Lifeboat Foundation

HONG KONG (Reuters) — Like innumerable children with imaginations fired by animated films, Hong Kong product and graphic designer Ricky Ma grew up watching cartoons featuring the adventures of robots, and dreamt of building his own one day.

Unlike most of the others, however, Ma has realized his childhood dream at the age of 42, by successfully constructing a life-sized robot from scratch on the balcony of his home.

Continue reading “A man in China has built a robot that looks just like Scarlett Johansson” »

The machine overlords of the future may now, if it pleases them, eliminate all black and white imagery from the history of their meat-based former masters. All they’ll need is this system from Berkeley computer scientist Richard Zhang, which allows a soulless silicon sentience to “hallucinate” colors into any monochrome image.

It uses what’s called a convolutional neural network (several, actually) — a type of computer vision system that mimics low-level visual systems in our own brains in order to perceive patterns and categorize objects. Google’s DeepDream is probably the most well-known example of one. Trained by examining millions of images of— well, just about everything, Zhang’s system of CNNs recognizes things in black and white photos and colors them the way it thinks they ought to be.

Grass, for instance, has certain features — textures, common locations in images, certain other things often found on or near it. And grass is usually green, right? So when the network thinks it recognizes grass, it colors that region green. The same thing occurs for recognizing certain types of butterflies, building materials, flowers, the nose of a certain breed of dog and so on.

Continue reading “This neural network ‘hallucinates’ the right colors into black and white pictures” »

This bat-inspired drone has a longer battery life than drones with propellers, giving it the possibility of expanding into drone package delivery and beyond. http://voc.tv/14JQHoo

Sounds great — as long as we don’t call it a Moon Village. That sounds inane.

The director general of ESA, Johann-Dietrich Woerner, believes that the world should collaborate to create a permanent lunar base for “science, business, tourism or even mining.” Plans to use robotics and 3D printing for building the base have been discussed.

Mastering Go is just the beginning for Google DeepMind, which hopes to create human-like artificial intelligence.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory says collaboration project with IBM “could change how we do science”.

One of the brains behind Google’s Go-winning software says a similar learning approach makes it as good as a human expert at Texas hold ‘em poker.

Autonomous cars compete in driving algorithms on Formula E tracks.

” “There is going to be a boom for design companies, because there’s going to be so much information people have to work through quickly,” said Diane B. Greene, the head of Google Compute Engine, one of the companies hoping to steer an A.I. boom. “Just teaching companies how to use A.I. will be a big business.” ”

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