Lifeboat Foundation

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A new paper offers a broad challenge to a certain kind of ‘grand theory’ about the brain. According to the authors, Federico E. Turkheimer and colleagues, it is problematic to build models of brain function that rely on ‘strong emergence’.

Two popular theories, the Free Energy Principle aka Bayesian Brain and the Integrated Information Theory model, are singled out as examples of strong emergence-based work.

Continue reading “How Emergent is the Brain?” »

AI farms are well suited to impoverished regions like Guizhou, where land and labor are cheap and the climate temperate enough to enable the running of large machines without expensive cooling systems. It takes only two days to train workers like Yin in basic AI tagging, or a week for the more complicated task of labeling 3D pictures.

A battle for AI supremacy is being fought one algorithm at a time.

OTTAWA — A Chinese telecommunication company secretly diverted Canadian internet traffic to China, particularly from Rogers subscribers in the Ottawa area, says an Israeli cybersecurity specialist.

The 2016 incident involved the surreptitious rerouting of the internet data of Rogers customers in and around Canada’s capital by China Telecom, a state-owned internet service provider that has two legally operating “points of presence” on Canadian soil, said Yuval Shavitt, an electrical-engineering expert at Tel Aviv University.

Shavitt told The Canadian Press that the China Telecom example should serve as a caution to the Canadian government not to do business with another Chinese telecommunications giant: Huawei Technologies, which is vying to build Canada’s next-generation 5G wireless communications networks.

Continue reading “Israeli cyberexpert detects China hack in Ottawa, warns against using Huawei 5G” »

The University of Michigan has come up with a temperature sensing “computer” measuring just 0.3mm — so small it beats the one developed by IBM.

It is about a tenth the size of IBM’s former record-setter, and so sensitive that its transmission LED could instigate currents in its circuits.

The term “computer” is used loosely by the university, as it continues to question what exactly a computer is. It does have a processor, but unlike a full-sized computer, it loses all data when it loses power.

Continue reading “The world’s smallest computer is so tiny that it makes a grain of rice look gigantic” »

Rather than building objects layer by layer, the printer creates whole structures by projecting light into a resin that solidifies. Rather than building objects layer by layer, the method creates whole structures by projecting images onto a resin that solidifies.

How it works, why it’s so powerful, and where it’s likely to be most useful first.

Now, this is awesome. A stationary robot, two mobile robots, and a human cooperating to perform a task. The humanoid robot also interprets human gestures and obeys those commands.

More information: http://www.co4robots.eu/

Continue reading “Co4Robots — Milestone 2 Demonstrator” »

Johnny Matheny demonstrates how a modular prosthetic limb works during DARPA Demo Day 2016 at the Pentagon, May 11, 2016. Matheny is a test subject with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab⁸.