Lifeboat Foundation

Physicists at the University of Regensburg have choreographed the shift of a quantized electronic energy level with atomic oscillations faster than a trillionth of a second.

Throwing a ball into the air, one can transfer arbitrary energy to the ball such that it flies higher or lower. One of the oddities of quantum physics is that particles, e.g., electrons, can often only take on quantized energy values—as if the ball was leaping between specific heights, like steps of a ladder, rather than flying continuously.

Qubits and quantum computers as well as light-emitting quantum dots (Nobel Prize 2023) make use of this principle. However, electronic energy levels can be shifted by collisions with other electrons or atoms. Processes in the quantum world usually take place on atomic scales and are also incredibly fast.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is teaming up with Larry Ellison’s Oracle to help farms plan and predict their agricultural output using an AI tool.

Larry Ellison said on Oracle’s earnings call on Monday that it’s collaborating with Musk and SpaceX to create the AI-powered mapping application for governments. The tool creates a map of a country’s farms and shows what each of them is growing.

The Oracle executive chairman said the tool could help farms assess the steps needed to increase their output, and whether fields had enough water and nitrogen.

Ultimately, every problem in the constantly evolving IT software stack becomes a database problem, which is why there are 418 different databases and datastores in the DB Engines rankings and there are really only a handful of commercially viable operating systems. But what if the operating system is the problem?

We are so used to thinking of the operating system as the foundation of the system that this kind of talk seems more weird than it does heresy, but make no mistake. When Michael Stonebraker and Matei Zaharia and a team of techies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University are involved in creating a new operating system, it is definitely going to be heresy.

Stonebraker says that the spark for the idea for DBOS, which is short for database operating system, came when he was listening to a talk by Zacharia, who among other things was the creator of the Spark in-memory database while at the AMPLab at the University of California Berkeley and the co-founder and chief technology officer of Databricks, which has commercialized Spark.

The patch might offer a non-invasive communication tool for people who cannot speak due to vocal cord problems.

GaussianImage.

1000 FPS Image Representation and Compression by 2D Gaussian Splatting.

Implicit neural representations (INRs) recently achieved great success in image representation and compression, offering high visual quality and fast rendering speeds with…

Continue reading “Paper page — GaussianImage: 1000 FPS Image Representation and Compression by 2D Gaussian Splatting” »

There’s a lot to like about brain-computer interfaces, those sci-fi-sounding devices that jack into your skull and turn neural signals into software commands. Experimental BCIs help paralyzed people communicate, use the internet, and move prosthetic limbs. In recent years, the devices have even gone wireless. If mind-reading computers become part of everyday life, we’ll need doctors to install the tiny electrodes and transmitters that make them work. So if you have steady hands and don’t mind a little blood, being a BCI surgeon might be a job for you.

Shahram Majidi, a neurosurgeon at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, began operating in clinical trials for a BCI called the Stentrode in 2022. (That’s “stent” as in a tube that often sits inside a vein or artery.) Here he talks about a not-too-distant future where he’s performing hundreds of similar procedures a year.

Brain-computer interfaces have been around for a few decades, and there are different kinds of implants now. Some have electrodes attached to your brain with wires sticking out of your head and connecting to a computer. I think that’s great as a proof of concept, but it requires an engineer sitting there and a big computer next to you all the time. You can’t just use it in your bedroom. The beauty of a BCI like the Stentrode, which is what I’ve worked with, is that nothing is sticking out of your brain. The electrodes are in blood vessels next to the brain, and you get there by going through the patient’s jugular. The receiver is underneath the skin in their chest and connected to a device that decodes the brain signals via Bluetooth. I think that’s the future.

A team of researchers from Japan has made it possible for humans to talk to each other in a robotic form. And they claim that it feels exactly like talking with real people.

They made a half-humanoid called ‘Yui’, which would be controlled by a real person wearing virtual reality goggles and a microphone headset. These gadgets let them see and hear what Yui sees and hears and even copy their facial expressions and voice.

There is a lot we can learn about social media’s unregulated evolution over the past decade that directly applies to AI companies and technologies. These lessons can help us avoid making the same mistakes with AI that we did with social media.

In particular, five fundamental attributes of social media have harmed society. AI also has those attributes. Note that they are not intrinsically evil. They are all double-edged swords, with the potential to do either good or ill. The danger comes from who wields the sword, and in what direction it is swung. This has been true for social media, and it will similarly hold true for AI. In both cases, the solution lies in limits on the technology’s use.

The role advertising plays in the internet arose more by accident than anything else. When commercialization first came to the internet, there was no easy way for users to make micropayments to do things like viewing a web page. Moreover, users were accustomed to free access and wouldn’t accept subscription models for services. Advertising was the obvious business model, if never the best one. And it’s the model that social media also relies on, which leads it to prioritize engagement over anything else.

Fly, goat, fly! A new AI agent from Google DeepMind can play different games, including ones it has never seen before such as Goat Simulator 3, a fun action game with exaggerated physics. Researchers were able to get it to follow text commands to play seven different games and move around in three different 3D research environments. It’s a step toward more generalized AI that can transfer skills across multiple environments.

Google DeepMind has had huge success developing game-playing AI systems. Its system AlphaGo, which beat top professional player Lee Sedol at the game Go in 2016, was a major milestone that showed the power of deep learning. But unlike earlier game-playing AI systems, which mastered only one game or could only follow single goals or commands, this new agent is able to play a variety of different games, including Valheim and No Man’s Sky. It’s called SIMA, an acronym for “scalable, instructable, multiworld agent.”