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How robotics is making live music a more enriching experience.

Scientists have developed a ‘smart’ wearable robotic limb that responds to human gestures and the music it hears, allowing drummers to play with three arms.

The two-foot long robotic arm can be attached to a musician’s shoulder, and knows what to play by listening to the music in the room. It improvises based on the beat and rhythm. For instance, if the musician plays slowly, the arm slows the tempo. If the drummer speeds up, it plays faster.

Another aspect of its intelligence is knowing where it is located at all times, where the drums are, and the direction and proximity of the human arms.

Continue reading “Robot limb lets drummers play with three arms” | >

The facts about the CRISPR Patent.

Xconomy San Francisco —

If you ask people who don’t follow biotech too closely what they know about CRISPR, you might get two answers: genetic editing and a big patent fight.

But a new CRISPR patent highlights a lower-profile potential use for the biotechnology: genetic detection and analysis.

Continue reading “Caribou Bio’s New CRISPR Patent Isn’t About Gene Editing” | >

New insights on GBM resistance markers.

A research team, with the participation of the University of Granada (UGR), has made some progress in determining the causes for glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), one of the most aggressive brain tumors known, to be resistant to the drugs currently used, which is one of the main limitations of its treatment. The results have been recently published in two articles in PlosOne magazine.

The researchers have proven that proteoglycans (the cells’ structural elements), called decorin (DCN) and lumican (LUM), could be decisive in the behavior and development of a resistance to the drugs used for treating glioblastoma multiforme, such as temozolamide (TMZ). In the other hand, they have laid bare that the inhibition of the transcription of some of the sub-units belonging to the mismatch-repair (MMR) complex, a system that analyzes and repairs DNA, could be responsible of the failure of current therapies against this kind of tumor.

This is a scientific breakthrough that could be useful for the search of new resistance markers in GBM as well as for the development of new therapeutic strategies which avoid the resistance to drugs that these tumors possess.

Continue reading “GBM Treatment Discoveries: Why Select Drugs Might not Work” | >

Actors and Actresses will never have to worry about reading through pages of scripts to decide whether or not the role is worth their time; AI will do the work for you.

A version of this story first appeared in the Feb. 26 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.

During his 12 years in UTA’s story department, Scott Foster estimates he read about 5,500 screenplays. “Even if it was the worst script ever, I had to read it cover to cover,” he says. So when Foster left the agency in 2013, he teamed with Portland, Ore.-based techie Brian Austin to create ScriptHop, an artificial intelligence system that manages the volume of screenplays that every agency and studio houses. “When I took over [at UTA], we were managing hundreds of thousands of scripts on a Word document,” says Foster, who also worked at Endeavor and Handprint before UTA. “The program began to eat itself and become corrupt because there was too much information to handle.” ScriptHop can read a script and do a complete character breakdown in four seconds, versus the roughly four man hours required of a reader. The tool, which launches Feb. 16 is free, and is a sample of the overall platform coming later in 2016 that will recommend screenplays as well as store and manage a company’s library for a subscription fee of $29.99 a month per user.

As for how exactly it works, Austin is staying mum. “There’s a lot of sauce in the secret sauce,” he says. Foster and Austin aren’t the first to create AI to analyze scripts. ScriptBook launched in 2015 as an algorithmic assessment to determine a script’s box-office potential. By contrast, ScriptHop is more akin to a Dewey Decimal System for film and TV. Say a manager needs to find a project for a 29-year-old male client who is 5 feet tall, ScriptHop will spit out the options quickly. “If you’re an agent looking for roles for minority clients, it’s hugely helpful,” says Foster. There’s also an emotional response dynamic (i.e., Oscar bait) that charts a character’s cathartic peaks and valleys as well as screen time and shooting days. So Meryl Streep instantly can find the best way to spend a one month window between studio gigs. Either way, it appears that A.I. script reading is the future. The only question is what would ScriptHop make of Ex Machina’s Ava? “That would be an interesting character breakdown,” jokes Foster.

Continue reading “This New Artificial Intelligence Script-Reading Program Could Find Your Next Oscar Role (Exclusive)” | >

Big Blue is cool again according to investors.

NEW YORK: Here’s a vexing question for artificial mega-brain Watson: Why is IBM stock surging? Big Blue’s market value rose about $6 billion after the computer giant agreed on Thursday to buy Truven Health Analytics for $2.6 billion. Giving IBM’s artificial-intelligence platform more data to chew on is useful, but investors’ glee over an opaque addition to an enigmatic business effort is confusing.

Big Blue’s top line has been shrinking steadily for nearly four years. In the fourth quarter of 2015, all major divisions had declining sales, with overall revenue falling 8.5 percent compared with the same period a year earlier. Clients need less of IBM’s hardware, and its software and consulting businesses are faltering in competition with rivals’ cloud-based versions.

The upshot is a falling share price. It has dropped about 25 percent in the past four years, while the S&P 500 has risen about 40 percent.

Continue reading “Why is IBM surging?” | >

This is so true and even more importantly in the space of technology as we introduce more products and services in the AI space. Reason is because we are seeing the consumer’s buying patterns changing especially as consumers have more options around devices, services, and AI available to them.

As a result of more choices and AI sophistication; consumers are now & more so in the future will chose to buy things that “fit” more with their own style and personality today. And, this places pressures on companies to change/ expand their thinking on product innovation to include emotional thinking as well. Gone are the days of technology just being a machine/ devices designed to only process information and provide information insights only. Tech consumers today and in the future want technology that marries with their own sense of style and personalities. Therefore, corporate culture as a whole will need to change their thinking at all levels.

I once wrote an article about how people with outstanding academic achievement or technical brilliance can easily get hired, but brilliance will get them nowhere if they lack emotional intelligence and the ability to build strong working relationships. This is especially true in today’s highly competitive world where organisations rely heavily on interdependence to stay ahead of the game.

However, I have heard arguments against my claim from people who point out that there is no shortage of notoriously heartless CEOs lacking in EQ. While that argument might ring true to some extent, I find the reasons for that situation rather interesting. As well, it is essential to note that most CEOs with low EQ scores are not the best-performing business leaders.

Continue reading “We need leaders with emotional intelligence” | >

A trio of physicists in Europe has come up with an idea that they believe would allow a person to actually witness entanglement. Valentina Caprara Vivoli, with the University of Geneva, Pavel Sekatski, with the University of Innsbruck and Nicolas Sangouard, with the University of Basel, have together written a paper describing a scenario where a human subject would be able to witness an instance of entanglement—they have uploaded it to the arXiv server for review by others.

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