Lifeboat Foundation

Trade Secretary Ramon Lopez said the DTI would soon launch an initiative to train the country’s IT and engineering graduates to create AI solutions for the global marketplace.

Instead of fearing artificial intelligence (AI), a supposed threat to the country’s thriving business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, the Philippines can position itself as a global AI hub, Trade Secretary Ramon Lopez said.

In a recent chance interview, Lopez said the Department of Trade and Industry would soon launch an initiative to train the country’s IT and engineering graduates to create AI solutions for the global marketplace.

Continue reading “DTI: PH can become artificial intelligence powerhouse” »

Not sure how to post only a segment, but I found the first segment of this video interesting on the discussion of regulatory oversight of Facebook.

Facebook looks to the government for help censoring viewpoints, the old guard Democrats clash with the socialists, and we check the mailbag!

Continue reading “Big Brother Meets Big Tech | Ep. 753” »

Scientists called for a bigger say over research funding under a stifling bureaucratic application system. Yuan Zhiming, an agricultural scientist from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Wuhan, said he spent so much time filling out funding applications that he did not have time for any research. Senior officials responded that they understood the need to speed up research for China to transform itself into an innovation powerhouse. Minister of Science and Technology Wang Zhigang said the government would overhaul funding management to give researchers more incentives.

The country has to address a lot of shortcomings, but when it sets course to remedy them and commits a bigger share of resources, it could become a leading scientific power within a decade.

PARIS (AP) — The French government has outlined measures to ensure early diagnostic testing for young children with autism and help for them going to school.

In a statement following a Cabinet meeting Monday, the government promised that expenses linked to diagnostic testing will be fully reimbursed.

Measures include opening specific classes at preschools and elementary schools, and putting in place teacher and medical staff training and research to better understand autism, a neurodevelopmental disorder.

It was a way for machines to see the world around them, recognize sounds and even understand natural language. But scientists had spent more than 50 years working on the concept of neural networks, and machines couldn’t really do any of that.

Backed by the Canadian government, Dr. Hinton, a computer science professor at the University of Toronto, organized a new research community with several academics who also tackled the concept. They included Yann LeCun, a professor at New York University, and Yoshua Bengio at the University of Montreal.

On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest society of computing professionals, announced that Drs. Hinton, LeCun and Bengio had won this year’s Turing Award for their work on neural networks. The Turing Award, which was introduced in 1966, is often called the Nobel Prize of computing, and it includes a $1 million prize, which the three scientists will share.

Continue reading “Turing Award Won by 3 Pioneers in Artificial Intelligence” »

Lithium alters how we think by changing the levels of serotonin and norepinephrine secreted by our endocrine system. But the government is polluting our environment with the stuff.

SILVER SPRING, Md. — Blue Origin has studied repurposing upper stages of its future New Glenn launch vehicle to serve as habitats or for other applications as part of a series of NASA-funded commercialization studies.

Brett Alexander, vice president of government sales and strategy at Blue Origin, said the company looked at ways it could make use of the second stage of New Glenn rather than simply deorbiting the stage at the end of each launch, but emphasized the company currently had no firm plans to reuse those stages at this time.

That study was part of a series of study contracts awarded by NASA last August to study future concepts to support commercial human spaceflight in low Earth orbit. “We focused there on the reuse of the second stage of New Glenn and what we might be able to do with that volume and capacity once we’re on orbit,” he said during a panel discussion about low Earth orbit commercialization at the American Astronautical Society’s Goddard Memorial Symposium here March 20.

Continue reading “Blue Origin studying repurposing of New Glenn upper stages” »

As the World Wide Web marks its 30th birthday on Tuesday, public discourse is dominated by alarm about Big Tech, data privacy and viral disinformation. Tech executives have been called to testify before Congress, a popular campaign dissuaded Amazon from opening a second headquarters in New York and the United Kingdom is going after social media companies that it calls “digital gangsters.” Implicit in this tech-lash is nostalgia for a more innocent online era.

Let’s not let artificial intelligence put society on autopilot.

The last two decades have seen a great upswing in commercial space endeavors with hundreds of new companies formed and a few prominent billionaires entering the fray. This is all good, but it remains devilishly hard to make money in space without tapping into government space markets. Nevertheless, I’m a firm believer that the commercialization of space is absolutely essential for the growth of the space economy and achieving all of the goals we espouse for human activities in space.

So, what do I mean by commercial space? This has been a great topic of debate ever since NASA initiated the commercial cargo and commercial crew programs. There are many definitions and which is appropriate depends on the context. The real distinction is between the public sector and the private sector. Any given space activity can include a mixture of both elements. The purest form of commercial activity takes place entirely within the private sector. It is performed by private-sector companies for the benefit of private-sector customers using private-sector capital. Something like Direct TV would be an example.

At the other end of the spectrum is a pure public-sector activity where the activity is performed entirely by public-sector agencies using public-sector employees, entirely funded by public funds for a public purpose. An example would be SLS, but even it is not purely public as several private sector companies are employed. In between are all manner of hybrids involving a mix of investment funds, executing entities and customers.

Continue reading “Op-ed” »