Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 10380

India’s artificial intelligence journey could get a big boost this year.

The National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog is reportedly going to release a first-ever national policy on AI directly rivalling whatever’s going on in China on the subject. The policy will chalk out the scope of AI via research and how the technology will be adopted in the years to come.

According to an Economic Times report, NITI Aayog will form the policy with short, medium and long term goals in mind, spread up to 2030.

Read more

Space has suddenly become big in New Zealand, but Rocket Lab is just one example of what is starting to look like exponential growth in commercial activity. Business consultant and self-confessed space junkie Kevin Jenkins looks into how things are shaping up.

One space narrative is about disappointment. The 1950s and 1960s were about possibilities, and landing on the Moon seemed to prove that the science fiction of the 20th century really was just history written before it happened. But the promise of space seemed to peter out. The Apollo moon programme came to look more like a peak or end-point, rather than the trial run for Mars some in the space programme had hoped it would be.

After Apollo, “space” seemed to shift back to being more of a popular culture theme. For example, the famous song, album and movie Space is the Place is by one of my favourite jazz weirdos, Sun Ra, who was adamant he came from Saturn. Space became a dominant meme in pop and rock music too, as well as a mainstay in novels and films.

Read more

The pair of galaxies NGC 1531/2, engaged in a spirited waltz, is located about 70 million light-years away towards the southern constellation Eridanus (The River). The deformed foreground spiral galaxy laced with dust lanes NGC 1532 is so close to its companion — the background galaxy with a bright core just above the centre of NGC 1532 — that it gets distorted: one of its spiral arms is warped and plumes of dust and gas are visible above its disc. The cosmic dance leads to another dramatic effect: a whole new generation of massive stars were born in NGC 1532 because of the interaction. They are visible as the purple objects in the spiral arms.

This exquisite image was made using the 1.5-metre Danish telescope at the ESO La Silla Observatory, Chile. It is based on data obtained through three different filters: B, V and R. The field of view is 12 × 12 arcmin.

Read more

On the Right Track

In the final analysis, while IBM clearly has more work to do, it’s on the right track. Its investments in cloud and AI are already paying off, while blockchain and quantum computing bets are looking promising.

Furthermore, while IBM’s progress overall is clearly a massive team effort, Big Blue’s execution is due in large part to Rometty’s six years of leadership.

Read more

Intelligent Machines

AI tackles the Vatican’s secrets

Even church archivists don’t know what mysteries lie hidden in the Vatican Secret Archives, since many of its documents have never been transcribed. A machine-vision system for medieval text is about to change that.

    Read more