Lifeboat Foundation

Earlier this year, in June 2,021 the British Ministry of Defence employed Rafael’s DRONE DOME counter-UAV system to protect world leaders during the G7 Summit in Cornwall, England from unmanned aerial threats. Three years ago, Britain’s Defence Ministry purchased several DRONE DOME systems which it has successfully employed in a multitude of operational scenarios, including for protecting both the physical site and participants of this year’s G7 summit. Rafael’s DRONE DOME is an innovative end-to-end, combat-proven counter-Unmanned Aerial System (C-UAS), providing all-weather, 360-degree rapid defence against hostile drones. Fully operational and globally deployed, DRONE DOME offers a modular, robust infrastructure comprised of electronic jammers and sensors and unique artificial intelligence algorithms to effectively secure threatened air space.

Meir Ben Shaya, Rafael EVP for Marketing and Business Development of Air Defence Systems: Rafael today recognizes two new and key trends in the field of counter-UAVs, both of which DRONE DOME can successfully defend against. The first trend is the number of drones employed during an attack, and the operational need to have the ability counter multiple, simultaneous attacks; this is a significant, practical challenge that any successful system must be able to overcome. The second trend is the type of tool being employed. Previously, air defense systems were developed to seek out conventional aircraft, large unmanned aerial vehicles, and missile, but today these defense systems must also tackle smaller, slower, low-flying threats which are becoming more and more autonomous.

The selected companies will develop lander design concepts, evaluating their performance, design, construction standards, mission assurance requirements, interfaces, safety, crew health accommodations, and medical capabilities. The companies will also mitigate lunar lander risks by conducting critical component tests and advancing the maturity of key technologies.

The work from these companies will ultimately help shape the strategy and requirements for a future NASA’s solicitation to provide regular astronaut transportation from lunar orbit to the surface of the Moon.

Training efficiency has become a significant factor for deep learning as the neural network models, and training data size grows. GPT-3 is an excellent example to show how critical training efficiency factor could be as it takes weeks of training with thousands of GPUs to demonstrate remarkable capabilities in few-shot learning.

To address this problem, the Google AI team introduce two families of neural networks for image recognition. First is EfficientNetV2, consisting of CNN (Convolutional neural networks) with a small-scale dataset for faster training efficiency such as ImageNet1k (with 1.28 million images). Second is a hybrid model called CoAtNet, which combines convolution and self-attention to achieve higher accuracy on large-scale datasets such as ImageNet21 (with 13 million images) and JFT (with billions of images). As per the research report by Google, EfficientNetV2 and CoAtNet both are 4 to 10 times faster while achieving state-of-the-art and 90.88% top-1 accuracy on the well-established ImageNet dataset.

In recently published research using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers announced that they had found the first clear detection of a circumplanetary, moon-forming disk surrounding the exoplanet PDS 70c — a first in astrophysics.

The circumplanetary disk, or CPD, has been seen in past research from other groups. However, due to the inability to tell the disk apart from its surrounding environment, the presence of the disk around PDS 70c could not be confirmed.

Until now.

Is Elon right Eric Klien?

It’s been nearly five years since Musk first announced the full self driving feature and very little progress has been made on it.

The chips at the heart of our digital devices are manufactured by a few large companies, but an open-source approach to design could end their dominance — with implications for everyone.

❤️ Check out the Gradient Dissent podcast by Weights & Biases: http://wandb.me/gd.

📝 The paper “The Relightables: Volumetric Performance Capture of Humans with Realistic Relighting” is available here:
https://augmentedperception.github.io/therelightables/

Continue reading “This AI Makes Digital Copies of Humans! 👤” »

Data collected from 18 states between March and August suggest the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine reduces the risk of being hospitalized with COVID-19 by 91% in the first four months after receiving the second dose. Beyond 120 days, however, that vaccine efficacy drops to 77%.

Meanwhile, Moderna’s vaccine was 93% effective at reducing the short-term risk of COVID-19 hospitalization and remained 92% effective after 120 days.

Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine does a significantly better job of preventing COVID-19 hospitalizations compared with Pfizer’s shot.

A newly discovered manipulation mechanism used by parasitic bacteria to slow down plant aging, may offer new ways to protect disease-threatened food crops.

Parasites manipulate the organisms they live off to suit their needs, sometimes in drastic ways. When under the spell of a parasite, some plants undergo such extensive changes that they are described as “zombies”. They stop reproducing and serve only as a habitat and host for the parasitic pathogens.

Until now, there’s been little understanding of how this happens on a molecular and mechanistic level.