Menu

Blog

Page 7218

Oct 1, 2019

Arts at CERN announces two open calls and the arrival of residency winners

Posted by in categories: innovation, particle physics

Geneva. Arts at CERN announces two open calls for art residencies – Collide Geneva/Dance and Accelerate Finland – and the arrival of the winners of Collide International, Rosa Menkman, and Collide Pro Helvetia, Christina Hemauer and Roman Keller. The art residency programmes are based on the particle physics laboratory’s cultural strategy, which aims to foster networks between local and international organisations through platforms that engage art and science.

“Arts at CERN plays an important role in augmenting the interest seen in the interaction of the arts and sciences in recent years. By inviting artists and scientists to have a dialogue in the Laboratory, the programme shows how the two fields impact one another. I am proud to announce new opportunities for participation, and to welcome artists-in-residence this autumn,” says Mónica Bello, head of Arts at CERN.

For the sixth Collide Geneva residency, Arts at CERN, the Republic and Canton of Geneva and the City of Geneva have joined forces. The three-month fully funded residency award will be granted to a Geneva-based artist or artist collective working in the field of dance. The winner will have the opportunity to carry out their research at CERN and work together with particle physicists, engineers and IT professionals. Collide Geneva/Dance encourages applications from dance artists inspired by scientific ideas or technological concepts, with innovative approaches in their artistic expression.

Oct 1, 2019

AI Can Diagnose Like Doctors. But for Continued Progress, Research Standards Must Improve

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, health, robotics/AI

The trawl found 20,500 articles tackling the topic, but shockingly, less than 1 percent of them were scientifically robust enough to be confident in their claims, say the authors. Of those, only 25 tested their deep learning models on unseen data, and only 14 actually compared performance with health professionals on the same test sample.

Nonetheless, when the researchers pooled the data from the 14 most rigorous studies, they found the deep learning systems correctly detected disease in 87 percent of cases, compared to 86 percent for healthcare professionals. They also did well on the equally important metric of excluding patients who don’t have a particular disease, getting it right 93 percent of the time compared to 91 percent for humans.

Ultimately, then, the results of the review are broadly positive for AI, but damning of the hype that has built up around the technology and the research practices of most of those trying to apply it to medical diagnosis.

Oct 1, 2019

In Trying to Live Forever, Tech Leaders Aren’t Helping Anyone but Themselves

Posted by in category: life extension

Silicon Valley takes on the quest for immortality.

Oct 1, 2019

Life on Mars could be found within two years but world is ‘not prepared’, NASA’s chief scientist says

Posted by in category: alien life

Leading astronomer says discovery will open up ‘whole new line of thinking’.

Oct 1, 2019

How a Flock of Drones Developed Collective Intelligence

Posted by in category: drones

Just like groups of birds or insects, these drones organize themselves into cohesive groups—a so-called “emergent” property of their individual actions.

Oct 1, 2019

Non-abelian Aharonov-Bohm experiment done at long last

Posted by in categories: computing, information science, particle physics, quantum physics

For the first time, physicists in the US have confirmed a decades-old theory regarding the breaking of time-reversal symmetry in gauge fields. Marin Soljacic at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an international team of researchers have made this first demonstration of the “non-Abelian Aharonov-Bohm effect” in two optics experiments. With improvements, their techniques could find use in optoelectronics and fault-tolerant quantum computers.

First emerging in Maxwell’s famous equations for classical electrodynamics, a gauge theory is a description of the physics of fields. Gauge theories have since become an important part of physicists’ descriptions of the dynamics of elementary particles – notably the theory of quantum electrodynamics.

A salient feature of a gauge theory is that the physics it describes does not change when certain transformations are made to the underlying equations describing the system. An example is the addition of a constant scalar potential or a “curl-free” vector potential to Maxwell’s equations. Mathematically, this does not change the electric and magnetic fields that act on a charged particle such as an electron – and therefore the behaviour of the electron – so Maxwell’s theory is gauge invariant.

Oct 1, 2019

Are You Developing Skills That Won’t Be Automated?

Posted by in categories: education, employment, robotics/AI, transportation

The jobs that are likely to be automated are repetitive and routine. They range from reading X-rays (human radiologists may soon have much more limited roles), to truck driving, to stocking a warehouse. While much has been written about the sorts of jobs that are likely to be eliminated, another perspective that has not been examined in as much detail is to ask not which jobs will be eliminated but rather which aspects of surviving jobs will be replaced by machines.


The future of work looks grim for many people. A recent study estimated that 10% of U.S. jobs would be automated this year, and another estimates that close to half of all U.S. jobs may be automated in the next decade. The jobs that are likely to be automated are repetitive and routine. They range from reading X-rays, to truck driving, to stocking a warehouse. In this context, employers say that they’re seeking candidates who have other sorts of “soft skills,” such as being able to learn adaptively, to make good decisions, and to work well with others. These sought-after abilities, of course, fit perfectly with the sorts of things that people can do well, but are and will continue to be difficult to automate. All of this suggests that our educational systems should concentrate not simply on how people interact with technology (e.g., by teaching students to code), but also how they can do the things that technology will not be doing soon. These are the skills that are hardest to understand and systematize, and the skills that give — and will continue to give —humans an edge over robots.

Oct 1, 2019

California researchers develop drug cocktail that reverses aging — results are ‘remarkably promising’

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

???? Respect AEWR & r.p.berry


Scientists find promising results in trial to reverse biological aging.

Oct 1, 2019

Here’s how blockchain could stop corrupt officials from stealing school lunches

Posted by in categories: bitcoin, computing, economics, governance, security

The World Economic Forum has partnered with the Inter-American Development Bank and the Colombian Inspector General’s Office to explore how distributed ledger technology can improve public transparency and integrity in school meal procurement.

The project, which is taking place this year, is multi-faceted and includes a software implementation with blockchain technology for the selection of school food vendors. It is co-designed with several partners from academia, the IT industry, and the non-profit world, including economists and computer scientists from the blockchain economics and governance consulting firm Prysm Group, the National University of Colombia, U.C. Berkeley, and the blockchain security firm Quantstamp.

Oct 1, 2019

This new wearable tech is closing the gap between humans and cyborgs

Posted by in categories: computing, cyborgs, engineering, wearables

A professor at the University of Chicago believes he is on his way to creating a wearable for market that will manipulate your muscles with electrical impulses to cause you to move involuntarily so you can perform a physical task you otherwise didn’t know how to do, like playing a musical instrument or operating machinery.

Dr. Pedro Lopes, who heads the Human Computer Integration lab at the university, is all about integrating humans and computers, closing the gap between human and machine. His team, which focuses on engineering the next generation of wearable and haptic devices, is exploring the endless possibilities if wearables could intentionally share parts of our body for input and output, allowing computers to be more directly interwoven in our bodily senses and actuators.

Lopes’ vision: a wearable EMS device that would look like a sleeve and be able to send electrical impulses in the right timing and in the right fashion to make a user’s muscles move involuntarily to perform a physical task. EMS stands for electrical muscle stimulation.