The conductor on the podium has no baton, no tailcoat, and no musical score, but Android Alter 3 is kicking up a storm as it guides a symphony orchestra’s players through their paces. Robot playing orchestra.
The news: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has conducted the first test of a new type of drone that can be launched from a plane in a swarm and recovered in mid-air when it’s done its job.
How it works: A military transport or bomber plane releases a series of drones in rapid succession. They carry out the task designated to them (surveillance, for example) and then return to the plane, docking on a line before being winched in. It looks a bit like the airborne refueling process.
Continue reading “DARPA is testing drones it can launch from a plane—then collect mid-air” »
Interesting. And, for those who swear AI will never take the creative jobs.
The image, and resulting data, has helped astronomers learn more about black holes in general, and this one in particular, making that two-year wait more than worthwhile. Part of the reason for the delay was simply the logistics of gathering so many observations. Each observatory collects data over a narrow range of wavelengths, resulting in massive amounts of information — the equivalent of up to 5,000 years of mp3 music files. That’s too much to just email someone. Researchers instead had to find ways to physically move that data around. For instance, to transport the information out of the South Pole Telescope in Antarctica, scientists had to wait until spring, when planes finally started flying out again.
Only then could researchers begin the complicated process of stitching together data from the eight observatories, a technique known as interferometry. The team had their work cut out for them: Raw files from each of the observing sites came in with different angles on the sky, in different wavelengths and at different observation times.
“The calibrating and working with it took many months,” Özel says. “And at the end we synthesize it into a single image.” But that’s still not the end of the work, she says. “[You] spend another six months worrying about all the things you might have done wrong, and ask yourself more and more questions, until finally you can be certain that what you have is real.”
It’s no secret that the average smart phone today packs an abundance of gadgets fitting in your pocket, which could have easily filled a car trunk a few decades ago. We like to think about video cameras, music playing equipment, and maybe even telephones here, but let’s not ignore the amount of measurement equipment we also carry around in form of tiny sensors nowadays. How to use those sensors for educational purposes to teach physics is presented in [Sebastian Staacks]’ talk at 36C3 about the phyphox mobile lab app.
While accessing a mobile device’s sensor data is usually quite straightforwardly done through some API calls, the phyphox app is not only a shortcut to nicely graph all the available sensor data on the screen, it also exports the data for additional visualization and processing later on. An accompanying experiment editor allows to define custom experiments from data capture to analysis that are stored in an XML-based file format and possible to share through QR codes.
Continue reading “36C3: Phyphox – Using Smartphone Sensors For Physics Experiments” »
Can A.I. make music? Can it feel excitement and fear? Is it alive? Will.i.am and Mark Sagar push the limits of what a machine can do. How far is too far, and how much further can we go?
The Age of A.I. is a 8 part documentary series hosted by Robert Downey Jr. covering the ways Artifial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Neural Networks will change the world.
Hayley Harrison is on a constant Roll… Here she sent me privately this video of the great Bill Faloon… I have not completed the video as yet… But the beginning is awesome I will watch late tonight during my down time… Great Respect to Life Extension and Bill Faloon and Neal Francis Vanderee two of the Longevity Movements most interesting characters and the movements many activists such as Hayley “the watchful” Harrison… AEWR.
My mission is to drastically improve your life by helping you break bad habits, build and keep new healthy habits to make you the best version of yourself.
Continue reading “Brent Nally interviews Bill Faloon about his longevity clinical trial” »
This is what 500 Intel drones look like in a tribute to women in tech at the Intersect Festival. A collaboration with Kacey Musgraves and a female-led drone team at Intel to use the power of music and tech to create this dazzling moment & donate $50k to Girls in Tech from Amazon Web Services to empower our sisters in tech.
Drone Light Show by Intel
Produced by Production Club
Directed by Eva Dubuvoy of Verluxe
Aerial Footage by LA Drones
Music “Oh, What a World” by Kacey Musgraves.
Summary: Researchers reveal the right homologue of the Broca’s area plays a major role in the processing of music.
Source: Max Planck Institute.
Vincent Cheung, along with Angela Friederici, has been investigating non-local dependencies in music and trying to determine how the human brain processes them. In language and music, dependencies are conceptual threads that bind two things together. Non-local dependencies bind non-adjacent items. For example, in pop music, the second instance of a verse, following a chorus, would have a non-local dependency with the first instance of the verse. Experientially, it is clear to us that we are hearing a sequence that we have heard before. According to Cheung, composers use such devices to build up our expectations and elicit strong emotional responses to the music. But how does the brain recognize these patterns and what does this have to do with Paul Broca?
