Thursday 13 June 2019

Innovative robot fingers hold promise for assistive living, prosthetics

There's nothing quite like the comforting squeeze of your partner's hand. But a robot's hand? That's perhaps a bit different.

* This article was originally published here

Researchers show glare of energy consumption in the name of deep learning

Wait, what? Creating an AI can be way worse for the planet than a car? Think carbon footprint. That is what a group at the University of Massachusetts Amherst did. They set out to assess the energy consumption that is needed to train four large neural networks.

* This article was originally published here

Southwest pushes back expected return of troubled Boeing jet

Southwest Airlines is delaying expectations for return of the Boeing 737 Max, which remains grounded after two deadly crashes.

* This article was originally published here

Genes for Good project harnesses Facebook to reach larger, more diverse groups of people

In 2015, a group of researchers hypothesized that our collective love of Facebook surveys could be harnessed for serious genetic studies. Today, the Genes for Good project (@genesforgood) has engaged more than 80,000 Facebook users, collected 27,000 DNA spit-kits, and amassed a trove of health survey data on a more diverse group of participants than has previously been possible. Researchers say their app could work as a model for studies on an even larger scale. Their work appears June 13 in The American Journal of Human Genetics.

* This article was originally published here

How to get the jiggle out: 3 exercises to tone your upper arms

(HealthDay)—Getting your upper arms in shape is a worthy ambition in any season, and the triceps are the muscles to target for a sleek look.

* This article was originally published here

UN-ish speeches cooked by artificial intelligence are quite credible

Those who worry about artificial intelligence being so good it spins out of control into making humans robo-victims of cooked lies posing as truth had best ignore the recent study which is sure to disturb their sleep. The paper looks at a successful implementation of AI-generated speeches.

* This article was originally published here

Video games battle for the cloud as industry girds for change

The knock-down, drag-out battle in the video game world heads to the cloud as the premier industry event looks to adapt to a consumer shift to streaming services.

* This article was originally published here

The start of a new era in stem cell therapy

A recent study published in the April 8 issue of Nature Chemical Biology improves on the "Cellular Reprogramming" method developed by Nobel Laureate in Medicine and Physiology Prof. Shinya Yamanaka, making it possible to produce cells in a considerably shorter time and with greater success. Yamanaka's method, which is referred to as "Cellular Reprogramming," obtains pluripotent cells, similar to the ones we know exist in the very early stages of the embryo.Since such cells are obtained by transforming existing cells of the body (such as skin cells), they are referred to as induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS in short.

* This article was originally published here

Harvesters of light

They fan out into lily-pad-shaped disks, branch haphazardly like the antlers of deer, and hold fast to the sea floor in squat little spheres. Corals come in many shapes and sizes—and this diversity in form is driven by sunlight.

* This article was originally published here

Teaching AI agents navigation subroutines by feeding them videos

Researchers at UC Berkeley and Facebook AI Research have recently proposed a new approach that can enhance the navigation skills of machine learning models. Their method, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, allows models to acquire visuo-motor navigation subroutines by processing a series of videos.

* This article was originally published here

Evolving neural networks with a linear growth in their behavior complexity

Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are designed to replicate the behavior and evolution of biological organisms while solving computing problems. In recent years, many researchers have developed EAs and used them to tackle a variety of optimization tasks.

* This article was originally published here