Here they are:
Facebook will “cure, prevent, or manage all diseases in our children’s lifetime.”
A new MIT computer responds to human emotions with almost 90% accuracy.
NASA and Made in Space are going to turn asteroids into spaceships.”
That’s the world we live in. And perhaps it belongs to Mark Zuckerberg after all.
The social media savant has been accused of not just harboring a “God complex” but of actually/figuratively anointing himself The Supreme Being by the cynical/snarky folks at Gizmodo.
That followed Facebook Inc.’s (FB) first-quarter 2016 earnings announcement, after which Zuckerberg posted a bold statement describing his ever-expanding mandate:
While helping to connect the world will always be the most important thing I do, there are more global challenges that I feel a responsibility to help solve — like helping to cure all diseases by the end of this century, upgrading our education system so it’s personalized for each student, and protecting our environment from climate change. That’s why Priscilla and I created the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and committed to give 99% of our Facebook shares during our lives to advance human potential and promote equality.
This week, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative put some meat on those bones, introducing the $3 billion Chan Zuckerberg Science plan during a Facebook Live event.
Zuckerberg identified three basic goals: to bring scientists and engineers together, to build tools and technology that advance research, and to grow the movement to fund more science around the world.
The first step is a $600 million investment in what Zuckerberg called the Biohub, a new research project at the University of California, San Francisco (the medical school where Mark’s wife Priscilla received her pediatric training) that will also involve scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University.
That’s the world we live in. And perhaps it belongs to Mark Zuckerberg after all.
Biohub has two initial forays: the Cell Atlas, a compendium of the cells that comprise the human body’s major organs; and the Infectious Disease Initiative, which focuses on treatments for diseases including HIV and the Zika virus.
It’s just the latest health-focused announcement by a high-profile tech outfit.
Earlier this week, Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) described how its computer scientists, programmers and engineers are working “to use computer science to solve one of the most complex and deadly challenges humans face: cancer.
Indeed, Bill Gates actually delivered the coda at the Zuckerberg-Chan announcement.
And on September 20, IBM’s (IBM) research unit established a collaborative partnership with the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences at MIT “to advance the scientific field of machine vision, a core aspect of artificial intelligence.”
According to IBM:
The new IBM-MIT Laboratory for Brain-inspired Multimedia Machine Comprehension’s (BM3C) goal will be to develop cognitive computing systems that emulate the human ability to understand and integrate inputs from multiple sources of audio and visual information into a detailed computer representation of the world that can be used in a variety of computer applications in industries such as healthcare, education and entertainment.
Speaking of artificial intelligence…
Emotion, Robotics, and AI
Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have created “a device that can detect a person’s emotions using wireless signals.”
“EQ-Radio” emits wireless signals that bounce from the subject’s body back to the device. A “beat-extraction algorithm” reads the reflections, establishes intervals and identifies variations.
From these measurements, EQ-Radio is able to establish “levels of arousal and positive effect” and thus detect emotion.
The MIT CSAIL team will present its research at the Association of Computing Machinery’s International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCon) in October.
The technology improves on relatively unreliable facial recognition methods, and it’s much more convenient than on-body sensors.
Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have created “a device that can detect a person’s emotions using wireless signals.”
According to MIT professor Dina Katabi, “Our work shows that wireless signals can capture information about human behavior that is not always visible to the naked eye.”
In addition to applications in entertainment, understanding human behavior, and healthcare, Katabi believes that EQ-Radio “could pave the way for future technologies that could help monitor and diagnose conditions like depression and anxiety.”
This is an important step toward infusing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning with emotion. EQ-Radio enhances “computer vision” and has the potential to make “deep learning” even deeper.
It works two ways. And the duality has important implications for AI and robotics.
As CSAIL Ph.D. student and study co-author Mingmin Zhao noted in an interview with IEEE Spectrum, “Smart homes could use information about your emotions to adjust the music or even suggest that you get some fresh air if you’ve been sad for a few days.”
At the same time, data on human emotions can be stored so that an AI-enabled robot can continuously learn and develop deeper “human” understanding.
The combination of Zuckerberg’s billions, AI, and robotics advances may help us live forever. If that happens, we’re going to get off Earth, which is going to get destroyed when the sun burns out.
The good news is we may have a new means of getting off this rock…
3-D Printing-Enabled Space Travel
The idea of using asteroids in service of space travel isn’t particularly new.
Gregory Matloff, emeritus associate and adjunct associate professor of physics at New York City College of Technology, published a paper in the March-April 2011 issue of the journal Acta Astronautica that calculated the case for asteroids as “taxis” for astronauts on the way to Mars.
With more than 7,000 “near-Earth objects” available for plotting a workable course, a spaceship could hop from one passing asteroid to another. One of the critical threshold problems for interplanetary travel, however, is exposure to cosmic radiation.
Matloff’s approach would employ the asteroids as shields against this damaging effect.
On April 7, 2016, NASA and Made in Space Inc. upped the game, announcing Project RAMA, a study “to establish the concept feasibility of using the age-old technique of analog computers and mechanisms to convert entire asteroids into enormous autonomous mechanical spacecraft.”
If NASA and Made in Space can put it all together, we may see an asteroid spaceship by the mid-2030s.
Made in Space is already living up to its name, with the world’s first zero-gravity 3-D printer in operation right now on the International Space Station (ISS). And in April, the company’s Additive Manufacturing Facility was installed on the ISS.
According to Made in Space:
AMF… can be accessed by any Earth-bound customer for job-specific work, like a machine shop in space. Example use cases include a medical device company prototyping space optimized designs, a satellite manufacturer testing new deployable geometries or creating tools for ISS crew members.
NASA is already working on a robotic mission to a near-Earth asteroid that would grab a boulder from the asteroid surface and then redirect the boulder into orbit around the moon. There astronauts would study the boulder and bring samples back to Earth.
The goal is to get this project done by the mid-2020s.
Project RAMA combines Made in Space’s existing technologies with to-be-developed systems to accomplish a truly out-of-this-world objective: “to enable asteroid rendezvous missions in which a set of technically simple robotic processes convert asteroid elements into very basic versions of spacecraft subsystems (GNC, Propulsion, Avionics).”
Yeah, all of this sounds out of this world. But the compelling thing is the basic technological building blocks for Project RAMA already exist.
If NASA and Made in Space can put it all together, we may see an asteroid spaceship by the mid-2030s.
Old Things New
If all you could say about The Big Sleep is that it provided the inspiration/template/cinematic source material for The Big Lebowski, well, you’d have gone a long way with me.
Both are full of noir — darkness and shadows, smoke and rain, drinking and leering, absurdity and alienation, immorality and deviance, ambiguous virtue, and obvious vice.
And while The Big Lebowski goes there in a way only possible in a post-Production Code universe, The Big Sleep accomplishes a high degree of sexuality through suggestion — via the lips, eyes, swaggers, lilts and bobs of its actors, well-timed jump cuts in the editing process and straight-up innuendo when it comes to strictly unmentionable types of relationships.
Howard Hawks paired young, up-and-coming writer Leigh Brackett with William Faulkner. Brackett, much to Hawks’ surprise, was not a man but the 28-year-old woman who had written another hard-boiled detective novel the famed director had read. By then, Faulkner was just trying to make some money in Hollywood but he maintained his gift for pathos and a fine ear for dialogue.
Brackett and Faulkner did well with Raymond Chandler’s novel, and Hawks capitalized on the simmering state of affairs between stars Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.
The plot is not quite byzantine but certainly hard to follow. No matter; it’s all mood, atmosphere and chemistry.
There are far worse ways to spend 116 minutes on the first weekend of fall (including getting a jump on the seasonal leaf-raking, for instance).
Smart Investing,
David Dittman
Editorial Director, Wall Street Daily
The post Three Sentences That Will Blow Your Mind appeared first on Wall Street Daily.
By David Dittman
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