A robotic arm smoothly traces the movements of a cursor on a computer screen, controlled by the brain activity of a person sitting close by who stares straight ahead. The person wears a cap covered in electrodes.
This “mind-controlled” robot limb is being manipulated by a brain-computer interface (BCI), which provides a direct link between the neural information of a brain that’s wired to an electroencephalography (EEG) device and an external object.
This cutting-edge research is being spearheaded by scientists at Carnegie Mellon University. Down the line, this work might lead to technology that could make day-to-day life easier for people who suffer from paralysis or who live with movement disorders.
Frustrated by the lack of progress, Matt Might, Buddy’s father and a computer programmer who heads the Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), began attacking the problem the only way he knew how — by writing code.
His work at the institute involves creating an artificial intelligence system capable of sifting and analyzing vast stores of biomedical information. Sitting at Buddy’s bedside, he started building software to query the system for clues about what was causing his son’s symptoms. It was a bit of a Hail Mary. The AI, dubbed mediKanren, is still experimental and used only by a small group of researchers at UAB.
Even with a $1 billion endowment, OpenAI felt it needed more money. The non-profit was at a distinct disadvantage compared to the corporate A.I. labs, many of which are part of companies with massive cloud computing businesses and therefore don’t have to pay market rates for server time.
What’s more, Musk, who had been the biggest initial donor, reduced his commitment to OpenAI in early 2018, stepping down from the organization’s board. OpenAI said Tesla’s increasing interest in commercializing A.I. applications presented Musk with a conflict-of-interest.
To compete with big corporations and startups with huge reserves of venture capital funding, OpenAI’s board made a fateful decision: if it couldn’t beat the corporates, it would join them. In March, Altman announced that OpenAI would create a separate for-profit company, called OpenAI LP, that would seek outside capital.
New Australian research finds that, when a neighborhood’s green space leads to better health outcomes, it’s the canopy of trees that provides most of the benefits.
Rice University researchers are developing a system that converts waste heat into light and then that light into electricity, which could help data centers reduce computing costs.
If AI works as promised, it could democratize health care by boosting access for underserved communities and lowering costs — a boon in the United States, which ranks poorly on many health measures despite an average annual health care cost of $10,739 per person. AI systems could free overworked doctors and reduce the risk of medical errors that may kill tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of U.S. patients each year. And in many countries with national physician shortages, such as China where overcrowded urban hospitals’ outpatient departments may see up to 10,000 people per day, such technologies don’t need perfect accuracy to prove helpful.
But critics point out that all that promise could vanish if the rush to implement AI tramples patient privacy rights, overlooks biases and limitations, or fails to deploy services in a way that improves health outcomes for most people.
we created Mubert, an AI-powered service of generative music that provides an entire infrastructure for the music industry where all stakeholders can benefit. With our tools, artists can create and monetize their samples and patterns, labels can share royalties with their artists, and sample distributors are given a new business model for their sample database.
In the eyes of our users, Mubert is a real-time streaming service allowing people to play completely unique, endless music streams based on personal preferences, actions, events, and mood. Traditionally, it took a lot of effort to tweak music to personal needs — requiring constant management of playlists, for example. An AI-based algorithm can instead play the part of a conductor, handpicking samples and weaving a never-ending personal soundtrack – a musical canvas which perfectly suits a specific listener at a specific point in time.
From a business standpoint, Mubert is a long-anticipated solution for broadcasting copyright-free music streams.
Less than two years ago, Tesla built and installed the world’s largest lithium-ion battery in Hornsdale, South Australia, using Tesla Powerpack batteries. Since then, the facility saved nearly $40 million in its first year alone and helped to stabilize and balance the region’s unreliable grid.
Battery storage is transforming the global electric grid and is an increasingly important element of the world’s transition to sustainable energy. To match global demand for massive battery storage projects like Hornsdale, Tesla designed and engineered a new battery product specifically for utility-scale projects: Megapack.
Megapack significantly reduces the complexity of large-scale battery storage and provides an easy installation and connection process.
Exact Sciences and Genomic Health, two of the largest companies in the cancer diagnostics market, are merging. The Madison, WI-based company said it will acquire Genomic Health for $72 per share in a cash stock transaction valued at $2.8 billion. The deal was signed off on by both companies and is expected to close by the end of 2019.
The merger will bring together Exact Sciences’ Cologuard and Genomic Health’s Oncotype DX, which the companies said will provide a robust platform for continued growth. With this enhanced platform, including a commercial presence in more than 90 countries, the combined company expects to continue to increase adoption of current tests, and to bring new innovative cancer diagnostics to patients throughout the world.
The potential inaccuracies have broad implications for the growing body of scientific research that relies on these wearables — as well as for the increasing number of people whose employers offer financial incentives or other benefits for using Fitbits and other trackers.
Concerns about the devices also come amid a broader reckoning over whether new technologies are as objective as they appear — and whether implicit prejudices are shaping their development.
“It really is about the existing bias in medicine that we have already,” said Kadija Ferryman, a cultural anthropologist who studies the social, cultural, and ethical implications of health information technologies at the Data & Society Research Institute. “No matter what [the] technology is, there is evidence that … inserting another tool, no matter how advanced it is, will likely continue on and continue to uphold the existing biases or exacerbate them.”
This blog post is based roughly on notes I wrote prior to a panel on AI and Ethics at CSUN 2019. CSUN is an amazing conference, which brings together accessibility professionals, assistive technology vendors, people with disabilities, and a handful of academics. This panel was headed by Merrie Morris and Megan Lawrence, and Matt Huenerfauth and Shiri Azenkot also participated.
The bar is set pretty low for chatbots, which exhibit fairly tedious and even idiotic streams of thought when engaging in chit-chat with people. A raft of new papers from Facebook and academic partners provide promising new directions, though the goal of human dialogue still seems fairly far away.
William Kramer has been selected as the next director of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), a joint research center of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. Kramer, currently project director and principal investigator of the Blue Waters Project and the senior associate director for @Scale Science and Technology at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, begins his role in the fall of 2019.
“It’s our great fortune to recruit Bill, who is known and honored nationally for his leadership and innovations in the world of supercomputing,” said Rob A. Rutenbar, senior vice chancellor for research at the University of Pittsburgh. “In many ways, his career path is emblematic of the role of supercomputing in modern scientific research. The field has grown specifically because of his innovations and commitment.”
University of California-Los Angeles, UCLA Newsroom
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UCLA scientists are leading a $10 million project to help California officials make ecologically wise decisions as the state continues to confront the effects of climate change.
The California Conservation Genomics Project, which is funded by the state, will involve conservation biologists, geneticists, ecologists and climate scientists from all 10 University of California campuses, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory, the UC Natural Reserve System and California State University campuses, as well as officials from state and federal regulatory agencies and nongovernment agencies, such as The Nature Conservancy. It is intended to run through 2022 or 2023.
Las Vegas, NV August 8-11. “The AI Village at DEF CON is a place where experts in AI and security (or both!) can come together to learn and discuss the use, and misuse, of artificial intelligence in traditional security.” [registration required]
Durham, NC September 25, starting at 10 a.m. ” This year’s theme for our one day conference is ‘Digital Health Across the Lifespan’. The program will include insights from experts in research, clinical care, and device development and will explore how health tech is used from pediatrics to gerontology.” [free, registration required]
Cambridge, MA November 1-2 at MIT. “The purpose of the Conference on Digital Experimentation at MIT (CODE) is to bring together leading researchers conducting and analyzing large scale randomized experiments in digitally mediated social and economic environments, in various scientific disciplines including economics, computer science and sociology, in order to lay the foundation for ongoing relationships and to build a lasting multidisciplinary research community.” [$$$]
“People assume “thesauruses are there so you can look up a fancy word for ‘big,'” when in fact they serve their true purpose when you come to a point in a sentence “where you’re unhappy with the word you’ve chosen not because of its meaning, but because of its rhythm. You may want a monosyllable for this concept, or you may want a trisyllable.”
My main initial mistake was to let my anxiety build up and wait for a story to take way longer than I imagined before asking what was going on. In order to avoid this problem, I followed my mentor’s advice and started to check-in at least every half day with each pair of engineers I was working with. This was mostly me passing by and asking how things were going without asking about a specific story.