What’s smaller than a piece of confetti, covered in artificial synapses, and may change the future of artificial intelligence? MIT’s new “brain-on-a-chip,” an engineering feat that could bring supercomputer smarts to mobile devices.
Researchers placed tens of thousands of tiny memristors (memory transistors)—silicon-based components that mimic the human brain’s information-transmitting synapses—onto a single chip which, when run through various tasks, was able to “remember” and reproduce stored images.
While artificial synapse networks currently exist only as software, the MIT team wants to build a hardware equivalent for portable artificial intelligence systems. The results, published this week in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, highlight the new memristor design—ideal for carrying out complex tasks on mobile devices that only supercomputers can handle.
Researchers say they’ve built a system that can translate brain signals directly into text — a promising step toward a “speech prosthesis” that could effectively allow you to think text directly into a computer.
“We are not there yet,” University of California researcher Joseph Makin told The Guardian, “but we think this could be the basis of a speech prosthesis.”
AI Power
Makin and his collaborators described the new system in a paper published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
When it premiered in 1896, the silent short film “L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat” was a cinematic wonder. Compared to today’s motion pictures, though, the quality of the black-and-white clip is downright primitive.
But now, YouTuber Denis Shiryaev has found a way to show what the film might have looked like if it had been recorded using more modern technology — by using artificial intelligence to upscale it to 4K resolution at 60 frames per second.
Could this AI reduce our dependence on human radiologists?
A team of UK researchers at Google Health and Google’s AI lab DeepMind has created a tool that can successfully identify breast cancer in X-ray mammograms, Wired reports.
It’s so successful, according to the paper published in the journal Nature this week, that it could one day rival or even outperform human radiologists.
The researchers trained their AI using mammograms from nearly 91,000 women in the US and UK — and the results were impressive. Compared to human radiologists, the AI model flagged 9.4 percent fewer false negatives and 5.7 percent fewer false positives in the US dataset, and 2.7 and 1.2 percent respectively for the much larger UK dataset.
But now, IEEE Spectrumreports that a team of Japanese roboticists has taught a dog-like robot a new trick: how to autonomously climb a vertical ladder.
Thumbs Up
The team from Tokyo Metropolitan University and Okayama University presented their quadruped robot at the 2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems on November 5.
AI research over the last couple of years at the University of Tasmania could have been a check on the existing mess with historical temperature reconstructions. Reconstructions that suggest every next year is hotter than the last the world over. Except that Jaco Vlok began with the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s temperature datasets without first undertaking adequate quality assurance (QA).
Shopping is becoming less and less of a consumer experience—or, for many, less of a chore—as the list of things that can be bought online and delivered to our homes grows to include, well, almost anything you can think of. An Israeli startup is working to make shopping and deliveries even faster and cheaper—and they’re succeeding.
I’m guessing you are scoffing in disbelief at the very suggestion of this article, but bear with me.
A growing number of tech analysts are predicting that in less than 20 years we’ll all have stopped owning cars, and, what’s more, the internal combustion engine will have been consigned to the dustbin of history.
Using a technique called reinforcement learning, a researcher at Google Brain has shown that virtual robots can redesign their body parts to help them navigate challenging obstacle courses—even if the solutions they come up with are completely bizarre.
Embodied cognition is the idea that an animal’s cognitive abilities are influenced and constrained by its body plan. This means a squirrel’s thought processes and problem-solving strategies will differ somewhat from the cogitations of octopuses, elephants, and seagulls. Each animal has to navigate its world in its own special way using the body it’s been given, which naturally leads to different ways of thinking and learning.
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Left: An unmodified walker learning how to navigate challenging terrain. Right: A self-modified walker, using new limbs and walking strategy, working through the same obstacle course.
An international team of researchers showed that artificial intelligence can make a killing on the stock market — and some real-world hedge funds are already trying it.
Scoring above-average returns on the stock market is notoriously hard — so hard, in fact, studies show even the most talented investors on Wall Street can’t do it reliably. But their problem might be that they’re just human.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is seen as both a boon and a threat. It uses our personal data to influence our lives without us realising it. It is used by social media to draw our attention to things we are interested in buying, and by our tablets and computers to predict what we want to type (good). It facilitates targeting of voters to influence elections (bad, particularly if your side loses).
Exponential technologies (AI, VR, 3D printing, and networks) are radically reshaping traditional retail.
E-commerce giants (Amazon, Walmart, Alibaba) are digitizing the retail industry, riding the exponential growth of computation.
Many brick-and-mortar stores have already gone bankrupt, or migrated their operations online.
Massive change is occurring in this arena.
For those “real-life stores” that survive, an evolution is taking place from a product-centric mentality to an experience-based business model by leveraging AI, VR/AR, and 3D printing.
Let’s dive in.
E-Commerce Trends
Last year, 3.8 billion people were connected online. By 2024, thanks to 5G, stratospheric and space-based satellites, we will grow to 8 billion people online, each with megabit to gigabit connection speeds.
These 4.2 billion new digital consumers will begin buying things online, a potential bonanza for the e-commerce world.
At the same time, entrepreneurs seeking to service these four-billion-plus new consumers can now skip the costly steps of procuring retail space and hiring sales clerks.
Today, thanks to global connectivity, contract production, and turnkey pack-and-ship logistics, an entrepreneur can go from an idea to building and scaling a multimillion-dollar business from anywhere in the world in record time.
In 2016, global online sales totaled $1.8 trillion. Remarkably, this $1.8 trillion was spent by only 1.5 billion people — a mere 20 percent of Earth’s global population that year.
There’s plenty more room for digital disruption.
AI and the Retail Experience
For the business owner, AI will demonetize e-commerce operations with automated customer service, ultra-accurate supply chain modeling, marketing content generation, and advertising.
In the case of customer service, imagine an AI that is trained by every customer interaction, learns how to answer any consumer question perfectly, and offers feedback to product designers and company owners as a result.
Facebook’s handover protocol allows live customer service representatives and language-learning bots to work within the same Facebook Messenger conversation.
Taking it one step further, imagine an AI that is empathic to a consumer’s frustration, that can take any amount of abuse and come back with a smile every time. As one example, meet Ava. “Ava is a virtual customer service agent, to bring a whole new level of personalization and brand experience to that customer experience on a day-to-day basis,” says Greg Cross, CEO of Ava’s creator, a New Zealand company called Soul Machines.
Predictive modeling and machine learning are also optimizing product ordering and the supply chain process. For example, Skubana, a platform for online sellers, leverages data analytics to provide entrepreneurs constant product performance feedback and maintain optimal warehouse stock levels.
Blockchain is set to follow suit in the retail space. ShipChain and Ambrosus plan to introduce transparency and trust into shipping and production, further reducing costs for entrepreneurs and consumers.
Meanwhile, for consumers, personal shopping assistants are shifting the psychology of the standard shopping experience.
Alexa is in her infancy with voice search and vocal controls for smart homes. Already, Amazon’s Alexa users, on average, spent more on Amazon.com when purchasing than standard Amazon Prime customers — $1,700 versus $1,400.
As I’ve discussed in previous posts, the future combination of virtual reality shopping, coupled with a personalized, AI-enabled fashion advisor will make finding, selecting, and ordering products fast and painless for consumers.
But let’s take it one step further.
Imagine a future in which your personal AI shopper knows your desires better than you do. Possible? I think so. After all, our future AIs will follow us, watch us, and observe our interactions — including how long we glance at objects, our facial expressions, and much more.
In this future, shopping might be as easy as saying, “Buy me a new outfit for Saturday night’s dinner party,” followed by a surprise-and-delight moment in which the outfit that arrives is perfect.
In this future world of AI-enabled shopping, one of the most disruptive implications is that advertising is now dead.
In a world where an AI is buying my stuff, and I’m no longer in the decision loop, why would a big brand ever waste money on a Super Bowl advertisement?
The dematerialization, demonetization, and democratization of personalized shopping has only just begun.
As shoppers seek the convenience of online shopping, brick-and-mortar stores are tapping into the power of the experience economy.
Rather than focusing on the practicality of the products they buy, consumers are instead seeking out the experience of going shopping.
The Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and computation are exponentially improving the in-person consumer experience.
As AI dominates curated online shopping, AI and data analytics tools are also empowering real-life store owners to optimize staffing, marketing strategies, customer relationship management, and inventory logistics.
In the long term, we’ll see how our desire for enhanced productivity and seamless consumption balances with our preference for enjoyable real-life consumer experiences — all of which will be driven by exponential technologies.
One thing is certain: the nominal shopping experience is on the verge of a major transformation.
Implications
The convergence of exponential technologies has already revamped how and where we shop, how we use our time, and how much we pay.
Twenty years ago, Amazon showed us how the web could offer each of us the long tail of available reading material, and since then, the world of e-commerce has exploded.
The ways that businesses operate today is not the same as 30 years’ ago. Today, businesses operate based off data-driven reasoning. With that, one of the most effective means to generate revenue growth is through marketing. Now, if a company wants to take their success to new heights, they need to begin using AI for marketing. Here are five reasons behind how AI marketing can transform your marketing efforts.
Thanks to rapid advances in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, smart machines that would have once been relegated to works of science-fiction are now a part of our reality.
It took sixteen months to build the exceptionally steep Trump Rally, and just one week to eliminate a quarter of it. While I wouldn’t call that jolting reversal a stock-market crash in the ordinary sense, the largest one-day point fall in the history of the market (by far) certainly marks a massive change in market conditions. From this point forward, it won’t be the same market it was.
An international team of researchers showed that artificial intelligence can make a killing on the stock market — and some real-world hedge funds are already trying it.
Scoring above-average returns on the stock market is notoriously hard — so hard, in fact, studies show even the most talented investors on Wall Street can’t do it reliably. But their problem might be that they’re just human.
An international team of researchers just devised a group of AI algorithms that achieved eye-popping returns in tests using past market data to replicate real-time investing.
The AI stock pickers didn’t just beat the market. They annihilated it.
Before the middle of this century, the growth rates of our technology— which will be indistinguishable from ourselves— will be so steep as to appear essentially vertical. From a strictly mathematical perspective, the growth rates will still be finite but so extreme that the changes they bring about will appear to rupture the fabric of human history. That, at least, will be the perspective of unenhanced biological humanity.
Liberal democracy is in retreat across the globe. Following decades of expansion since the 1950s, the spread of democracy hit a wall in the new millennium. Freedom House, using carefully crafted metrics, has measured a decline in democracy and freedom worldwide. Definitions are important: Does the fact of elections, even where the outcome is autocratically determined, qualify a country as a democracy? By most measures and definitions, there are now about 25 fewer democratic countries than there were at the turn of the millennium.
Founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy Larry Diamond wrote a 2015 paper, “Facing up to the Democratic Recession.” Diamond asks, reasonably enough, “Why have freedom and democracy been regressing in many countries? The most important and pervasive answer is, in brief, bad governance.” But this tells us very little. How and why has governance been so bad?
Elon Musk has given a doomsday prophecy on the topic of AI, going as far as to invest $1 billion into researching how to use it safely.
Other experts have different perspectives on the future of AI, but all are agreed that this is an important topic, and how we use this powerful technology must be thoroughly thought through.
The AI Debate
Our technology prophets are talking in the lexicon of magic, gods, and monsters when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI). They predict every scenario from utopias to apocalypses, overlords to angels.
Scientists from the University of Washington have constructed digital logic gates in living cells. Though they’re not the first to do so, the researchers’ living circuitry is the largest and most complex of any created thus far.
Living Circuits
Thanks to projects like Elon Musk’s Neuralink, a future in which humankind merges with machines is on everyone’s minds. While a brain computer interface (BCI) like the one Musk is proposing would involve making a computer function as part of a human body, other researchers are taking an opposite route. Instead of making machines that can imitate biology, they’re looking for ways to make biological systems function more like computers.
By Stephanie Mlot – Re-Blogged From PC Magazine
