Every one of us has a magical tool in our pockets or purses. We should be able to enter an unknown building, navigate to our desired location, know where the elevators are, and gain access seamlessly.
But we can’t.
Our buildings cost millions or even billions of dollars. They have the latest technology. But they don’t know how many people are in them. They don’t know when to turn the lights off, or learn when to start warming or cooling office or meeting space. They don’t reposition elevators for maximum efficiency, and they can’t tell first responders where the fire is, where the medical emergency is, or what the quickest route up is. Nor can they tell occupants that the air is clean today, or that there’s an elevated level of volatile organic compounds because the floors were just waxed yesterday.
Fundamental Research On Ethical & Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence, For Health, Environment, And A Sustainable Future — Dr. Patrick van der Smagt, Ph.D., Director, ArtificiaI Intelligence Research, Volkswagen.
Dr. Patrick van der Smagt is Director of ArtificiaI Intelligence Research, Volkswagen AG, and Head of Argmax. AI (https://argmax.ai/), the Volkswagen Group Machine Learning Research Lab, in Munich, focusing on a range of research domains, including probabilistic deep learning for time series modelling, optimal control, reinforcement learning robotics, and quantum machine learning.
Dr. van der Smagt is also a research professor in the Computer Science faculty at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.
Dr. van der Smagt previously directed a lab as professor for machine learning and biomimetic robotics at the Technical University of Munich while leading the machine learning group at the research institute fortiss, and before that, founded and headed the Assistive Robotics and Bionics Lab at DLR, the German Aerospace Center.
Besides publishing numerous papers and patents on machine learning, robotics, and motor control, Dr. van der Smagt has won a number of awards, including the 2013 Helmholtz-Association Erwin Schrödinger Award, the 2014 King-Sun Fu Memorial Award, the 2013 Harvard Medical School/MGH Martin Research Prize, the 2018 Webit Best Implementation of AI Award, and best-paper awards at various machine learning and robotics conferences and journals.
Dr. van der Smagt also serves as a scientific reviewer for governmental funding organizations and served on various conference and journal boards.
Dr. van der Smagt is founding chairman of a non-for-profit organization for Assistive Robotics for tetraplegics, and co-founder of various tech companies. In 2018, he started a for-good initiative called 10-to-GO (https://10togo.eu/), by supporting teams using machine learning for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Also then, he initiated etami (https://www.etami.eu/en.html), an initiative on Ethical and Trustworthy Artificial and Machine Intelligence, creating an organization with almost 20 multinationals and universities.
Dr. van der Smagt has his Master of Science (M.Sc.), Computer Science from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and his Doctor of Philosophy (Ph. D.), Computer and Information Sciences, from University of Amsterdam.
A chemist in D.C.’s crime lab has discovered a new synthetic opioid being used on the streets of the District. The lab immediately alerted first responders about the possibility the drug could be resistant to the lifesaving antidote Narcan.
As part of her work testing used syringes to surveil the drug supply for new threats, chemist Alexandra Evans discovered the first known sample of Protonitazene in D.C.
Google is secretly working with the world’s leading neuroscientists on mapping the entire Human Brain. Neuroscientists at have released the most detailed 3D map of the mammalian brain ever made. Google has helped them by funding their goal to create the most detailed map yet of the connections within the human brain. It reveals a staggering amount of detail, including patterns of connections between neurons, as well as what may be a new kind of neuron.
The applications in the field of Brain Computer Interfaces or understanding medical conditions are staggering. But it’s doubtful that this will just help companies such as Neuralink develop advanced future brain computer interfaces and will likely lead to Google doing evil things by understanding people’s way of thinking and delivering ads to them. –
If you enjoyed this video, please consider rating this video and subscribing to our channel for more frequent uploads. Thank you! smile – TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 A Paradigm Shift in Brain Research. 00:53 What did actually happen? 02:54 How Scientists mapped the Human Brain. 05:05 What this does for neuroscientists. 06:23 How long until we understand the Brain? 08:08 Last Words. – #google #bci #neuralink
Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang doesn’t see the global chip shortage coming to an end anytime soon. The head of the largest chip maker by market cap, Huang is fresh off his virtual keynote at Nvidia’s GTC conference where he announced advances in the company’s metaverse and AI efforts.
But Nvidia still makes the bulk of its revenue, about 47% in Q2, from the sale of its gaming cards. And those continue to be in short supply due to the pandemic-induced chip crisis.
“I think that through the next year, demand is going to far exceed supply. We don’t have any magic bullets in navigating the supply chain,” Huang told Yahoo Finance Live on Wednesday.
For example, scientists recently treated a patient’s severe depression with a neural implant that zaps her brain 300 times per day and, she says, has allowed her to spontaneously laugh and feel joy for the first time in years. Of course, the treatment requires an electrode implanted deep into the brain, which currently reserves it for the most extreme medical cases — but as brain interface tech inexorably becomes more advanced and widely available, there’s no reason such a device couldn’t become a consumer gadget as well.
At the research’s current rate of trajectory, experts told Futurism, the tech could conceivably hit the market in just a few years. But what we don’t know is what it will mean for us, psychologically as individuals and sociologically as a society, when we can experience genuine pleasure from the push of a button. And all those questions become even more complex, of course, when applied to the messy world of sex.
“A big question that remains unanswered is whether sextech will ultimately become a complement to our sex lives or a substitute,” Kinsey Institute research fellow Justin Lehmiller, an expert on sex and psychology, told Futurism.
Incredible new videos show stem cells escaping from hair follicles, which could provide insight on a new, potentially reversible mechanism of hair loss.
Stem cells contribute to tissue regeneration, and they are thought to play an important role in age-related decline — so much so that stem cell exhaustion is one of the hallmarks of aging. These stem cells reside in “compartments” in various tissues. In the hair, the stem cell compartment, known as the bulge, is adjacent to the hair follicle.
It is extremely hard to monitor stem cell activity in live animals over time, yet this is exactly what the researchers of this study have achieved using noninvasive imaging techniques based on lasers. By anesthetizing mice and putting them inside the imaging device, they were able to observe and record the process of stem cells escaping their compartment.
Researchers watched as escaping stem cells changed their shape and shot out of the compartment as if squeezing through invisible holes, which are most likely structural abnormalities in the membrane. The researchers hypothesize that aging somehow harms the structural integrity of the membrane, but this phenomenon demands further examination. The “rogue” stem cells escape to the dermis, which is the lower layer of the skin. Once there they remained stem cells, and seemed to be doing quite well in the new environment. However, this may not be a good sign, since stem cells are known to contribute heavily to tumorigenesis, and the authors call for more research into the role that escaping stem cells might play in the development of cancer.
The researchers studied both young and old mice. In young animals, the stem cell compartment was well defined, and cells were restricted to their rightful place. In many older mice, however, the researchers noticed the shrinkage of the hair follicle and compartment. The shrinkage was even more pronounced when the compartment showed signs of stem cell escape.
The researchers looked for proteins that were downregulated in the follicles that experienced stem cell escape, zeroing in on two transcription factors (FOXC1 and NFATC1). These identified proteins are indeed known to regulate cellular adhesion and extracellular matrix integrity.
The creation of nanoscale computers for use in precision health care has long been a dream of many scientists and health care providers. Now, for the first time, researchers at Penn State have produced a nanocomputing agent that can control the function of a particular protein that is involved in cell movement and cancer metastasis. The research paves the way for the construction of complex nanoscale computers for the prevention and treatment of cancer and other diseases.
Nikolay Dokholyan, G. Thomas Passananti Professor, Penn State College of Medicine, and his colleagues — including Yashavantha Vishweshwaraiah, postdoctoral scholar in pharmacology, Penn State — created a transistor-like ‘logic gate,’ which is a type of computational operation in which multiple inputs control an output.
“Our logic gate is just the beginning of what you could call cellular computing,” he said, “but it is a major milestone because it demonstrates the ability to embed conditional operations in a protein and control its function, said Dokholyan. ” It will allow us to gain a deeper understanding of human biology and disease and introduces possibilities for the development of precision therapeutics.”
The new feature is part of Google’s Business Messages, a conversational messaging service that allows organizations to connect with people via Google Search, Google Maps, or their own business channels. For instance, Albertsons used Business Messages to share information with customers about vaccine administration. Suppose someone searched on Google for Safeway (an Albertson’s company). In that case, they could use the “message” button on Google Search to receive information like vaccine availability and how to book an appointment.
The new Bot-in-a-Box feature lets businesses launch a chatbot with an existing customer FAQ document, whether it’s from a web page or an internal document, to keep the service simple. The feature uses Google’s Dialogflow technology to create chatbots that can automatically understand and respond to customer questions without writing any code.
A team of researchers from Tri Alpha Energy Inc. and Google has developed an algorithm that can be used to speed up experiments conducted with plasma. In their paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, the group describes how they plan to use the algorithm in nuclear fusion research.
As research into harnessing nuclear fusion has progressed, scientists have found that some of its characteristics are too complex to be solved in a reasonable amount of time using current technology. So they have increasingly turned to computers to help. More specifically, they want to adjust certain parameters in a device created to achieve fusion in a reasonable way. Such a device, most in the field agree, must involve the creation of a certain type of plasma that is not too hot or too cold, is stable, and has a certain desired density.
Finding the right parameters that meet these conditions has involved an incredible amount of trial and error. In this new effort, the researchers sought to reduce the workload by using a computer to reduce some of the needed trials. To that end, they have created what they call the “optometrist’s algorithm.” In its most basic sense, it works like an optometrist attempting to measure the visual ability of a patient by showing them images and asking if they are better or worse than other images. The idea is to use the crunching power of a computer with the intelligence of a human being—the computer generates the options and the human tells it whether a given option is better or worse.
