Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Month: March 2019

With the latest move, Premji, who turned a small maker of vegetable oil into a software behemoth, has donated $21 billion of his fortune to charity. Premji’s philanthropy may prompt the rich in a nation where ultra-high net worth population is expected to surge 39 percent by 2023 donate more to charity, and help pull millions out of poverty.

Azim Premji, the billionaire chairman of Indian conglomerate Wipro Ltd., will gift an extra $7.5 billion of the company’s shares to support philanthropic activities, making it the most generous donation in the nation’s history.

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CEO and founder of R2ai, Yiwen Huang, talks to Interesting Engineering in an exclusive interview about how he started a company where AI creates Machine Learning models and how AI is not going to replace but enhance humans’ jobs in the future.

R2ai’s Founder and CEO, Yiwen Huang, tells interesting Engineering in an interview how he goes from a lab to creating an AI that creates AI. And how AI is not going to replace but to augment jobs in the future.

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One of the perks of being President of the United States of America is that you get to submit your budget recommendations to the US Congress before any decisions are made. While it’s up to Congress to make the budget and the President to sign it into law, the recommendations for the next fiscal year are where the administration gets to set their agenda and announce to the world the direction it wants to go in.

Last year, the Trump administration proposed cutting a number of Earth Science missions, ending NASA Astrophysics’ flagship mission for the 2020s, WFIRST, and eliminating NASA’s Office of Education. Then-acting administrator Robert Lightfoot put out a statement mentioning hard choices and an inability to do everything with a limited budget, but Congress overturned these cuts and restored funding for these programs. This year, the assault is even worse, and has a better chance of succeeding. Here’s why.

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On May 5, 1809, Mary Kies became the first woman to receive a patent in the United States. (It was for her technique of weaving straw with silk.)

Of course, women inventors existed before this time, but the property laws in many states made it illegal for women to own property on their own. This led some women to apply for patents in their husbands’ names if they decided to apply at all.

As of last year, only 10 percent of U.S. patent holders were women, although women account for half of doctoral degrees in science and engineering. This disparity is due in part to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office being more likely to reject patents with women as sole applicants.

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Japan is hoping to play a lead role in crafting international rules on what has been called lethal autonomous weapons systems or LAWS.

Japan is planning to give its backing to international efforts to regulate the development of lethal weapons controlled by artificial intelligence at a UN conference in Geneva late this month, government sources said Saturday.

It would mark a departure from Japan’s current policy. The government was already opposed to the development of so-called killer robots that could kill without human involvement. But it had called for careful discussions when it comes to rules so as to make sure that commercial development of AI would not be hampered.

With the policy shift, Japan is hoping to play a leading role in crafting international rules on what have been called lethal autonomous weapons systems, or LAWS, the sources said.

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Using roundworms, one of Earth’s simplest animals, Rice University bioscientists have found the first direct link between a diet with too little vitamin B12 and an increased risk of infection by two potentially deadly pathogens.

Despite their simplicity, 1-millimeter-long nematodes called Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) share an important limitation with humans: They cannot make B12 and must get all they need from their . In a study published today in PLOS Genetics, researchers from the lab of Rice biochemist and cancer researcher Natasha Kirienko describe how a B12-deficient diet harms C. elegans’ health at a cellular level, reducing the worms’ ability to metabolize branched-chain amino acids (BCAA). The research showed that the reduced ability to break down BCAAs led to a toxic buildup of partially metabolized BCAA byproducts that damaged mitochondrial health.

Researchers studied the health of two populations of worms, one with a diet sufficient in B12 and another that got too little B12 from its diet. Like the second population of worms, at least 10 percent of U.S. adults get too little B12 in their diet, a risk that increases with age.

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