Lifeboat Foundation

Bringing together concepts from electrical engineering and bioengineering tools, Technion and MIT scientists collaborated to produce cells engineered to compute sophisticated functions— biocomputers of sorts.

Graduate students and researchers from Technion—Israel Institute of Technology Professor Ramez Daniel’s Laboratory for Synthetic Biology & Bioelectronics worked together with Professor Ron Weiss from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create genetic “devices” designed to perform computations like artificial neural circuits. Their results were recently published in Nature Communications.

The genetic material was inserted into the bacterial cell in the form of a plasmid: a relatively short DNA molecule that remains separate from the bacteria’s “natural” genome. Plasmids also exist in nature, and serve various functions. The research group designed the plasmid’s genetic sequence to function as a simple computer, or more specifically, a simple artificial neural network. This was done by means of several genes on the plasmid regulating each other’s activation and deactivation according to outside stimuli.

It’s not really a Star Wars story unless there’s a lovable or memorable droid stealing the spotlight. But, when you really stop and think about it, there’s also something profoundly tragic about the role artificial lifeforms play in the Star Wars universe.

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It’s commonly believed that many of these prehistoric animals were vicious carnivores.

Researchers used artificial intelligence (AI) to discover information on dinosaurs, specifically to find out if a certain dinosaur was a predator or not. AI has shown that the dinosaur typically thought to be a carnivore may actually have been an herbivore.

The new analysis was done by using deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) — computing systems based on neural networks of the brain — to track the fossils of these prehistoric reptiles.

Continue reading “AI predicts that a dinosaur thought to be predatory may have been an herbivore” »

Chip startup Cerebras Systems Inc. today debuted Andromeda, a supercomputer optimized to run artificial intelligence applications that features more than 13.5 million processor cores.

Sunnyvale, California-based Cerebras Systems is backed by more than $720 million in venture funding. The startup sells a chip called the WSE-2 that is specifically designed to run AI software. The new Andromeda supercomputer that Cerebras Systems debuted today is based on the WSE-2 chip.

According to Cerebras Systems, Andromeda can provide performance in excess of one exaflop when running AI applications. One exaflop equals 1 million trillion calculations per second. The startup says that Andromeda’s performance makes it suitable for, among other use cases, training large language models, which are complex neural networks that can perform tasks such as translating text and generating software code.

The maniacally focused founder of Insilico Medicine is going all in on AI to discover new medicines and extend lifespan.

But researchers are now using artificial intelligence to accelerate parts of that process by orders of magnitude. The same kind of technology that recognizes your face or autocompletes your emails can potentially add years to your life, experts say.

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