Lifeboat Foundation

Global Manufacturing Companies Trust LandingLens to Enhance Their Existing Visual Inspection Systems with AI

PALO ALTO, Calif. – October 21, 2020 – Landing AI, a company that empowers customers to harness the business value of AI by providing enablement tools and transformation programs, today unveiled LandingLens, an end-to-end visual inspection platform specifically designed to help manufacturers build, deploy, and scale AI-powered visual inspection solutions.

Visual inspection is a widely used method in manufacturing for processes like defect identification and assembly verification. While this has generally been performed by human workers and traditional rule-based machine vision, more and more companies are turning to AI to automate and enhance their visual inspection operations given the accuracy, flexibility and low cost that the technology brings.

It’s been almost 20 years since the Concorde was retired, putting an end to commercial supersonic flight for the very rich. But out in Colorado, the startup Boom Technology has raised $160 million in its quest to build a replacement, one that should be cheaper, more comfortable and able to fly more routes. Here’s an exclusive first look at Boom’s prototype test plane, the XB-1.

#HelloWorld #Technology #Aviation

Continue reading “The First Look at Boom’s Supersonic Plane” »

Negotiations are a central part of many human interactions, ranging from business discussions and legal proceedings to conversations with vendors at local markets. Researchers specialized in economics, psychology, and more recently, computer science have conducted several studies aimed at better understanding how humans negotiate with one another in the hope of shedding light on some of the dynamics of human decision-making and enabling the development of machines that can replicate these dynamics.

A research team at the University of Southern California has been exploring the possibility of building automated systems that can negotiate with humans. In a paper pre-published on arXiv and set to be presented at the IJCAI conference, they presented a virtual agent based on a framework called IAGO (Interactive Arbitration Guide Online), which can negotiate with humans in a three-round negotiation task. This virtual agent, called Pilot, is one of the finalists of the IJCAI conference’s global negotiation challenge (ANAC).

“Recently, researchers realized the potential applications of building automated systems that can negotiate with humans,” Kushal Chawla, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “These intelligent assistants can be really useful to augment current techniques for training people to have stronger social skills. Examples include teaching business students to negotiate for successful deals or lawyers to accurately assess settlement rates in legal proceedings.”

The pandemic has seen the number of remote workers swell. Now Germany says it wants to make sure new business models work for everyone.

SpaceX won a $2 million contract from the SpEC consortium to study ways to provide weather data to the U.S. Space Force.

WASHINGTON — SpaceX is looking at ways it could provide weather data to the U.S. military. The company is working under a $2 million six-month study contract from the U.S. Space Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center.

Charlotte Gerhart, chief of the Space and Missile Systems Center Production Corps Low Earth Orbit Division, said in a statement to SpaceNews that SpaceX received the contract in July from SMC’s Space Enterprise Consortium.

Continue reading “SpaceX to explore ways to provide weather data to U.S. military” »

Elons fears are real about AI.

Sign up to Morning Brew for free today here: http://cen.yt/morningbrewcoldfusion2

Continue reading “From Essays to Coding, This New A.I. Can Write Anything” »

If the surge in digital finance is universal, the business models behind it are not. In Latin America look out for digital banks and e-commerce pioneers such as Nubank and MercadoLibre, owner of Mercado Pago. In South-East Asia Grab and Gojek, two ride-hailing services, are becoming “super-apps” with financial arms. Fintech firms now provide the majority of consumer loans in Sweden. In America credit-card firms such as Visa (the world’s most valuable financial firm), digital-finance giants such as PayPal (the sixth) and the big banks both co-operate and compete. Tech giants such as Apple and Alphabet are dipping their toes in, tempted by the financial industry’s $1.5trn global pool of profits.

A blockbuster listing shows how fintech is revolutionising finance.

International Business Machines, still the legal name of century-plus-old IBM, has managed over the years to pull off a dubious feat. Despite selling goods and services in one of the most dynamic industries in the world, the IT sector the company helped create, it has managed to avoid growing.

The company that was synonymous with mainframes, that dominated the early days of the personal computer (a “PC” once meant a device that ran software built to IBM’s technical standards), and that reinvented itself as a tech-consulting goliath, lagged while upstarts and a few of its old competitors zoomed past it.

What IBM excelled at more often was marketing a version of its aspirational self. Its consultants would advise urban planners on how to create “smart cities.” Its command of artificial intelligence, packaged into a software offering whose name evoked its founding family, would cure cancer. Its CEO would wow the Davos set with cleverly articulated visions of how corporations could help fix the ills of society.

Continue reading “IBM finally gets rid of some business to focus on the one that matters” »

The electric-car maker could benefit from improving profitability on vehicle sales and huge growth in its nascent energy business.