Lifeboat Foundation

Over the past few decades, the performance of machine learning models on various real-world tasks has improved significantly. Training and implementing most of these models, however, still requires vast amounts of energy and computational power.

Engineers worldwide have thus been trying to develop alternative hardware solutions that can run artificial intelligence models more efficiently, as this could promote their widespread use and increase their sustainability. Some of these solutions are based on memristors, memory devices that can store information without consuming energy.

Researchers at Université Paris-Saclay-CNRS, Université Grenoble-Alpes-CEA-LETI, HawAI.tech, Sorbonne Université, and Aix-Marseille Université-CNRS have recently created a so-called Bayesian machine (i.e., an AI approach that performs computations based on Bayes’ theorem), using memristors. Their proposed system, introduced in a paper published in Nature Electronics, was found to be significantly more energy-efficient than currently employed hardware solutions.

Analysis of chatter on dark web forums shows that efforts are already under way to use OpenAI’s chatbot to help script malware.

Cyclists are supposed to wear helmets to protect them from any untoward accidents while riding through the city on their bicycles. While the helmet can protect from serious brain injury, other parts of the body can be exposed to both minor and serious injuries in case they encounter other vehicles and even pedestrians. It would be nice if there’s a sort of airbag that can shield them from injuries in case an accident happens and that said airbag will be portable enough for them to carry around.

Designer: In&Motion.

Taming rays of light and bending them to your will is tricky business. Light travels fast and getting a good chunk of it to stay in one place for a long time requires a lot of skillful coaxing. But the benefits of learning how to hold a moonbeam (or, more likely, a laser beam) in your hand, or on a convenient chip, are enormous. Trapping and controlling light on a chip can enable better lasers, sensors that help self-driving cars “see,” the creation of quantum-entangled pairs of photons that can be used for secure communication, and fundamental studies of the basic interactions between light and atoms—just to name a few.

Of all the moonbeam-holding chip technologies out there, two stand the tallest: the evocatively named whispering gallery mode microrings, which are easy to manufacture and can trap light of many colors very efficiently, and photonic crystals, which are much trickier to make and inject light into but are unrivaled in their ability to confine light of a particular color into a tiny space—resulting in a very large intensity of light for each confined photon.

Recently, a team of researchers at JQI struck upon a clever way to combine whispering gallery modes and photonic crystals in one easily manufacturable device. This hybrid device, which they call a microgear photonic crystal ring, can trap many colors of light while also capturing particular colors in tightly confined, high-intensity bundles. This unique combination of features opens a route to new applications, as well as exciting possibilities for manipulating light in novel ways for basic research.

On Tuesday, Meta AI announced the development of Cicero, which it claims is the first AI to achieve human-level performance in the strategic board game Diplomacy. It’s a notable achievement because the game requires deep interpersonal negotiation skills, which implies that Cicero has obtained a certain mastery of language necessary to win the game.

Even before Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, board games were a useful measure of AI achievement. In 2015, another barrier fell when AlphaGo defeated Go master Lee Sedol. Both of those games follow a relatively clear set of analytical rules (although Go’s rules are typically simplified for computer AI).

Have you ever been cut off while driving and found yourself swearing and laying on the horn? Or come home from a long day at work and lashed out at whoever left the dishes unwashed? From petty anger to the devastating violence we see in the news, acts of aggression can be difficult to comprehend. Research has yielded puzzling paradoxes about how rage works in the brain. But a new study from Caltech, pioneering a machine-learning research technique in the hypothalamus, reveals unexpected answers on the nature of aggression.

The hypothalamus is a brain region linked to many innate survival behaviors like mating, hunting, and the fight-or-flight response. Scientists have long believed that neurons in the hypothalamus are functionally specific—that is, certain groups of neurons correlate to certain specific behaviors. This seems to be the case in mating behavior, where neuron groups in the medial preoptic area (MPOA) of the hypothalamus, when stimulated, cause a male mouse to mount a female mouse. These same neurons are active when mounting behavior occurs naturally. The logical conclusion is that these neurons control mounting in mice.

But when looking at the analogous neurons that control aggression in another part of the hypothalamus, the VMHvl, researchers found a different story. These neurons could be stimulated to cause a male mouse to attack another male mouse, yet they did not show specific activity when the same neurons were observed in naturally fighting mice. This paradox indicated that something distinct was happening when it came to aggression.

Automation will solve labour shortage in developed countries.

Alberta’s worker shortage has shown some signs of levelling off in recent months, but similar to the rest of the country, industries that rely heavily on skilled workers report feeling constrained as their operations continue to struggle.

In the 46th episode, Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque discusses the future of AI. From being only years out from generating entire movies in real-time to how it’s revolutionizing the healthcare industry and could help identify cancer. Plus its benefits in education, charities, the potential regulations, and societal impact, and Stable Diffusion becoming the most popular open-source software in the world.

(0:00) Intro.
(1:03) Introducing Emad Mostaque.
(1:27) Generative AI
(9:52) Computing power and AI
(12:23) How Emad got into AI
(14:49) Open-source AI
(20:19) Growth of Stable Diffusion.
(21:57) Lensa.
(25:39) Power of Creativity.
(30:00) Ramifications of AI
(34:09) State of the industry.
(37:32) Business model for AI
(43:28) AI use cases.
(48:11) Societal impact.
(51:39) Becoming a public figure.
(55:41) Outro.

Continue reading “Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque, The Future of Generative AI, Real-Time Movies, Societal Impact” »

Year 2019 face_with_colon_three

The matter of taste and how it is influenced by external factors is a subject of fascination for many people (witness the proliferation of polls about which sense you would give up if needed, for example). In the foodservice industry, the question of how people perceive flavors is big business, used to predict upcoming food trends and what will resonate with tomorrow’s fickle diner.

Continue reading “How Robot Tongues Are Measuring Taste For The Food And Beverage Industry” »