Lifeboat Foundation

The spaces between galaxies may be the best place to find dark energy.

Photo by Erin Ashford Yale University Principal Investigator: David Spiegel Research Team: Prof. Jason Crawford, Nam Kim, Venkata Sabbasani, Matthew Streeter The long-lived collagen proteins that give structure to our arteries and other tissues are continuously exposed to blood sugar and other highly reactive molecules necessary for life. Occasionally, …Glucosepane Crosslinks and Undoing Age-Related Tissue Damage.

Unregulated cell division is a hallmark of cancer, and one of the key proteins involved in controlling cell division is called FoxM1. Abnormal activation of FoxM1 is a common feature of cancer cells and is correlated with poor prognosis, metastasis, and resistance to chemotherapy.

Now researchers at UC Santa Cruz have determined the structure of this protein—a kind of “master switch” for cell division—in its inactive or “off” conformation. This new understanding of the structure of FoxM1 could ultimately be used to design new drugs that stabilize the protein in its inactive state and thereby stop the uncontrolled proliferation of cancer cells.

Seth Rubin, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UC Santa Cruz, explained that FoxM1 is a “transcription factor,” a protein that controls the activity of specific genes.

Continue reading “Study reveals structure of a ‘master switch’ controlling cell division” »

At low speed, it operates like a quadcopter, at high speed, it’s a jet-propelled, highly efficient supersonic aircraft whose entire body acts as a low-drag wing. Those are the claims of the Romanian creators of this flying saucer that’s designed to offer unprecedented aerial agility across a broad range of speeds.

Learn how the AI and machine learning in Oracle Adaptive Intelligent Apps can automate repetitive business processes in a Q&A with Oracle Vice President Melissa Boxer.

By pieter spronck and jaap van den herik

While the audiovisual qualities of games have improved significantly over the last twenty years, game artificial intelligence (AI) has been largely neglected. Since the turn of the century game development companies have discovered that nowadays it is the quality of the game AI that sets apart good games from mediocre ones. The Institute of Knowledge and Agent Technology (IKAT) of the Universiteit Maastricht examines methods to enhance game AI with machine learning techniques. Several typical characteristics of games, such as their inherent randomness, require novel machine learning approaches to allow them to deal with game AI.

Most commercial computer games contain computer-controlled agents that oppose the human player. ‘Game AI’ encompasses the decision-making capabilities of these agents. For implementing game AI, especially for complex games, developers usually resort to rule-based techniques in the form of scripts. Scripts have the advantage that they are easy to understand and can be used to implement fairly complex behaviour.

Continue reading “Game Artificial Intelligence that Adapts to the Human Player” »

Recent attempts to move beyond narrow AI applications in industry have struggled to gain traction. ReThink Robotics, a leading startup founded by AI founding MIT researcher Dr. Rodney Brooks to create adaptive collaborative robots for industrial robotics, closed its doors in October 2018 and has since had its IP acquired by HAHN Group. In a retrospective published by The Robot Report, several contributing factors led to the shutdown. ReThink’s reliance on series elastic actuators compromised the precision and repeatability found in typical actuators in favor of safety, which likely led to efforts to compensate on hardware through software.

While the company utilized innovative machine control and machine vision technologies in iterating on their robots, the combination of mechanical motion of firmware at the heart of their products led to a narrow range of issues at varying quality. This made Baxter and Sawyer, ReThink’s flagship industrial robots, ill-suited for adaptive industrial use.

Other companies attempting to build adaptive robots, including Jibo, have met similar troubles. Touted as an interactive social robot with a personality, Jibo launched their eponymous robot in November 2017 with an emphasis on naturalistic human-computer interaction, but entered the market with more limited functionality than cheaper smart assistant speakers. The company has since closed down and transferred ownership of their IP to SQN Venture Partners in November 2018.

Continue reading “The Expectations And Possibility Of Adaptive AI Hardware” »

Video games have increasingly demonstrated a great deal of audiovisual realism, in par with the massive performance improvement of computer systems. At the.

IBM’s biologically motivated machine learning accelerates brain research.