Lifeboat News: The Blog – Safeguarding Humanity

Harvard researcher George Church is looking for people with exceptionally good memory to take part in a study aimed at finding genetic mechanisms that boost memory in research that could one day result in better drugs or diagnostic tests.

Church and other researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and Harvard Medical School’s Personal Genome Project, in collaboration with Lumos Labs — the makers of the brain-training game Lumosity — will look for common genetic markers in individuals with exceptional memories, attention and reaction speeds.

‘Bigger than the cloud’ … Xero makes first move towards automated accounting

Posted by Alireza Mokri in business, robotics/AI

Mar 15
2017

The chief executive of listed accounting software business Xero has claimed machine learning-based automation will be a bigger change than the advent of cloud computing, as it starts to offer options to automate accounting tasks.

Xero boss Rod Drury said the company would unveil a new feature to its software this week which would automate the coding of invoices and bank transactions for its small business customers, work that has been conducted personally by business owners or accountants until now.

The process was targeted for automation after Xero’s Find & Recode feature showed 3.1 million invoices had been incorrectly recorded by its 862,000 subscribers in the 18 months to September 2016. It is the first introduction of machine learning automation at Xero since it shifted its infrastructure to run on Amazon Web Services in 2016.

Baidu is restructuring to focus on artificial intelligence

Posted by Alireza Mokri in robotics/AI | 2 Comments on Baidu is restructuring to focus on artificial intelligence

Mar 15
2017

Since appointing the former Microsoft executive Lu Qi as the new Chief Operating Officer and Vice Chairman, Baidu has reshuffled its senior management team and company structure to focus more on artificial intelligence.

Mark Cuban: The world’s first trillionaire will be an artificial intelligence entrepreneur

Posted by Alireza Mokri in robotics/AI

Mar 15
2017

The self-made billionaire sees tremendous opportunity in machine learning.

Artificial Intelligence Is Powerful Stuff, But Difficult To Scale To Real-Life Business

Posted by Alireza Mokri in business, robotics/AI

Mar 15
2017

AI and machine learning technology is ready, but simply imposing it on an existing organization without preparing your people and processes will not deliver the best results.

Science|Large Sections of Australia’s Great Reef Are Now Dead, Scientists Find

Posted by Blair Erickson in food, science

Mar 15
2017

Words and promises of action in some far off future election will not save the once great natural wonder of the Great Barrier Reef from death.

If most of the world’s coral reefs die, as scientists fear is increasingly likely, some of the richest and most colorful life in the ocean could be lost, along with huge sums from reef tourism. In poorer countries, lives are at stake: Hundreds of millions of people get their protein primarily from reef fish, and the loss of that food supply could become a humanitarian crisis.