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Jun 19, 2023

Robot-assisted deep brain stimulation surgery could treat epilepsy

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, robotics/AI

Three of these procedures have thus far been undertaken in Canada.

A neurosurgeon in Canada has become the first in the nation to perform robot-assisted deep brain stimulation surgery on a patient suffering from epilepsy with success.

This is according to a report by CTV News published on Wednesday.

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Jun 19, 2023

Euclid telescope to explore dark energy and dark matter like never before

Posted by in category: cosmology

ESA/Wikimedia.

This is according to a report by The Guardian published on Sunday.

Jun 19, 2023

Georgia tech team unveils autonomous tennis robot to help you beat your foes

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, transportation

“It can also be my opponent. It can help me train.”

An assistant professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology has revealed a robotic tennis partner that may soon become your sparring partner and skilled opponent.

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Jun 19, 2023

Is OpenSource AI Threatening The Tech Titans?

Posted by in categories: innovation, robotics/AI

Open-source AI can be defined as software engineers collaborating on various artificial intelligence projects that are open to the public to develop. The goal is to better integrate computing with humanity. In early March, the open source community got their hands on Meta’s LLaMA which was leaked to the public. In barely a month, there are very innovative OpenSource AI model variants with instruction tuning, quantization, quality improvements, human evals, multimodality, RLHF, etc.

Open-source models are faster, more customizable, more private, and capable. They are doing things with $100 and 13B params that even market leaders are struggling with. One open-source solution, Vicuna, is an… More.


This article explores AI in the context of open-sourced alternatives and highlights market dynamics in play.

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Jun 19, 2023

Russia Claims ‘First Kill by Artificial Intelligence’ in Ukraine

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, transportation

Russia claims that its S-350 Vityaz air defence system shot down a Ukrainian aircraft while operating in “automatic mode”. The Russian Deputy PM said that its highly acclaimed S-350 Vityaz air defence system was operating in the NVO zone. It demonstrated capabilities of autonomously detecting, tracking, and destroying Ukrainian air targets without any operator’s intervention. Watch the video to find out how did the system work on AI?

#artificialintelligence #S350Vityaz #worldnews #defencenews.

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Jun 18, 2023

Video: Building block of life found on Saturn moon. Bill Nye explains what it means

Posted by in category: space

Science educator Bill Nye joins CNN’s Jim Acosta to explain the significance of the detection of phosphorus in salty ice grains on Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

Jun 18, 2023

Fabrication of Nanofiltration Membranes via Surface and Interface Engineering

Posted by in categories: bioengineering, chemistry, sustainability

A team of researchers successfully constructed nanofiltration membranes with superior quality using the mussel-inspired deposition methods. Such was achieved via a two-part approach to fabricate the thin-film composite (TFC) nanofiltration membranes. Firstly, the substrate surface was coated through fast and novel deposition to form a dense, robust, and functional selective layer. Then, the structure controllability of the selective layer was enhanced by optimizing the interfacial polymerization (IP) process. As a result, the properties of nanofiltration membranes produced are with high durability and added functionality. When put into a bigger perspective, these high-performance TFC nanofiltration membranes are potential solutions to a number of fields, including water softening, wastewater treatment, and pharmaceutical purification. Hence, there is a need to further explore and expand the application in an industrial scale instead of being bound within the walls of the laboratories.

Membrane-based technologies, especially enhanced nanofiltration systems, have been highly explored due to their myriad of distinct properties, primarily for their high efficiency, mild operation, and strong adaptability. Among these, the TFC nanofiltration membranes are favoured for their smaller molecular weight cutoff, and narrower pore size distribution which lead to higher divalent and multivalent ion rejection ability. Moreover, these membranes show better designability owing to their thin selective layer make-up and porous support with different chemical compositions. However, the interfacial polymerization (IP) rate of reaction is known to affect the permeability and selectivity of the TFC nanofiltration membranes by weakening the controllability of the selective layer structure. Therefore, this study was designed to improve the structural quality of the TFC nanofiltration membranes through surface and interface engineering, and subsequently, increase the functionality.

Continue reading “Fabrication of Nanofiltration Membranes via Surface and Interface Engineering” »

Jun 18, 2023

Smart drugs fall short as cognitive function enhancers

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, information science, mathematics, neuroscience

Background

Many everyday tasks can fall under the mathematical class of “hard” problems. Typically, these problems belong to the complexity class of nondeterministic polynomial (NP) hard. These tasks require systematic approaches (algorithms) for optimal outcomes. In the case of significant complex problems (e.g., the number of ways to fix a product or the number of stops to be made on a delivery trip), more computations are required, which rapidly outgrows cognitive capacities.

A recent Science Advances study investigated the effectiveness of three popular smart drugs, namely, modafinil (MOD), methylphenidate (MPH), and dextroamphetamine (DEX), against the difficulty of real-life daily tasks, i.e., the 0–1 knapsack optimization problem (“knapsack task”). A knapsack task is basically a combinatorial optimization task, the class of NP-time challenging problems.

Jun 18, 2023

Qubit Quest Takes a Topological Turn

Posted by in categories: information science, particle physics, quantum physics, robotics/AI

The compelling feature of this new breed of quasiparticle, says Pedram Roushan of Google Quantum AI, is the combination of their accessibility to quantum logic operations and their relative invulnerability to thermal and environmental noise. This combination, he says, was recognized in the very first proposal of topological quantum computing, in 1997 by the Russian-born physicist Alexei Kitaev.

At the time, Kitaev realized that non-Abelian anyons could run any quantum computer algorithm. And now that two separate groups have created the quasi-particles in the wild, each team is eager to develop their own suite of quantum computational tools around these new quasiparticles.

Jun 18, 2023

Meta introduces Voicebox, does a first on Generative AI speech

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Meta AI researchers have moved a step forward in the field of generative AI for speech with the development of Voicebox. Unlike previous models, Voicebox can generalize to speech-generation tasks that it was not specifically trained for, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance.

Voicebox is a versatile generative system for speech that can produce high-quality audio clips in a wide variety of styles. It can create outputs from scratch or modify existing samples. The model supports speech synthesis in six languages, as well as noise removal, content editing, style conversion, and diverse sample generation.

Traditionally, generative AI models for speech required specific training for each task using carefully prepared training data. However, Voicebox adopts a new approach called Flow Matching, which surpasses diffusion models in performance. It outperforms existing state-of-the-art models like VALL-E for English text-to-speech tasks, achieving better word error rates (5.9% vs. 1.9%) and audio similarity (0.580 vs. 0.681), while also being up to 20 times faster. In cross-lingual style transfer, Voicebox surpasses YourTTS by reducing word error rates from 10.9% to 5.2% and improving audio similarity from 0.335 to 0.481.