Have you ever wondered what is going to replace the likes of Siri, Cortana, and Alexa? You may be looking at their next logical stage – this holographic digital home assistant.
Japanese startup vinclu Inc. is showing off a concept video for a holographic assistant called Gatebox. For its first incarnation, it projects a hologram named Azuma Hikari. Azuma will wake you in the morning, greet you when you get home from work, and communicate with your other smart devices in your home. Use her to turn on your TV, adjust your thermostat, play your music, etc. The possibilities are endless. If Amazon Echo had this kind of personality, it would have sold even better.
A transplantation procedure to treat multiple sclerosis using a patient’s own stem cells has shown impressive results
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a complex autoimmune disorder in which myelin, the protective sheath around nerve fibres, begins to get degraded. Progressive inflammation and scarring results in permanent nerve damage which can eventually lead to severe disability. While there has been progress in controlling the disease, no cure currently exists.
Interesting; especially how AI is leveraged for enhancing games which does make perfect sense from a pattern recognition and improvement standpoint.
As Central Florida’s video game community enters the virtual reality era, specialists and artists who can create fantasy worlds will be in higher demand here.
Video games often try to transport players to a virtual world, whether it’s a land of wooden zombies or a virtual representation of the Amway Center.
But professionals here say the illusion fails if the game’s artificial intelligence doesn’t realistically react to game situations.
In a computational reconstruction of brain tissue in the hippocampus, Salk and UT-Austin scientists found the unusual occurrence of two synapses from the axon of one neuron (translucent black strip) forming onto two spines on the same dendrite of a second neuron (yellow). Separate terminals from one neuron’s axon are shown in synaptic contact with two spines (arrows) on the same dendrite of a second neuron in the hippocampus. The spine head volumes, synaptic contact areas (red), neck diameters (gray) and number of presynaptic vesicles (white spheres) of these two synapses are almost identical. (credit: Salk Institute)
Salk researchers and collaborators have achieved critical insight into the size of neural connections, putting the memory capacity of the brain far higher than common estimates. The new work also answers a longstanding question as to how the brain is so energy efficient, and could help engineers build computers that are incredibly powerful but also conserve energy.
“This is a real bombshell in the field of neuroscience,” says Terry Sejnowski, Salk professor and co-senior author of the paper, which was published in eLife. “We discovered the key to unlocking the design principle for how hippocampal neurons function with low energy but high computation power. Our new measurements of the brain’s memory capacity increase conservative estimates by a factor of 10 to at least a petabyte (1 quadrillion or 1015 bytes), in the same ballpark as the World Wide Web.”
Renowned neuroscientist Rafael Yuste on Wednesday dismissed the latest doomsday predictions of Stephen Hawking, saying the British astrophysicist “doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
In a recent lecture in London, Hawking indicated that advances in science and technology will lead to “new ways things can go wrong,” especially in the field of artificial intelligence.
Yuste, a Columbia University neuroscience professor, was less pessimistic. “We don’t have enough knowledge to be able to say such things,” he told Radio Cooperativa in Santiago, Chile.
Five couples sealed the deal at a robot factory in Shenyang, Liaoning Province of China, in one of the most unique wedding venues in recent news.
On Wednesday, robots of all forms serviced the entire wedding for the couples and guests alike. Some robots were merely appendages, holding candles out along the aisle. Others had a more humanoid form with bright, pixilated smiles. These robots served wine and greeted guests at the door. A few special ones even served as ring-bearers or flower girls.