Lifeboat Foundation

Self-driving cars are pretty cool. Really, who wouldn’t want to spend their daily commute surfing social media, chatting with friends or finishing the Netflix series they were watching at 4 am the night before? It all sounds virtually utopian. But what if there is a dark side to self-driving cars? What if self-driving cars kill the jobs? ALL the jobs?

In this video series, the Galactic Public Archives takes bite-sized looks at a variety of terms, technologies, and ideas that are likely to be prominent in the future. Terms are regularly changing and being redefined with the passing of time. With constant breakthroughs and the development of new technology and other resources, we seek to define what these things are and how they will impact our future.

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The automotive industry is undergoing a period of rapid and radical transformation fueled by a range of technological innovations, digital advancements and wave after wave of new entrants and alternative business models; as a result, the entire sector is seeing major disruption.

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Phase 1, which was the Design part of the competition, was completed back in 2015. Phase 2 is the Structural Member Competition, and the most recent level challenged competitors to 3D print a beam for bend testing. Scores were calculated based on the final material composition of the 3D printed beam and the maximum load that could be held before it failed.

Seoul-based Moon X Construction were not eligible for prize money, but $67,465 was awarded to Form Forge of Oregon State University for the second place entry. Foster and Partners with Branch Technology of Chattanooga, Tennessee came in third, earning $63,783, after getting $85,930 for getting first place in the first round of Phase 2. Fairbanks University of Alaska and CTL Group Mars of Illinois came in fourth and fifth respectively, with Singaporean team ROBOCON finishing in sixth place.

Continue reading “NASA announces winners for latest round of 3D Printed Habitat challenge, over $200k prize money awarded” »

High-bandwidth connections into the brain could treat blindness, paralysis, and speech disorders.

One of the most well-accepted physical theories makes no logical sense. Quantum mechanics, the theory that governs the smallest possible spaces, forces our human brains to accept some really wacky, uncomfortable realities. Maybe we live in a world where certain observations can force our universe to branch into multiple ones. Or maybe actions in the present influence things earlier in time.

A team of physicists did some thinking, and realized this latter idea, called retrocausality, is a consequence of certain interpretations of quantum mechanics, and therefore, certain interpretations of the nature of reality. Their new paper is more of a “what-if,” an initial look at how to make some of those quantum mechanical interpretations work. Some people I asked thought the work was important, some thought it didn’t matter. Others felt the authors’ interpretation of quantum mechanics avoids the problems posed by the new paper. But no matter what, quantum mechanics will force us to make some uncomfortable conclusions about the world.

• A group affiliated with the United Nations is launching a fake Mars and moon colony.
• Called M.A.R.S., the faux habitat is located in the remote countryside of southern Poland.
• Six volunteer astronauts will work and live inside M.A.R.S. for two weeks, starting on July 31.
• Organizers hope to use the data and lessons they learn to support real missions to the moon and Mars.

Atop a forested ridge in southern Poland, a mission on the surfaces of both Mars and the moon is about to launch.

The two-week mission is just a simulation, of course, since no entity on Earth is prepared to inhabit deep space. But the experiment — called the Poland Mars Analogue Simulation 2017 — will study a group of six volunteer “analogue” astronauts as they work through a realistic schedule of space exploration, then provide those findings to anyone who’s drawing up crewed missions beyond Earth.

Continue reading “Poland is about to launch a fake Mars colony on a hilltop” »

It should be possible to build a silicon version of the human cerebral cortex with the transistor technology that was in production in 2013. The resulting machine would take up less than a cubic meter of space and consume less than 100 watts, not too far from the human brain. This article is summarizing the work of Jennifer Hasler and Bo Marr writing in Frontiers of Neuroscience – Finding a roadmap to achieve large neuromorphic hardware systems.

Computational power efficiency for biological systems is 8–9 orders of magnitude higher (better) than the power efficiency wall for digital computation. Analog techniques at a 10 nm node can potentially reach this same level of biological computational efficiency. Figure 1 show huge potential for neuromorphic systems, showing the community has a lot of room left for improvement, as well as potential directions on how to achieve these approaches with technology already being developed; new technologies only improve the probability of this potential being reached.

Continue reading “Roadmap to human cortex scale neuromorphic hardware” »

The founder of a new startup is working on a “thinking cap” that could see inside our minds.

Teaches artificial intelligence superhuman relational reasoning.

A key challenge in developing artificial intelligence systems with the flexibility and efficiency of human cognition is giving them a similar ability — to reason about entities and their relations from unstructured data. Solving this would allow these systems to generalize to new combinations of entities, making infinite use of finite means.

Modern deep learning methods have made tremendous progress solving problems from unstructured data, but they tend to do so without explicitly considering the relations between objects.

Continue reading “A neural approach to relational reasoning” »