Lifeboat Foundation

From robotic replacement limbs to bionic eyes, the next step in human evolution might involve augmenting our bodies with a variety of new technology.

Andrew Ng, one of the world’s best-known artificial-intelligence experts, is launching an online effort to create millions more AI experts across a range of industries. Ng, an early pioneer in online learning, hopes his new deep-learning course on Coursera will train people to use the most powerful idea to have emerged in AI in recent years.

Millions of people should master deep learning, says a leading AI researcher and educator.

The intelligent home of the future is coming sooner than you think. Our future homes will not only provide us shelter, but much more than you think.

Artificial intelligence can’t understand meaning or emotion just yet, but it can write a pretty good essay on 17th-century maritime trade.

At the 2017 TED Conference this past April, AI expert Noriko Arai gave a talk presenting her Todai Robot, a machine that has been programmed to take the entrance exam to Japan’s most prestigious university, Tokyo University.

While Arai discovered Todai didn’t pass muster to gain acceptance, the robot still beat 80% of the students taking the exam, which consisted of seven sections, including math, English, science, and a 600-word essay writing portion.

Continue reading “A robot did better than 80% of students on the University of Tokyo entrance exam” »

Regulators are working to prepare a timeline to end sales and production.

Jianxiong Xiao aims to make self-driving cars as widely accessible as computers are today. He’s the founder and CEO of AutoX, which recently demonstrated an autonomous car built not with expensive laser sensors but with ordinary webcams and some sophisticated computer-vision algorithms. Remarkably, the vehicle can navigate even at night and in bad weather.

AutoX hasn’t revealed details of its software, but Xiao is an expert at using deep learning, an AI technique that lets machines teach themselves to perform difficult tasks such as recognizing pedestrians from different angles and in different lighting.

Growing up without much money in Chaozhou, a city in eastern China, Xiao became mesmerized by books about computers—fantastic-sounding machines that could encode knowledge, logic, and reason. Without access to the real thing, he taught himself to touch-type on a keyboard drawn on paper.

Continue reading “AutoX demonstrates how to build an autonomous car without expensive laser sensors” »

A recent research discussion paper “The Andromeda Study: A Femto-Spacecraft Mission to Alpha Centauri” discusses options for a 50 year (at 0.1c) one-way, fly-by, exploration trip to our nearest stellar neighbour, Alpha Centauri. In the paper the authors (Andreas M. Hein, Kelvin F. Long, Dan Fries, Nikolaos Perakis, Angelo Genovese, Stefan Zeidler, Martin Langer, Richard Osborne, Rob Swinney, John Davies, Bill Cress, Marc Casson, Adrian Mann, Rachel Armstrong) discuss the challenges and present possible solutions using current science and technology.