first author Yunguang Qiu, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Cheng’s lab whose research program focuses on developing therapeutics for nervous system disorders. Recent evidence has shown that drugging a specific subset of pain receptors in a protein class called G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) can provide non-addictive, non-opioid pain relief. The question is how to target those receptors, Dr. Qiu explains.

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