Lifeboat Foundation

The OpenAI Gym includes a number of games and challenges for AIs to try and master.

Researchers at Waseda University in Tokyo have created a way to realistically colorize black-and-white photos without any human intervention for the first time ever. The team’s approach is based on convolutional neural networks — a type of machine learning originally inspired by the visual cortex of a cat.

Bill Gates on personalized learning, AI in education.

The rise of smartphones has transformed the way students communicate and entertain themselves. But the classrooms they spend so much of their time in remain stubbornly resistant to transformation. On one hand, technology has long had a home in classrooms — I learned to type on an Apple IIe in the late 1980s. But for most schools, the approach to teaching remains stubbornly one-size-fits-all: a single teacher delivering the same message to a group of about 30 students, regardless of their individual progress.

Bill Gates is working to change all that. Through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Microsoft’s co-founder and chairman has invested more than $240 million to date in a developing field known as “personalized learning.” It’s a diffuse set of initiatives, led mostly by private companies, to develop software that creates individual lesson plans for students based on their performance, coaching them through trouble spots until they have mastered the subject at hand. Teachers still play a central role in the classroom, but they do less lecturing and more one-on-one coaching.

Continue reading “Can AI fix education? We asked Bill Gates” »

You need multiple clones of yourself as a humanoid robots created from your own 3D printer; we may be well on our way with this announcement.

An unusual egg-shaped booth in Tallinn’s Seaplane Harbour is where a small team of Estonian engineers is testing its new invention.

Continue reading “Estonian firm prints 3D customised model of you” »

Wouldn’t be surprised.

The profession could be putting itself out of work.

We investigate how the bot situation is bound to worsen, and why Nike has the only viable answer right now.

Tehran’s Robocup shows the country ready to lead the way in mobile robotics, in contrast to the dated images and narratives of Iran’s past.

Continue reading “March of Iran’s mobile bots on display at Tehran Robocup” »

Tomorrow’s cars will be all-electric, self-driving, connected to high-speed communications networks … and free.

And probably Chinese.

That, at least, is the vision of Jia Yueting, a billionaire entrepreneur and one of a new breed of Chinese who see their technology expertise re-engineering the automobile industry, and usurping Tesla Motors, a U.S. pioneer in premium electric vehicle (EV) making.

Continue reading “Chinese Billionaire Taking on Tesla With Cars He Hopes One Day Will Be Free” »

DARPA wants to bring autonomy and agility to military transportation.