Lifeboat Foundation

How robotics is making live music a more enriching experience.

Scientists have developed a ‘smart’ wearable robotic limb that responds to human gestures and the music it hears, allowing drummers to play with three arms.

The two-foot long robotic arm can be attached to a musician’s shoulder, and knows what to play by listening to the music in the room. It improvises based on the beat and rhythm. For instance, if the musician plays slowly, the arm slows the tempo. If the drummer speeds up, it plays faster.

Continue reading “Robot limb lets drummers play with three arms” »

Actors and Actresses will never have to worry about reading through pages of scripts to decide whether or not the role is worth their time; AI will do the work for you.

A version of this story first appeared in the Feb. 26 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.

During his 12 years in UTA’s story department, Scott Foster estimates he read about 5,500 screenplays. “Even if it was the worst script ever, I had to read it cover to cover,” he says. So when Foster left the agency in 2013, he teamed with Portland, Ore.-based techie Brian Austin to create ScriptHop, an artificial intelligence system that manages the volume of screenplays that every agency and studio houses. “When I took over [at UTA], we were managing hundreds of thousands of scripts on a Word document,” says Foster, who also worked at Endeavor and Handprint before UTA. “The program began to eat itself and become corrupt because there was too much information to handle.” ScriptHop can read a script and do a complete character breakdown in four seconds, versus the roughly four man hours required of a reader. The tool, which launches Feb. 16 is free, and is a sample of the overall platform coming later in 2016 that will recommend screenplays as well as store and manage a company’s library for a subscription fee of $29.99 a month per user.

Continue reading “This New Artificial Intelligence Script-Reading Program Could Find Your Next Oscar Role (Exclusive)” »

Big Blue is cool again according to investors.

NEW YORK: Here’s a vexing question for artificial mega-brain Watson: Why is IBM stock surging? Big Blue’s market value rose about $6 billion after the computer giant agreed on Thursday to buy Truven Health Analytics for $2.6 billion. Giving IBM’s artificial-intelligence platform more data to chew on is useful, but investors’ glee over an opaque addition to an enigmatic business effort is confusing.

Big Blue’s top line has been shrinking steadily for nearly four years. In the fourth quarter of 2015, all major divisions had declining sales, with overall revenue falling 8.5 percent compared with the same period a year earlier. Clients need less of IBM’s hardware, and its software and consulting businesses are faltering in competition with rivals’ cloud-based versions.

Continue reading “Why is IBM surging?” »

This is so true and even more importantly in the space of technology as we introduce more products and services in the AI space. Reason is because we are seeing the consumer’s buying patterns changing especially as consumers have more options around devices, services, and AI available to them.

As a result of more choices and AI sophistication; consumers are now & more so in the future will chose to buy things that “fit” more with their own style and personality today. And, this places pressures on companies to change/ expand their thinking on product innovation to include emotional thinking as well. Gone are the days of technology just being a machine/ devices designed to only process information and provide information insights only. Tech consumers today and in the future want technology that marries with their own sense of style and personalities. Therefore, corporate culture as a whole will need to change their thinking at all levels.

I once wrote an article about how people with outstanding academic achievement or technical brilliance can easily get hired, but brilliance will get them nowhere if they lack emotional intelligence and the ability to build strong working relationships. This is especially true in today’s highly competitive world where organisations rely heavily on interdependence to stay ahead of the game.

Continue reading “We need leaders with emotional intelligence” »

There is a need for a larger “official and governmental” review and oversight board for drones, robots, etc. due to the criminal elements; however, any review needs focus more on the immediate criminal elements that can use and is using this technology plus how to best manage it. Like guns; we may see a need for background check and registration & license to have drones and certain robots as a way to better vet and track who can own a drone or robot.

At AAAI-16, a panel discussed the safety that will be necessary when it comes to autonomous manned and unmanned aircraft. Here’s what you need to know.

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IBM leads the way on AI — definitely makes sense and should given the years of research & funding spent on Watson. It would be really place IBM in a bad position not to be a leader in in AI especially since it has spent so many years on cognitive computing technology.

While Google and Facebook are taking the headlines with their advancements in Artificial Intelligence, another company is making some big strides behind the scenes. The ever resilient IBM has come up with an interesting strategy to garner attention for it’s cognitive computing technology “Watson “.

Continue reading “Here is Why IBM May Develop a Better AI than Google or Facebook” »

Neural networks have become enormously successful – but we often don’t know how or why they work. Now, computer scientists are starting to peer inside their artificial minds.

A PENNY for ’em? Knowing what someone is thinking is crucial for understanding their behaviour. It’s the same with artificial intelligences. A new technique for taking snapshots of neural networks as they crunch through a problem will help us fathom how they work, leading to AIs that work better – and are more trustworthy.

In the last few years, deep-learning algorithms built on neural networks – multiple layers of interconnected artificial neurons – have driven breakthroughs in many areas of artificial intelligence, including natural language processing, image recognition, medical diagnoses and beating a professional human player at the game Go.

Continue reading “Brain scan for artificial intelligence shows how software thinks” »

TED curator Chris Anderson just announced the world’s biggest speaking fee — a $4.5m (£3.1m) cheque to be awarded to a speaker at the 2020 TED conference. There’s just one catch: the speaker must be an artificial intelligence, which convinces the audience that it has mastered the art of the 18-minute TED talk.

The IBM Watson AI X Prize, announced on Wednesday at the TED conference in Vancouver, will offer $4.5 million to the team that develops an artificial intelligence showing “how humans can collaborate with powerful cognitive technologies to tackle some of the world’s grand challenges”.

Peter Diamandis, chairman of the X Prize Foundation, said the winner would be chosen by the TED audience in 2020, when three finalists — either AIs or AI human partnerships — “come on stage to deliver jaw-dropping, awe-inspiring TED talks”.

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Well, US is failing on building a competitive waiter to go up against China’s version.

America is getting crushed by China. Not in trade or weapons or any of those things that don’t matter. We’re losing the war of the Roseys. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the new robot above, serving up deliciousness at a farmhouse restaurant in Sanmenxia, China.

Or look at this December photo of Tete, a robot in Qingdao, China. Tete can communicate over 200 words and has no trouble delivering dishes.

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