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WASHINGTON — Artificial intelligence startup Wallaroo Labs won a $1.5 million contract from the U.S. Space Force to continue the development of machine learning models for edge computers in orbit.

The New York-based company, known as Wallaroo.ai, is partnered with New Mexico State University for the Small Business Technology Transfer Phase 2 contract, announced Aug. 15. The team last year won a Phase 1 award.

Wallaroo.ai created a software platform that helps businesses assess the performance of AI applications when deployed on edge computers.

Can you recognize someone you haven’t seen in years, but forget what you had for breakfast yesterday? Our brains constantly rearrange their circuitry to remember familiar faces or learn new skills, but the molecular basis of this process isn’t well understood. Today, scientists report that sulfate groups on complex sugar molecules called glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) affect “plasticity” in the brains of mice. Determining how GAGs function could help us understand how memory and learning work in humans, and provide ways to repair neural connectivity after injuries.

The researchers will present their results today at the fall meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

The sugars that sweeten fruits, candies or cakes are actually just a few simple varieties of the many types of sugars that exist. When strung together, they can make a wide array of complex sugars. GAGs are formed by then attaching other chemical structures, including sulfate groups.

Exactly how, and how much, the unconscious processing of information influences our behavior has always been one of the most controversial questions in psychology. In the early 20th century, Sigmund Freud popularized the idea that our behaviors are driven by thoughts, feelings, and memories hidden deep within the unconscious mind — an idea that became hugely popular, but that was eventually dismissed as unscientific.

Modern neuroscience tells us that we are completely unaware of most brain activity, but that unconscious processing does indeed influence behavior; nevertheless, certain effects, such as unconscious semantic “priming,” have been called into question, leading some to conclude that the extent of unconscious processing is limited.

A recent brain scanning study now shows that unconsciously processed visual information is distributed to a wider network of brain regions involved in higher-order cognitive tasks. The results contribute to the debate over the extent to which unconscious information processing influence the brain and behavior and led the authors of the study to revise one of the leading theories of consciousness.

Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, cosmology, and the philosophy of science. He is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University and an external professor at the Sante Fe Institute. Sean has contributed prolifically to the public understanding of science through a variety of mediums: as an author of several physics books including Something Deeply Hidden and The Biggest Ideas in the Universe, as a public speaker and debater on a wide variety of scientific and philosophical subjects, and also as a host of his podcast Mindscape which covers topics spanning science, society, philosophy, culture, and the arts.

#physics #quantum #philosophy #mathematics.

http://www.patreon.com/timothynguyen.

In this episode, we take a deep dive into The Many Worlds (Everettian) Interpretation of quantum mechanics. While there are many philosophical discussions of the Many Worlds Interpretation available, ours marries philosophy with the technical, mathematical details. As a bonus, the whole gamut of topics from philosophy and physics arise, including the nature of reality, emergence, Bohmian mechanics, Bell’s Theorem, and more. We conclude with some analysis of Sean’s speculative work on the concept of emergent spacetime, a viewpoint which naturally arises from Many Worlds.

DURHAM – A big licensing deal potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars with an Austrlia-based company at the same time also has triggered what Precision Biosciences calls a “right-sized” organization of the company.

“Prior to the announcement, we had 190 employees, with 110 going forward with Precision. Most of the 80 employees went with Imugene, with the remainder parting ways with a reduction in force,” Mei Burris, director of investor relations and finance for the company,” told WRAL TechWire.

What “right-sized” means was not immediately explained in the company’s announcement Tuesday night after the markets closed. The company’s stock is trading at under $1 and it lost $12 million in its most recent quarter ending June 30.

“There’s no road map,” said Michael Sipser, a veteran complexity theorist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who spent years grappling with the problem in the 1980s. “It’s like you’re going into the wilderness.”

It seems that proving that computational problems are hard to solve is itself a hard task. But why is it so hard? And just how hard is it? Carmosino and other researchers in the subfield of meta-complexity reformulate questions like this as computational problems, propelling the field forward by turning the lens of complexity theory back on itself.