Lifeboat Foundation

When we think of human trafficking, we often think about the despondent faces of women and children who live in slums all over the world. What if human trafficking is much closer to home than we think? In 2019, Markie Dell, stood on the TEDx stage to recount her experience of being a domestic human trafficking victim. She was an awkward teenager who was groomed by a girl that she befriended at a birthday party. She was subsequently kidnapped, drugged, sexually violated, intimidated at gunpoint into dancing in strip clubs for an entire year.

She didn’t know that she was a human trafficking victim until a police officer handed her a book called, “Pimpology”. Then, she knew that she was being human trafficked.

Continue reading “AI Is Helping Us Combat The Economic Problem Of Human Trafficking” »

The 2019 Olympus Global Image of the Year honorees find beauty under the microscope.

On Sunday (April 12), Virgin Orbit completed the final test of its development program, sending its carrier plane, Cosmic Girl, aloft over the Southern California desert with an orbital rocket beneath its wing.

I think Wolfram has found the right path forward.

If anyone wants to learn about the future of artificial intelligence and the rise of super-intelligent machines here is Billionaire rocket scientist businessman Elon Musk’s favorite book of the year written by MIT math Professor Max Tegmark at the Future of Life Institute. The book Life 3.0 is presented in this free audio-book format on YouTube and is a 7 hour video talking about how we will become a Libertarian Utopia soon thanks to advances in technology.

Researchers have used the gene-editing technique CRISPR to delete a segment of DNA associated with autism and schizophrenia from mouse brain cells.

The technique has only proven effective in mice so far but may eventually be suitable for treating brain conditions in people, says Xiao-hong Lu, assistant professor of pharmacology and neuroscience at Louisiana State University Health in Shreveport.

Unlike techniques used to manipulate DNA in the mouse brain, CRISPR can be applied to people. He says, “We need a tool to help us to carry the genetic elements into the [human] brain.”

Circa 2017

What’s small, fast, and is launched from the bottom of a fighter jet? Not missiles, but a swarm of drones.

U.S. military officials have announced that they’ve carried out their largest ever test of a drone swarm released from fighter jets in flight. In the trials, three F/A-18 Super Hornets released 103 Perdix drones, which then communicated with each other and went about performing a series of formation flying exercises that mimic a surveillance mission.

Continue reading “A 100-Drone Swarm, Dropped from Jets, Plans Its Own Moves” »

It could be the best stealth fighter ever?

By Sebastien Roblin

As robots make their way into a variety of environments and start interacting with humans on a regular basis, they should be able to communicate with users as effectively as possible. Over the past decade or so, researchers worldwide have thus been developing machine learning-based models and other computational techniques that could enhance human-robot communications.

One way to improve how robots communicate with human users is by training them to express basic emotions, such as sadness, happiness, fear and anger. The ability to express emotions would ultimately allow robots to convey messages more effectively, in ways that are aligned with a given situation.

Researchers at the University of Hamburg in Germany have recently developed a machine learning-based method to teach robots how to convey what have previously been defined as the seven universal emotions, namely anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise and a neutral state. In their paper, pre-published on arXiv, they applied and tested their technique on a humanoid robot called iCub.