Many people around the world (and in the United States) do not have reliable access to medical care. This may be due to geographical factors, financial factors, cultural factors, or a combination thereof. However, mobile phone adoption continues to grow rapidly in both developed and underdeveloped countries. With fast rates of adoption and increasing levels [...]
Posts under ‘Artificial Intelligence’
MIT develops software to decipher ancient text
Archaeologists have uncovered many examples of ancient written languages yet to be deciphered. In most cases, the trick to deciphering extinct writing systems is to trace the evolution of that system backward – for instance, the Cyrillic alphabet evolved from the Greek alphabet, itself an evolution of the Phoenician alphabet. In order to assist with [...]
Answer: The name of the supercomputer that will be the first to compete on “Jeopardy!”
Quiz show Jeopardy! has been stumping human contestants and viewers for more than 45 years. Part of the show’s challenge lies in the way contestants are required to phrase answers, which must be in the form of a question. It can be flummoxing for humans, and would understandably be difficult for a machine. Apparently IBM’s [...]
R.U. Sirius offers his utopian vision for a transhuman future
One of my favorite blogs, io9, has been running a series of posts on “posthumanity” from both fiction and real-life. Today R.U. Sirius of h+ Magazine has a great post up about his “best-case scenario for posthumanity.” In it, he describes what his ideal vision of the future might look like, which includes open-source style [...]
Does the road to AI begin with smartphone chips?
While the computer chips in our smartphones (say, iPhones or Android phones) are increasingly capable of processing a large amount of information, their most valuable asset is their low power consumption. Steve Furber is a computer engineer who plans on combining 50,000 of the chips, however, to create an “artificial brain” that simulates one billion [...]
Can computers replace sports reporters?
Statistics form the backbone of sports reporting – shot percentages, batting averages, quarterback ratings, and so on. StatSheet.com, a site focused on sports statistics and analysis, is working on developing an algorithm that will create original sports reporting without human input: Now, I’m in the process of developing completely automated sports content, which will take [...]
Top 5 TED talks on transhumanism
TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) brings together some of the world’s top thinkers at conferences around the world to deliver short presentations on “ideas worth spreading.” Not surprisingly, several speakers have delivered talks on topics of interest to transhumanists, such as life extension, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and more. One of the great things about TED is [...]
DARPA researching cameras that have “visual intelligence”
This week DARPA announced its “Mind’s Eye Program,” an effort to research visual intelligence in machines. More specifically, it will serve to not only enable cameras to recognize objects (an ability some machines are already capable of) but determine interactions between objects it sees, and then use this information to provide a “complete narrative of [...]
Where will AI be in 90 years? Experts weigh in
Silicon.com asked leading thinkers in the realm of artificial intelligence where they think AI will be in the year 2100. On the conservative side, we have responses from Noel Sharkey, who sees autonomous cars and more use of robots in medicine. On the more radical side, we have Ray Kurzweil, who believes we will have [...]
Highlights from the AAAS Annual Meeting
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) held their annual meeting this week, and naturally a lot of very interesting stories and research results were unveiled: Turning paper and clothing into batteries – By coating fabric and paper with ink “laced” with carbon nanotubes, researchers were able to coax these ordinary materials into [...]