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AI now used in the fight against global infectious diseases

Our hope is for COVID-19 to never repeat itself,’ said the new program’s executive director.

A program run by a Canadian university is seeking to improve global health care for the most vulnerable by examining how artificial intelligence (AI) can enhance readiness for infectious disease epidemics in the Global South.

This is according to a report by CTV News published on Wednesday.


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Microsoft AI researchers accidentally exposed terabytes of internal sensitive data

Microsoft AI researchers accidentally exposed tens of terabytes of sensitive data, including private keys and passwords, while publishing a storage bucket of open source training data on GitHub.

In research shared with TechCrunch, cloud security startup Wiz said it discovered a GitHub repository belonging to Microsoft’s AI research division as part of its ongoing work into the accidental exposure of cloud-hosted data.

Readers of the GitHub repository, which provided open source code and AI models for image recognition, were instructed to download the models from an Azure Storage URL. However, Wiz found that this URL was configured to grant permissions on the entire storage account, exposing additional private data by mistake.

RoboFab is ready to build 10,000 humanoid robots per year

Humanoid robots are pretty cool, and Agility Robotics‘bipedal robot Digit is up there in terms of advanced tech (it even has a face!). Today, the company announced it’s getting ready to crank up its RoboFab, which can build more than 10,000 Digits per year. Obvious Skynet jokes aside, I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords.

The factory will be built in Salem, Oregon, and the company tells TechCrunch it started initial construction of the 70,000-square-foot robot factory last year, and it is set to open later this year.

“The opening of our factory marks a pivotal moment in the history of robotics: the beginning of the mass production of commercial humanoid robots,” said Agility Robotics’ co-founder and CEO Damion Shelton. “We built Digit to solve difficult problems in today’s workforce like injuries, burnout, high turnover and unfillable labor gaps, with the ultimate vision of enabling humans to be more human. When you’re building new technology to make society better, the most important milestone is when you’re able to mass produce that technology at a scale where it can have a real, widespread impact.”

Meet Ascento Guard, a new autonomous security patrolling robot

By regularly patrolling the property, armed guards prevent potential crimes simply by being present. Security patrols involve reviewing and monitoring the premises to ensure they are safe from potential threats.

However, foot patrol guards travel slowly and carry limited equipment. Due to this, the guard’s range and area coverage are relatively restricted. Patrolling guards also need help to do their duty in harsh weather conditions.

A Swiss Security and Investigations company, Ascento, has unveiled their new autonomous security patrolling robot, Ascento Guard.

What Is Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to complex software that performs tasks in a way similar to human brains, often by sensing and responding to a feature of their environment. This could mean learning to solve problems in unexpected ways, recognising the nuances of speech, or exhibiting some form of human-like creativity.

Just as no single quality defines human thinking, no clear line differentiates more basic computer programs from AI. It can be thought of more as an ideal than a category — using our own penchant for learning and problem solving to inspire new technology and answers to some of our biggest and most complex questions.

There are many different fields of AI, including ’robotics’, but one of the most commonly known forms is referred to as ‘machine learning’. This involves a program applying known information to new experiences and ‘learning’ how to take this historical information and its experiences into account in future actions.

Google’s Gemini AI is a Serious Threat to ChatGPT — Here’s Why

At a glance, Gemini’s ability to generate text and images gives it a serious advantage over GPT4 with respect to the range of content that it can produce.

However, perhaps the most threatening differentiator between the two is Google’s vast array of proprietary training data. Google Gemini can process data taken across services, including Google Search, YouTube, Google Books, and Google Scholar.

The use of this proprietary data in training the Gemini models could result in a distinct edge in the sophistication of the insights and inferences that it can take from a data set. This is particularly true if early reports that Gemini is trained on twice as many tokens as GPT4 are correct.


The launch of ChatGPT last November shook Google to its foundations. The popular chatbot posed such a threat to the company’s business that it had to declare a code red and began investing in catching up on the generative AI bandwagon. This effort has not only resulted in the release of Google Bard but also Gemini.

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Gemini is a set of large language models (LLMs) that combine GPT-4 with training techniques taken from AlphaGo, such as reinforcement learning and tree search, which has the potential to unseat ChatGPT as the most dominant generative AI solution on the planet.

How to use AI to write songs and make music videos

If you would like to harness the power of artificial intelligence to aid you in the creation of your next song or music video. You might be interested in a new video created by AI enthusiast Matt Wolfe. Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a game-changer a wide variety of different sectors including AI art generation, writing and more. As well as offering innovative tools that can assist in creating songs and music videos.

This AI music writing overview guide provides an in-depth look into how some of these AI tools can be utilized to create a new songs and accompanying music videos, a process that is not only fascinating but also accessible to anyone with an interest in music and technology.

Bad news, star employees: You’re not the ones who’ll benefit the most from AI

They were then assigned a series of practical consulting tasks for a fictional shoe company and had their performance graded by human and AI raters.

The greatest gains were seen by below-average performers using AI, whose average performance improved by 43%.

Their above-average counterparts only saw an average performance increase of 17% from using AI.

Overview of artificial intelligence in medicine

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the term used to describe the use of computers and technology to simulate intelligent behavior and critical thinking comparable to a human being. John McCarthy first described the term AI in 1956 as the science and engineering of making intelligent machines.

This descriptive article gives a broad overview of AI in medicine, dealing with the terms and concepts as well as the current and future applications of AI. It aims to develop knowledge and familiarity of AI among primary care physicians.

PubMed and Google searches were performed using the key words ‘artificial intelligence’. Further references were obtained by cross-referencing the key articles.

Resistance-resistant antibacterial treatment strategies

Antibiotic resistance is a major danger to public health that threatens to claim the lives of millions of people per year within the next few decades. Years of necessary administration and excessive application of antibiotics have selected for strains that are resistant to many of our currently available treatments. Due to the high costs and difficulty of developing new antibiotics, the emergence of resistant bacteria is outpacing the introduction of new drugs to fight them. To overcome this problem, many researchers are focusing on developing antibacterial therapeutic strategies that are “resistance-resistant”—regimens that slow or stall resistance development in the targeted pathogens. In this mini review, we outline major examples of novel resistance-resistant therapeutic strategies. We discuss the use of compounds that reduce mutagenesis and thereby decrease the likelihood of resistance emergence. Then, we examine the effectiveness of antibiotic cycling and evolutionary steering, in which a bacterial population is forced by one antibiotic toward susceptibility to another antibiotic. We also consider combination therapies that aim to sabotage defensive mechanisms and eliminate potentially resistant pathogens by combining two antibiotics or combining an antibiotic with other therapeutics, such as antibodies or phages. Finally, we highlight promising future directions in this field, including the potential of applying machine learning and personalized medicine to fight antibiotic resistance emergence and out-maneuver adaptive pathogens.

The use of antibiotics is central to the practice of modern medicine but is threatened by widespread antibiotic resistance (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (U.S.), 2019). Antibiotics are a selective evolutionary pressure—they inhibit bacterial growth and viability, and antibiotic-treated bacteria are forced to either adapt and survive or succumb to treatment. The stress of antibiotic treatment can enhance bacterial mutagenesis leading to de novo resistance mutations (Figure 1A), promote the acquisition of horizontally transferred genetic elements that confer resistance, or trigger phenotypic responses that increase tolerance to drugs (Davies and Davies, 2010; Levin-Reisman et al., 2017; Bakkeren et al., 2019; Darby et al., 2022;). Additionally, antibiotic treatment can select for the proliferation of pre-existing mutants already in the population (Figure 1B).