Lifeboat Foundation

CEO Drew Perkins discusses what the first demo was like. By year’s end, I could be next.

The dream of transforming windows into active power generators has just edged one step closer to realization.

A team of researchers from ARC Centre of Excellence in Exciton Science led by Professor Jacek Jasieniak from Monash University’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering has created perovskite cells with a conversion efficiency of 15.5 percent that allows more than 20 percent of visible light through, a press release states.

This improves the stability of solar windows while allowing more natural light in, which means the amount of visible light passing through the cells is remarkably now reaching glazing levels, increasing their potential for usage in a wide range of real-world applications.

It’s effectively a new data set that will fuel the second wave of discoveries about Mars’ surface composition.

But while it was doing that work, it was also gathering lower-resolution mapping strips, about 83,000 of them. Now that CRISM is no longer active, the team is building their map from those strips.

Processing this much data into one cohesive map is a complicated task requiring powerful computing resources. It takes time to optimize the maps and account for environmental conditions and discrepancies between the different images.

Continue reading “NASA just built the best map of Mars to date using 51,000 images” »

Moss rehabilitation research institute — elkins park, pennsylvania.

Presentation April 6, 2012 by Visiting Scholar Carolee Winstein, PhD, PT, FAPTA, Professor and Director of Motor Behavior and Neurorehabilitation Laboratory, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.

Samsung has announced the first mass production of computer chips using a 3 nanometre (nm) process.

Recently, researchers made AI write an academic paper about itself with legit citations and references, and quite to their surprise, the technology successfully executed this task!

Creative thought is surely among our most precious and mysterious capabilities. But can powerful computers rival the human brain? As thinking, remembering and innovating become increasingly interwoven with technological advances, what are we capable of? What do we lose? Join Luciano Floridi, John Donoghue, Gary Small and Rosalind Picard for a thought-provoking program about thinking.

This program is part of The Big Idea Series, made possible with support from the John Templeton Foundation.

Continue reading “Mind and Machine: The Future of Thinking” »

In the midst of the heated debate about AI sentience, conscious machines and artificial general intelligence, Yann LeCun, Chief AI Scientist at Meta, published a blueprint for creating “autonomous machine intelligence.”

LeCun has compiled his ideas in a paper that draws inspiration from progress in machine learning, robotics, neuroscience and cognitive science. He lays out a roadmap for creating AI that can model and understand the world, reason and plan to do tasks on different timescales.

While the paper is not a scholarly document, it provides a very interesting framework for thinking about the different pieces needed to replicate animal and human intelligence. It also shows how the mindset of LeCun, an award-winning pioneer of deep learning, has changed and why he thinks current approaches to AI will not get us to human-level AI.

Now, as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – the monster proton smasher at the European particle laboratory, Cern – gears up to start its third period of data collection on Tuesday, experts are hoping to unpick further secrets of the fundamental building blocks of the universe.

Bortoletto, now head of particle physics at the University of Oxford and part of the team that discovered the Higgs boson, said her main memory of the events a decade ago was the moment two weeks before the announcement when the researchers unblinded their analysis of the data and saw unambiguous signs of the boson.

“I still, thinking [about] that moment, get the butterflies in my stomach,” she said. “It was unbelievable. It’s really a unique moment in the life of the scientist.”