A team led by Northwestern University researchers has developed the first artificial intelligence (AI) to date that can intelligently design robots from scratch. To test the new AI, the researchers gave the system a simple prompt: Design a robot that can walk across a flat surface. While it took nature billions of years to evolve the first walking species, the new algorithm compressed evolution to lightning speed -- designing a successfully walking robot in mere seconds.
But the AI program is not just fast. It also runs on a lightweight personal computer and designs wholly novel structures from scratch. This stands in sharp contrast to other AI systems, which often require energy-hungry supercomputers and colossally large datasets. And even after crunching all that data, those systems are tethered to the constraints of human creativity -- only mimicking humans' past works without an ability to generate new ideas. The study will be published on Oct. 3, 2023 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
"We discovered a very fast AI-driven design algorithm that bypasses the traffic jams of evolution, without falling back on the bias of human designers," said Northwestern's Sam Kriegman, who led the work. "We told the AI that we wanted a robot that could walk across land. Then we simply pressed a button and presto! It generated a blueprint for a robot in the blink of an eye that looks nothing like any animal that has ever walked the earth. I call this process 'instant evolution.'"
Kriegman is an assistant professor of computer science, mechanical engineering and chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering, where he is a member of the Center for Robotics and Biosystems. David Matthews, a scientist in Kriegman's laboratory, is the paper's first author. Kriegman and Matthews worked closely with co-authors Andrew Spielberg and Daniela Rus (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Josh Bongard (University of Vermont) for several years before their breakthrough discovery.
From xenobots to new organisms
In early 2020, Kriegman garnered widespread media attention for developing xenobots, the first living robots made entirely from biological cells. Now, Kriegman and his team view their new AI as the next advance in their quest to explore the potential of artificial life. The robot itself is unassuming -- small, squishy and misshapen. And, for now, it is made of inorganic materials. But Kriegman says it represents the first step in a new era of AI-designed tools that, like animals, can act directly on the world.
LongNet is a Transformer variant that can handle sequences longer than 1 billion tokens without sacrificing performance. It introduces dilated attention, which expands the attentive field exponentially as the distance grows. LongNet has linear computation complexity and can be used for distributed training. Experimental results show strong performance on long-sequence modeling and general language tasks.
ChatDoctor is a next-generation AI doctor model that is based on the LLaMA model. The goal of this project is to provide patients with an intelligent and reliable healthcare companion that can answer their medical queries and provide them with personalized medical advice.
The ChatDoctor is an advanced language model that is specifically designed for medical applications. It has been trained on a large corpus of medical literature and has a deep understanding of medical terminology, procedures, and diagnoses. This model serves as the foundation for ChatDoctor, enabling it to analyze patients' symptoms and medical history, provide accurate diagnoses, and suggest appropriate treatment options.
The ChatDoctor model is designed to simulate a conversation between a doctor and a patient, using natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning techniques. Patients can interact with the ChatDoctor model through a chat interface, asking questions about their health, symptoms, or medical conditions. The model will then analyze the input and provide a response that is tailored to the patient's unique situation.
One of the key features of the ChatDoctor model is its ability to learn and adapt over time. As more patients interact with the model, it will continue to refine its responses and improve its accuracy. This means that patients can expect to receive increasingly personalized and accurate medical advice over time.
Recent large language models (LLMs) in the general domain, such as ChatGPT, have shown remarkable success in following instructions and producing human-like responses. However, such language models have not been tailored to the medical domain, resulting in poor answer accuracy and inability to give plausible recommendations for medical diagnosis, medications, etc. To address this issue, we collected more than 700 diseases and their corresponding symptoms, required medical tests, and recommended medications, from which we generated 5K doctor-patient conversations. In addition, we obtained 200K real patient-doctor conversations from online Q&A medical consultation sites. By fine-tuning LLMs using these doctor-patient conversations, the resulting models emerge with great potential to understand patients' needs, provide informed advice, and offer valuable assistance in a variety of medical-related fields. The integration of these advanced language models into healthcare can revolutionize the way healthcare professionals and patients communicate, ultimately improving the overall efficiency and quality of patient care and outcomes. In addition, we made public all the source codes, datasets, and model weights to facilitate the further development of dialogue models in the medical field.
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Can attacks at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant cause another Chernobyl explosion? The tragedy would be 10 times larger than Chernobyl and Hiroshima!!! While the actions of Russian occupiers are predictable, the radioactive cloud they could cause is not. And that cloud could go anywhere, hitting any part of Europe and even far beyond it.
The findings could inform the design of new materials such as iridescent windows or waterproof textiles.
If you brush against the wings of a butterfly, you will likely come away with a fine sprinkling of powder. This lepidopteran dust is made up of tiny microscopic scales, hundreds of thousands of which paper a butterfly’s wings like shingles on a wafer-thin roof. The structure and arrangement of these scales give a butterfly its color and shimmer, and help shield the insect from the elements.
Now, MIT engineers have captured the intricate choreography of butterfly scales forming during metamorphosis. The team has for the first time continuously observed the wing scales growing and assembling as a developing butterfly transforms inside its chrysalis.
With some minor surgery and a clever imaging approach, the researchers were able to watch wing scales form in specimens of Vanessa cardui, commonly known as the Painted Lady butterfly. They observed that, as a wing forms, cells on its surface line up in orderly rows as they grow. These cells quickly differentiate into alternating “cover” and “ground” scales, producing an overlapping shingle-like pattern. As they reach their full size, the scales sprout thin ridges along their length — tiny corrugated features that control the insect’s color and help it to shed rain and moisture.
Filmmaker Jan van IJken's Becoming reveals the fascinating genesis of animal life. A single cell is transformed into a complete, complex living organism with a beating heart and running bloodstream. Observe the stages of development that occur within an Alpine newt embryo (Ichthyosaura alpestris) in this fascinating six minute time-lapse captured over a three week period.
"There are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world -- and they all have different sounds, vocabularies and structures. But do they shape the way we think? Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky shares examples of language -- from an Aboriginal community in Australia that uses cardinal directions instead of left and right to the multiple words for blue in Russian -- that suggest the answer is a resounding yes. 'The beauty of linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us just how ingenious and how flexible the human mind is,' Broditsky says. Human minds have invented not one cognitive universe, but 7,000."
Follow Dr. Broditsky to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York in northern Australia. She went there because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like "right," "left," "forward," and "back," which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space. This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like "There's an ant on your southeast leg" or "Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit." One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is "Where are you going?" and the answer should be something like " Southsoutheast, in the middle distance." If you don't know which way you're facing, you can't even get past "Hello."
The result is a profound difference in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers of languages that rely primarily on absolute reference frames (like Kuuk Thaayorre) and languages that rely on relative reference frames (like English). Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. What enables them — in fact, forces them — to do this is their language. Having their attention trained in this way equips them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human capabilities. Because space is such a fundamental domain of thought, differences in how people think about space don't end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build other, more complex, more abstract representations.
Representations of such things as time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality, and emotions have been shown to depend on how we think about space. So if the Kuuk Thaayorre think differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time? This is why Dr. Broditsky and her collaborator Alice Gaby came to Pormpuraaw to find out.
To test this idea, we gave people sets of pictures that showed some kind of temporal progression (e.g., pictures of a man aging, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. If you ask English speakers to do this, they'll arrange the cards so that time proceeds from left to right. Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out the cards from right to left, showing that writing direction in a language plays a role. So what about folks like the Kuuk Thaayorre, who don't use words like "left" and "right"? What will they do?
The Kuuk Thaayorre did not arrange the cards more often from left to right than from right to left, nor more toward or away from the body. But their arrangements were not random: there was a pattern, just a different one from that of English speakers. Instead of arranging time from left to right, they arranged it from east to west. That is, when they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body and so on. This was true even though we never told any of our subjects which direction they faced. The Kuuk Thaayorre not only knew that already (usually much better than Dr. Broditsky herself did), but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time. Which is amazing.
As a young programmer, Joshua Browder built a chatbot to act as a kind of AI lawyer that would help people dispute parking tickets. Not only did it work, but it was hugely popular, which led Browder to expand the program to help anyone harmed by the Equifax scandal sue the company in small claims court. Now his company, DoNotPay, is aiming even higher: by the end of this year, Browder plans to launch an addition to the platform that will you let you sue anyone.
“To be honest, Equifax was just a bit of testing for the product that would let anyone sue anyone,” Browder, one of 2017’s 35 Innovators under 35, said Wednesday at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech MIT conference. “The main use would be for taking down corporations.”
Wherever corporate malfeasance hurts regular people, Browder envisions DoNotPay’s platform coming to the rescue by allowing users to print out documents that they can take to small claims court instead of relying on class action suits and spending years in the appeals process.
“The corporations will just settle and say, ‘We will give you $1,000 if this goes away,’” Browder said. “Which is great, because it means they actually get punished for doing wrong.”
Researchers pave way towards integration of 3-D holography into electronics like smart phones, computers and TVs, with development of nano-hologram 1,000 times thinner than a human hair.
An Australian-Chinese research team has created the world's thinnest hologram, paving the way towards the integration of 3D holography into everyday electronics like smart phones, computers and TVs.
Interactive 3D holograms are a staple of science fiction -- from Star Wars to Avatar -- but the challenge for scientists trying to turn them into reality is developing holograms that are thin enough to work with modern electronics.
Now a pioneering team led by RMIT University's Distinguished Professor Min Gu has designed a nano-hologram that is simple to make, can be seen without 3D goggles and is 1000 times thinner than a human hair.
"Conventional computer-generated holograms are too big for electronic devices but our ultrathin hologram overcomes those size barriers," Gu said. "Our nano-hologram is also fabricated using a simple and fast direct laser writing system, which makes our design suitable for large-scale uses and mass manufacture. "Integrating holography into everyday electronics would make screen size irrelevant -- a pop-up 3D hologram can display a wealth of data that doesn't neatly fit on a phone or watch.
"From medical diagnostics to education, data storage, defence and cyber security, 3D holography has the potential to transform a range of industries and this research brings that revolution one critical step closer." Conventional holograms modulate the phase of light to give the illusion of three-dimensional depth. But to generate enough phase shifts, those holograms need to be at the thickness of optical wavelengths.
The RMIT research team, working with the Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT), has broken this thickness limit with a 25 nanometre hologram based on a topological insulator material -- a novel quantum material that holds the low refractive index in the surface layer but the ultrahigh refractive index in the bulk. The topological insulator thin film acts as an intrinsic optical resonant cavity, which can enhance the phase shifts for holographic imaging.
Dr Zengyi Yue, who co-authored the paper with BIT's Gaolei Xue, said: "The next stage for this research will be developing a rigid thin film that could be laid onto an LCD screen to enable 3D holographic display. "This involves shrinking our nano-hologram's pixel size, making it at least 10 times smaller. "But beyond that, we are looking to create flexible and elastic thin films that could be used on a whole range of surfaces, opening up the horizons of holographic applications."
What fractal dimension is, and how this is the core concept defining what fractals themselves are. It is possible to have fractals with an integer dimension. The example to have in mind is some *very* rough curve, which just so happens to achieve roughness level exactly 2. Slightly rough might be around 1.1-dimension; quite rough could be 1.5; but a very rough curve could get up to 2.0 (or more). A classic example of this is the boundary of the Mandelbrot set.
The proper definition of a fractal, at least as Mandelbrot wrote it, is a shape whose "Hausdorff dimension" is greater than its "topological dimension". Hausdorff dimension is similar to the box-counting one I showed in this video, in some sense counting using balls instead of boxes, and it coincides with box-counting dimension in many cases. But it's more general, at the cost of being a bit harder to describe. Topological dimension is something that's always an integer, wherein (loosely speaking) curve-ish things are 1-dimensional, surface-ish things are two-dimensional, etc. For example, a Koch Curve has topological dimension 1, and Hausdorff dimension 1.262. The surface of an ocean would have topological dimension 2, but might have fractal dimension around 2.1. And if a curve with topological dimension 1 has a Hausdorff dimension that *happens* to be exactly 2, it would be considered a fractal, even though it's fractal dimension is an integer. Pick a random fractal from a hat, though, and it will almost certainly have a non-integer dimension.
The theory called Holographic Space-time is an attempt to generalize String Theory so that one can discuss local regions of space-time. It's key feature is a mapping between quantum concepts and the geometry of space-time. Causality conditions are imposed, as in quantum field theory, by insisting that things which cannot have mutual quantum interference are things that are causally separated. Geometrical sizes are encoded via the Holographic Principle: the number of quantum states in a region is determined by the area of a certain surface surrounding that region. Inside a black hole, space stretches and squeezes much faster than light.
In 1995, Jacobson showed that one could derive Einstein's equations by imposing this principle in every space-time region. Einstein's equations are the hydrodynamic equations of a system whose statistics obeys the Holographic connection between space-time and the number of quantum states.
Dr. Banks will outline the application of these ideas to a new model of the early inflationary universe, as well as to a rough prediction of the masses of supersymmetric particles.
Believable proxies of human behavior can empower interactive applications ranging from immersive environments to rehearsal spaces for interpersonal communication to prototyping tools. AI scientists now introduce generative agents–computational software agents that simulate believable human behavior.
Generative agents wake up, cook breakfast, and head to work; artists paint, while authors write; they form opinions, notice each other, and initiate conversations; they remember and reflect on days past as they plan the next day. To enable generative agents, they were able to describe an architecture that extends a large language model to store a complete record of the agent’s experiences using natural language, synthesize those memories over time into higher-level reflections, and retrieve them dynamically to plan behavior. They instantiate generative agents to populate an interactive sandbox environment inspired by "The Sims", where end users can interact with a small town of twenty five agents using natural language. In an evaluation, these generative agents produce believable individual and emergent social behaviors: for example, starting with only a single user-specified notion that one agent wants to throw a Valentine’s Day party, the agents autonomously spread invitations to the party over the next two days, make new acquaintances, ask each other out on dates to the party, and coordinate to show up for the party together at the right time. The researchers demonstrate through ablation that the components of this agent architecture–observation, planning, and reflection–each contribute critically to the believability of agent behavior. By fusing large language models with computational, interactive agents, this work introduces architectural and interaction patterns for enabling believable simulations of human behavior.
In this exclusive preview of groundbreaking, unreleased technology, former Apple designer and Humane cofounder Imran Chaudhri envisions a future where AI enables our devices to "disappear." He gives a sneak peek of his company's new product -- shown for the first time ever on the TED stage -- and explains how it could change the way we interact with tech and the world around us. Witness a stunning vision of the next leap in device design.
Traditionally, 3D indoor scene reconstruction from posed images happens in two phases: per image depth estimation, followed by depth merging and surface reconstruction. Recently, a family of methods have emerged that perform reconstruction directly in final 3D volumetric feature space. While these methods have shown impressive reconstruction results, they rely on expensive 3D convolutional layers, limiting their application in resource-constrained environments. In this work, researchers instead go back to the traditional route, and show how focusing on high quality multi-view depth prediction leads to highly accurate 3D reconstructions using simple off-the-shelf depth fusion. They propose a simple state-of-the-art multi-view depth estimator with two main contributions: 1) a carefully-designed 2D CNN which utilizes strong image priors alongside a plane-sweep feature volume and geometric losses, combined with 2) the integration of keyframe and geometric metadata into the cost volume which allows informed depth plane scoring. This method achieves a significant lead over the current state-of-the-art for depth estimation and close or better for 3D reconstruction on ScanNet and 7-Scenes, yet still allows for online real-time low-memory reconstruction. SimpleRecon is fast. The batch size one performance is 70ms per frame. This makes accurate reconstruction via fast depth fusion possible!
SimpleRecon: 3D Reconstruction Without 3D Convolutions Mohamed Sayed, John Gibson, Jamie Whatson, Victor Adrian Prisacariu, Michael Firman, and Clément Godard ECCV 2022
Monkeypox, a less-lethal relative of smallpox that’s normally found in Africa, has recently been spreading in some western countries, largely among gay men, and is mainly transmitted through intimate contact when people are symptomatic. More than 700 cases have been seen globally, said Jennifer McQuiston, deputy director of the CDC’s division of high-consequence pathogens and pathology. Supplies available in the Strategic National Stockpile are sufficient to combat the current outbreak, the agency said. Vaccines available for use against monkeypox are Jynneos from Bavarian Nordic A/S and Emergent BioSolutions Inc.’s ACAM2000. Both are prioritized for use in high-risk contacts of patients. Through contact-tracing efforts, officials have identified hundreds of people who may have been exposed to the virus in the US, but so far only 20 were determined to be high-risk.
The rapidly spreading monkeypox outbreak constitutes a global health emergency, the World Health Organization's highest alert level, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared just recently. First identified in monkeys, the virus is transmitted chiefly through close contact with an infected person. Until this year, the viral disease has rarely spread outside Africa where it is endemic. But reports of a handful of cases in the United Kingdom in early May signalled that the outbreak had moved into Europe. Cases have since ballooned to more than 16,000 from than 75 countries. Five deaths, all of which occurred in Africa, have been reported so far.
HOW DANGEROUS ARE MONKEYPOX?
The monkeypox virus typically causes mild symptoms including fever, aches and pus-filled skin lesions. People tend to recover within two to four weeks, according to the WHO. Anyone can spread the virus, but the current outbreak outside of Africa is concentrated almost exclusively among men who have sex with men. Monkeypox spreads primarily via intimate skin-to-skin contact, usually with someone who has an active rash, as well as via contact with contaminated clothes or bedding. It is not as easily transmitted as the SARS-CoV-2 virus that spurred the COVID-19 pandemic. "COVID is spread by respiratory route and is highly infectious. This doesn't appear to be the case with the monkeypox," said Dr. Martin Hirsch of Massachusetts General Hospital. The risk of monkeypox is moderate globally, except in the Europe, where the WHO has deemed the risk as high.
Health officials from several countries had urged the WHO to label monkeypox a public health emergency of international concern due to the quick escalation of cases and concerns it may become endemic in more countries. The emergency declaration aims to spur global action and collaboration on everything from testing to the production and distribution of vaccines and treatments. The fatality rate in preceding monkeypox outbreaks in Africa of the strain currently spreading has been around 1%, but so far this outbreak appears to be less lethal in the non-endemic countries, many of which have stronger healthcare infrastructure. Scientists are trying to determine what caused the initial spate of cases and whether anything about the virus has changed. Increased global travel as well as climate change have generally accelerated the emergence and spread of viruses, experts say. Infectious disease experts say that years of financial neglect has left sexual health clinics - who are on the frontline of the current monkeypox response - ill-prepared to curb further spread.
PROTECTIVE MEASURES
Health officials say that people should avoid close personal contact with someone who has a illness presenting with a distinctive rash or who is otherwise unwell. People who suspect they have monkeypox should isolate and seek medical care.
Health officials have also been offering monkeypox vaccines to high-risk individuals and those that have recently been in close contact with an infected person.
An older vaccine, currently made by Emergent Biosolutions (EBS) , is called ACAM2000, but its uptake has been limited due to a severe side-effect warning. Bavarian Nordic (BVNKF) says it can produce 30 million doses of its vaccines - including the monkeypox one - each year, and has tapped a U.S.-based contract manufacturer to increase monkeypox vaccine capacity.
TREATMENT
Monkeypox symptoms often resolve on their own within weeks. Patients may receive extra fluids and additional treatment for secondary bacterial infections. An antiviral agent called tecovirimat - branded as TPOXX and made by SIGA Technologies (SIGA) - has U.S. and EU approval for smallpox, while its European approval also includes monkeypox and cowpox.
(Reporting by Natalie Grover in London and Michael Erman in New Jersey; Editing by Michele Gershberg, William Maclean)
Demis Hassabis will discuss the capabilities and power of self-learning systems. He will illustrate this with reference to some of DeepMind's recent breakthroughs, including the AlphaZero, AlphaStar and AlphaFold systems, and talk about the implications of cutting-edge AI research for scientific and philosophical discovery.
Here is a list of extrasolar planets that have been directly observed, sorted by observed separations. The method used works best for young planets that emit infrared light and are far from the glare of the star. Currently, this list includes both directly imaged planets and imaged planetary-mass companions (objects that orbit a star but formed through a binary-star-formation process, not a planet-formation process). This list does not include free-floating planetary-mass objects in star-forming regions or young associations, which are also referred to as rogue planets.
The data given for each planet is taken from the latest published paper on the planet to have that data. In many cases it is not possible to have an exact value, and an estimated range is instead provided. The least massive planet is Fomalhaut b, which has a mass of 2 MJ or less. The coldest and oldest is 59 Virginis b with a mean temperature of 240 °C and age of 100–500 million years.[1] This list includes the four members of the multi-planet system that orbit HR 8799.
When National Geographic asked photographer Anand Varma to shoot photos of bees for a story, he did what any photographer wouldn’t do: He started keeping bees in his backyard to better acquaint himself with the creatures. Kind of like a photographer’s version of method acting.
But by the looks of things, Varma became pretty taken with his apian muses, going beyond the call of duty to try and really figure out the mysteries of the hive. And in particular, what’s going on with Varroa destructor, the bee-decimating parasitic mite with a name like a Harry Potter spell.
We are reliant on bees for our food – they pollinate one-third of our crops – but between pesticides, disease, habitat loss and the biggest threat of all, according to Varma, the Varroa mite – they are disappearing at an alarming rate.
With this in mind, Varma teamed up with the bee people from UC Davis to figure out a way to film life in the hive, and what they’ve come up with is a miraculous glimpse of the bees’ first 21 days. From egg to squiggling larvae to bona fide buzzing bees; mites included.
Lesioning studies have provided important insight into the functions of brain regions in humans and other animals. In the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, with a small nervous system of 302 identified neurons, it is possible to generate lesions with single cell resolution and infer the roles of individual neurons in behavior.
Scientists now present a dataset of ~300 video recordings representing the locomotor behavior of animals carrying single-cell ablations of 5 different motorneurons. Each file includes a raw video of approximately 27,000 frames; each frame has also been segmented to yield the position, contour, and body curvature of the tracked animal. These recordings can be further analyzed using publicly-available software to extract features relevant to behavioral phenotypes. This dataset therefore represents a useful resource for probing the neural basis of behavior in C. elegans, a resource we hope to augment in the future with ablation recordings for additional neurons.
Mayflies are an indicator species for clean streams and rivers. Most mayflies lay their eggs immediately after mating and the eggs then take anywhere from 10 days to many months to hatch. Cloeon cognatum is an exception because it is ovoviviparous, which means that a mated female holds her eggs internally until embryonic development is complete (about 18 days), after which she lays them in water and they hatch immediately. This female was dropped onto the water surface moments before the video started
Man-made structural colors, which originate from resonant interactions between visible light and manufactured nanostructures, are emerging as a solution for ink-free color printing. Scientists now show that non-iridescent structural colors can be conveniently produced by nanostructures made from high-index dielectric materials. Compared to plasmonic analogs, color surfaces with high-index dielectrics, such as germanium (Ge), have a lower reflectance, yielding a superior color contrast. Taking advantage of band-to-band absorption in Ge, we laser-postprocess Ge color metasurfaces with morphology-dependent resonances. Strong on-resonance energy absorption under pulsed laser irradiation locally elevates the lattice temperature (exceeding 1200 K) in an ultrashort time scale (1 ns). This forms the basis for resonant laser printing, where rapid melting allows for surface energy–driven morphology changes with associated modification of color appearance. Laser-printable high-index dielectric color metasurfaces are scalable to a large area and open a new paradigm for printing and decoration with nonfading and vibrant colors.
Suzanne Gildert is a founder and CTO of Kindred AI – a company pursuing the modest vision of “building machines with human-like intelligence.” Her startup just came out of stealth mode and I am both proud and humbled to say that this is the first ever long-form interview that Suzanne has done. Kindred AI has raised 15 million dollars from notable investors and currently employs 35 experts in their offices in Toronto, Vancouver and San Francisco. Even better, Suzanne is a long term Singularity.FM podcast fan, total tech geek, Gothic artist, PhD in experimental physics and former D-Wave Quantum Computer maker. Right now I honestly can’t think of a more interesting person to have a conversation with.
During our 100 min discussion with Suzanne Gildert we cover a wide variety of interesting topics such as: why she sees herself as a scientist, engineer, maker and artist; the interplay between science and art; the influence of Gothic art in general and the images of angels and demons in particular; her journey from experimental physics into quantum computers and embodied AI; building tools to answer questions versus intelligent machines that can ask questions; the importance of massively transformative purpose; the convergence of robotics, the ability to move large data across networks and advanced machine learning algorithms; her dream of a world with non-biological intelligences living among us; whether she fears AI or not; the importance of embodying intelligence and providing human-like sensory perception; whether consciousness is classical Newtonian emergent properly or a Quantum phenomenon; ethics and robot rights; self-preservation and Asimov’s Laws of Robotics; giving robots goals and values; the magnifying mirror of technology and the importance of asking questions…
A full listing of videos featuring the science, research, programs and staff of the National Human Genome Research Institute, as well as researchers and scientists from around the world.
Many of these videos were created and produced by Genome Productions, a part of the Communications and Public Liaison Branch of the National Human Genome Research Institute. All government-produced video and audio clips are in the public domain and may be freely distributed and copied, but, as a courtesy, it is requested that the National Human Genome Research Institute be given an appropriate acknowledgement: Courtesy: National Human Genome Research Institute.
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