Lifeboat Foundation

Video: Follow Team MIT as it sweats it out at the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals. Will a painful fall lead to disaster? Or can they pull through? Retro Report tells the story.

#DARPADRC #RobotsAreComing

“Only the Strong Will Survive”

Nature News reports:

“Scrambling to respond to the success of Google DeepMind’s world-beating Go program AlphaGo, South Korea announced on 17 March that it would invest $863 million (1 trillion won) in artificial-intelligence (AI) research over the next five years [towards] founding of a high-profile, public–private research centre with participation from several Korean conglomerates, including Samsung, LG Electronics and Hyundai Motor, as well as the technology firm Naver, based near Seoul.”

President Geun-Hye emphasized that “artificial intelligence can be a blessing for human society” and called it “the fourth industrial revolution”

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The Future of Business: Critical Insights into a Rapidly Changing World from 60 Future Thinkers by Rohit Talwar (editor)

Book review by José Luis Cordeiro

The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.
William Gibson

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Baidu Inc. will soon start testing autonomous cars in the U.S., part of the Chinese tech giant’s effort to introduce a commercially viable model by 2018.

The move, disclosed by Baidu’s chief scientist Andrew Ng in an interview late Tuesday, is a significant step for the company, which is trying to get ahead in the race to build autonomous cars and is now calling on the resources of its Silicon Valley tech center to advance the effort. At the same time, Baidu is advocating for better coordination with the U.S. government, which the company says is necessary to get self-driving cars on the road.

Central to the push is Mr. Ng, an artificial-intelligence scientist who conducted groundbreaking research at Stanford University and at Alphabet Inc.’s Google. He’s also a co-founder of online-learning company Coursera Inc.

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Cute, but i think mainly a publicity stunt. You couldnt trust that thing to be by itself unless it was a really safe small town or nice suburb.

For a pizza chain, Domino’s actually has a pretty rich history of innovation. It’s embraced social media, created a one-click Easy Order button and even built a delivery car that has its own pizza oven. Now it’s looking at robots. More specifically: delivery robots. What you see here is DRU (Domino’s Robotic Unit), an autonomous delivery vehicle built in collaboration with Australian technology startup Marathon Targets that Domino’s says is the first of its kind. It’s filled with thousands of dollars worth of military robotics tech, but its covert mission has been to deliver fresh pizza to the residents of Queensland.

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Where science fiction becomes science fact.

A technology official described her pursuit of a future force that includes high-powered lasers a self sustaining combat outposts.

Dark matter could be made of particles that each weigh almost as much as a human cell and are nearly dense enough to become miniature black holes, new research suggests.

While dark matter is thought to make up five-sixths of all matter in the universe, scientists don’t know what this strange stuff is made of. True to its name, dark matter is invisible — it does not emit, reflect or even block light. As a result, dark matter can currently be studied only through its gravitational effects on normal matter. The nature of dark matter is currently one of the greatest mysteries in science.

If dark matter is made of such superheavy particles, astronomers could detect evidence of them in the afterglow of the Big Bang, the authors of a new research study said. [Dark Matter Explained (Infographic)].

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