Lifeboat Foundation

RENO, Nev. (AP) — A Nevada firm says one of its drones has successfully completed the first fully autonomous package delivery in a residential area in the U.S.

Flirtey CEO Matt Sweeney says the six-rotor drone flew about a half-mile along a pre-programmed delivery route on March 10. It lowered the package outside a vacant residence in an uninhabited area of Hawthorne, southeast of Reno. The route was established using GPS. A pilot and visual observers were on standby during the flight but weren’t needed.

The package included bottled water, food and a first-aid kit.

Continue reading “For first time, drone delivers package to residential area” »

When the apocalypse comes, it won’t do so on four rotors. Drones, especially drones-as-we-know-them—the affordable, commercially available quadcopters—are only really engines of their own destruction. Zoltan Istvan, transhumanist candidate for President, wrote today that the American constitution is unprepared for the challenges of swarming robots. With all due I respect, I couldn’t possibly disagree more.

“The Second Amendment Isn’t Prepared for a 3D-Printed Drone Army”, Istvan argues, and vividly sets a scene of total despair:

This new gripper can be revolutionary for everything from food manufacturing to prosthetic hands.

These robots decorate your Easter eggs for you.

HOUSTON, March 23, 2016 /PRNewswire/ — Heath Consultants Incorporated (Heath) in collaboration with Physical Sciences Inc. (PSI), is adapting the industry-leading laser-based Remote Methane Leak Detector (RMLD®) for mounting on the InstantEye®, PSI’s two-foot-wide quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle featuring highly advanced autonomy and all-weather operation. This technology combination, known as the RMLD® Sentry, will implement self-directed flight patterns to continuously monitor, locate, and quantify volumetric leak rates of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from natural gas production sites.

Photo — http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160323/347391

At the recent RSA Conference it was virtually impossible to find a vendor that was not claiming to use machine learning. Both new and established companies are now touting “machine learning” as a major component of the data science being used in their products. What the heck is machine learning anyway? And is it really going to reshape cyber security in 2016?

For brevity’s sake, I’ll define machine learning as the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed. Over the past decade, machine learning has enabled self-driving cars, practical speech recognition, effective web search, and has vastly improved our understanding of the human genome. Machine learning is so pervasive today that we use it dozens of times a day without knowing it. Many researchers also think machine learning is the best way to make progress towards human-level Artificial Intelligence.

[ MORE MACHINE LEARNING: Machine learning: Cybersecurity dream-come-true or pipe dream? ].

Continue reading “Machine learning is reshaping security” »

Blue Prism (LON: PRSM) — Proactive speaks to a leading mind in the field of artificial intelligence to talk about the latest developments in robotic process automation.

Artificial-intelligence software designed by Microsoft to tweet like a teenage girl has been suspended after it began spouting offensive remarks.

Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft are using high salaries and games pitting humans against computers to try to claim the standard on which all companies will build their A.I. technology.