Lifeboat Foundation

We could see a day when Amazon and Books-A-Million latest top book sales are 100% comprised of AI Authors.

Sophisticated algorithms can now predict the bestseller lists, paving the way for artificial intelligence to take over entirely.

“[Using DNA,] you could fit all the knowledge in the whole world inside the trunk of your car,” Twist Bioscience CEO Emily Leproust told TechCrunch.

Twist Bioscience, a startup making and using synthetic DNA to store digital data, just struck a contract with Microsoft and the University of Washington to encode vast amounts of information on synthetic genes.

Big data means business and the company able to gather a lot of it is very valuable to investors and stockholders. But that data needs to be stored somewhere and can cost a lot for the upkeep.

Continue reading “Genetics startup Twist Bioscience is working with Microsoft to store the world’s data in DNA” »

Supercomputer facing problems?

In the world of High Performance Computing (HPC), supercomputers represent the peak of capability, with performance measured in petaFLOPs (10¹⁵ operations per second). They play a key role in climate research, drug research, oil and gas exploration, cryptanalysis, and nuclear weapons development. But after decades of steady improvement, changes are coming as old technologies start to run into fundamental problems.

When you’re talking about supercomputers, a good place to start is the TOP500 list. Published twice a year, it ranks the world’s fastest machines based on their performance on the Linpack benchmark, which solves a dense system of linear equations using double precision (64 bit) arithmetic.

Looking down the list, you soon run into some numbers that boggle the mind. The Tianhe-2 (Milky Way-2), a system deployed at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzho, China, is the number one system as of November 2015, a position it’s held since 2013. Running Linpack, it clocks in at 33.86 × 10¹⁵ floating point operations per second (33.86 PFLOPS).

Good article overall highlighting the gaps in AI talent. I do know that some of the best AI SMEs in the US all have worked somewhere in their careers at the US National Labs because many us had to build “real time” systems that leveraged complex algorithms to self-monitor conditions and react independently under certain conditions arise and in some cases we leveraged the super computer to prove theories as well. I suggest locate where some of these folks exist because you will find your talent pool.

Artificial Intelligence is the field where jobs continue to grow, provided you have the desired skill sets

Diksha Gupta, Techgig.com

Continue reading “Want a career in artificial intelligence? Here’s a guide” »

Nice; taking design and manufacturing to new levels.

Advanced materials are increasingly embodying counterintuitive properties, such as extreme strength and super lightness, while additive manufacturing and other new technologies are vastly improving the ability to fashion these novel materials into shapes that would previously have been extremely costly or even impossible to create. Generating new designs that fully exploit these properties, however, has proven extremely challenging. Conventional design technologies, representations, and algorithms are inherently constrained by outdated presumptions about material properties and manufacturing methods. As a result, today’s design technologies are simply not able to bring to fruition the enormous level of physical detail and complexity made possible with cutting-edge manufacturing capabilities and materials.

To address this mismatch, DARPA today announced its TRAnsformative DESign (TRADES) program. TRADES is a fundamental research effort to develop new mathematics and algorithms that can more fully take advantage of the almost boundless design space that has been enabled by new materials and fabrication methods.

“The structural and functional complexities introduced by today’s advanced materials and manufacturing methods have exceeded our capacity to simultaneously optimize all the variables involved,” said Jan Vandenbrande, DARPA program manager. “We have reached the fundamental limits of what our computer-aided design tools and processes can handle, and need revolutionary new tools that can take requirements from a human designer and propose radically new concepts, shapes and structures that would likely never be conceived by even our best design programs today, much less by a human alone.”

Continue reading “New Tools for Human-Machine Collaborative Design” »

A team of computer scientists from the University of Southern California (USC) have been successful in developing a new method to alleviate wildlife poaching. The National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the project that has created a model for ‘green security games’.

This model is based on game theory to safeguard wildlife from poachers. Game theory involves predicting the actions of enemy using mathematical equations and subsequently formulating the best possible restrain moves. This model will enable more efficient patrolling of parks and wildlife by park rangers.

An artificial intelligence (AI) application, known as Protection Assistant for Wildlife Sanctuary (PAWS) was developed by Fei Fang, a Ph.D. candidate in the computer science department at USC and Milind Tambe, a professor of computer science and systems engineering at USC, in 2013. The team has since then spent a couple of years to test the effectiveness of the application in Uganda and Malaysia.

Continue reading “AI Helps Scientists Develop Anti-Poaching System” »

What the bleep is an exocortex and why should we care?

Continue reading “Thinking Outside the Brain – Why We Need to Build a Decentralized Exocortex” »

Interesting — data compression algorithm can be applied to detect Quantum Entanglement.

The next time you archive some files and compress them, you might think about the process a little differently. Researchers at the National University of Singapore have discovered a common compression algorithm can be used to detect quantum entanglement. What makes this discovery so interesting is that it does not rely on heavily on an assumption that the measured particles are independent and identically distributed.

Continue reading “Data Compression Used to Detect Quantum Entanglement” »

Using a weird phenomenon in which particles of light seem to travel at faster-than-light speeds, scientists have shown that waves of light can seem to travel backward in time.

The new experiment also shows other bizarre effects of light, such as pairs of images forming and annihilating each other.

Taken together, the results finally prove a century-old prediction made by British scientist and polymath Lord Rayleigh. The phenomenon, called time reversal, could allow researchers to develop ultra-high-speed cameras that can peer around corners and see through walls. [In Images: The World’s 11 Most Beautiful Equations].