Lifeboat Foundation

It totally sounds like a mash-up of two of Jeff Goldblum’s best movies, The Fly and Jurassic Park, but scientists at New York University and the University of Chicago really have created mutant fruit flies carrying reconstructed genes from 140 million years ago. Here’s why.

Is your AI intelligent or just looking like it’s intelligent? In many ways, this depends on your idea of AI and what it is supposed to do. Scientists at Singapore University of Technology and Design have worked out a way to check for the issue. Open Access Journal: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08987-4

Current learning machines have successfully solved hard application problems, reaching high accuracy and displaying seemingly intelligent behavior. Here we apply recent techniques for explaining decisions of state-of-the-art learning machines and analyze various tasks from computer vision and arcade games. This showcases a spectrum of problem-solving behaviors ranging from naive and short-sighted, to well-informed and strategic. We observe that standard performance evaluation metrics can be oblivious to distinguishing these diverse problem solving behaviors. Furthermore, we propose our semi-automated Spectral Relevance Analysis that provides a practically effective way of characterizing and validating the behavior of nonlinear learning machines. This helps to assess whether a learned model indeed delivers reliably for the problem that it was conceived for. Furthermore, our work intends to add a voice of caution to the ongoing excitement about machine intelligence and pledges to evaluate and judge some of these recent successes in a more nuanced manner.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=6OKMmn855cA

Hadean wants to help build massive simulated worlds.

When you think of old photographs, you naturally think in terms of black and white, but as you can see from these stunning photographs from the turn of the 20th century, color photography has been around for a lot longer than you think.

Before 1907, if you wanted a color photograph then you (well, a professional colorist) basically had to color it in using different dyes and pigments, but two French brothers called Auguste and Louis Lumière changed all that with a game-changing process that they called the Autochrome Lumière. Using dyed grains of potato starch and light-sensitive emulsion, they were able to produce vibrant photographs without the need for additional colorization. Despite being difficult to manufacture and also somewhat expensive, the process was very popular among amateur photographers and one of the world’s first books of color photography was published using the Autochrome Lumière technique.

The brothers revolutionized the world of color photography until Kodak took things to a whole new level with the invention of Kodachrome film in 1935, a lighter and more convenient alternative that quickly made the Autochrome Lumière obsolete (although its popularity continued in France up until the 1950s). Kodachrome was also eventually overtaken by the rise of digital photography (Kodak stopped manufacturing Kodachrome in 2009), which is now by far the world’s most popular way to take pictures, but modern advances in photographic technology wouldn’t have been possible without the hard work of early pioneers like Auguste and Louis Lumière. Scroll down for a collection of stunning century-old color photographs using their groundbreaking technique.

Continue reading “116 Of The Oldest Color Photos Showing What The World Looked Like 100 Years Ago” »

Last year, my brother, then an employee at Silicon Valley-based tech company Nvidia, declared that all the AI and deep learning that is happening in healthcare is being powered by Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs)…however that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Nvidia holds a dominant position in terms of making the chips that power artificial intelligence projects, but can the Silicon Valley tech company with roots in the world of gaming and graphics succeed in healthcare?

By Arundhati Parmar

Continue reading “Meet the ‘preeminent AI company on earth,’ but can it succeed in healthcare?” »

It’s something straight out of a Marvel comic book: giving test subjects the ability to see infrared light, similarly to how night-vision goggles work — but without the awkward and bulky apparatus.

Scientists at the University of Science and Technology of China injected tiny nanoparticles that bind to the retina into the eyeballs of test mice, granting them what the researchers called “super vision.”

From pop culture channel InqPOP:

Inspired by the Star Wars movie franchise, this newly recognized sport by the French is different from how the other weapons are used in fencing. For one, it requires combatants to pull their sword from behind themselves before they can try to strike their opponent. It also has rounds that last three minutes. And the first duelist who will reach 15 victories will be announced as the winner.

This is awesome and WAY deserved.

A NASA facility in Fairmont, West Virginia, will be renamed after native Katherine Johnson, a pioneering mathematician who was depicted in the 2016 film “Hidden Figures” for her critical role in the success of the U.S. reaching space.

The Herbert Henderson Office of Minority Affairs announced the recognition of Johnson on Friday, according to The Register-Herald.

Continue reading “NASA facility in West Virginia renamed after native and ‘hidden figure’ Katherine Johnson” »

Something about political sports hooligans not caring about the truth, etc wink