Lifeboat Foundation

Some of the best circuits to drive AI in the future may be analog, not digital, and research teams around the world are increasingly developing new devices to support such analog AI.

The most basic computation in the deep neural networks driving the current explosion in AI is the multiply-accumulate (MAC) operation. Deep neural networks are composed of layers of artificial neurons, and in MAC operations, the output of each one of these layers is multiplied by the values of the strengths or “weights” of their connections to the next layer, which then sums up these contributions.

Modern computers have digital components devoted to MAC operations, but analog circuits theoretically can perform these computations for orders of magnitude less energy. This strategy—known as analog AI, compute-in-memory or processing-in-memory—often performs these multiply-accumulate operations using non-volatile memory devices such as flash, magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM), resistive RAM (RRAM), phase-change memory (PCM) and even more esoteric technologies.

The ultimate cooking show experience.

A professor has created Taste the TV (TTTV), a system of chemicals and rolling plastic that lets you lick a screen to taste what it’s displaying. The mind reels with the endless possibilities of this kind of tech.

Continue reading “Take a look at this delicious lickable screen to see the future we knew was coming” »

Even as commercial spaceflight company Axiom Space prepares to launch the first fully private crew to the International Space Station early next year, its engineers are also developing in-house spacesuits.

Texas-based Axiom teased the spacesuits in a tweet posted on Nov. 23. While the suits fit into Axiom’s own long-term plans of creating private space stations that can host paid research missions, the company also hopes to provide the suits to NASA as the space agency prepares for crewed Artemis program launches to the moon.

Video calling has become a critical service enabling remote work and learning from home. And for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing community, it can also be a lifeline — but not everyone is able to communicate using sign language, the primary language of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. That’s why we’re collaborating with ZP Better Together, LLC, a leading provider of video interpreting and communication solutions for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, to bring Video Relay Services (VRS) to the Meta Portal family of video-calling devices. With VRS, a relatively new form of telecommunication service, members of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing community can communicate in real time with hearing people using a sign language interpreter. If you’re Deaf or Hard of Hearing, you can even apply to receive a Portal for free at portal.zpvrs.com.

Machinia exists in the future when the world of robots is the norm. And, as has been highlighted in other posts, the world of the “extraordinary tomorrow” begins with the “unexceptional today.” #clean, #university

SAIT has started using autonomous robots to clean the floors at its main campus.

The robots are from Brain Corp, an artificial intelligence (AI) company, and contracted to SAIT for use through Calgary-based Bee Clean, Canada’s largest janitorial services provider.

Continue reading “SAIT using autonomous robots to clean main campus” »

BOSTON (AP) — A Harvard University professor charged with hiding his ties to a Chinese-run recruitment program was found guilty on all counts Tuesday.

Revolutionary new electronic components can be adapted to perform very different tasks – a technology perfectly suited for artificial intelligence.

Normally, computer chips consist of electronic components that always do the same thing. In the future, however, more flexibility will be possible: New types of adaptive transistors can be dynamically switched during run-time to perform different logical tasks. This fundamentally changes the possibilities of chip design and opens up completely new opportunities in the field of artificial intelligence, neural networks or even logic that works with more values than just 0 and 1.

In order to achieve this, scientists at TU Wien (Vienna) did not rely on the usual silicon technology, but on germanium. This was a success: The most flexible transistor in the world has now been produced using germanium. It has been presented in the journal ACS Nano. The special properties of germanium and the use of dedicated program gate electrodes made it possible to create a prototype for a new component that may usher in a new era of chip technology.

as well as the defense industrial base, called the Joint University Microelectronics Program 2.0 or JUMP 2.0. The program will support high-risk, high-payoff research that addresses existing and emerging challenges in information and communication technologies (ICT). JUMP 2.0 builds on the agency’s history of supporting long-term, pathfinding university research through public-private partnerships that drive disruption in #microelectronics. https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2021-12-22

Two decades after ‘The Matrix,’ technologies have emerged that make us question what is real—in ways stranger, if less sinister, than the movie imagined.