KS12 | What are young adults thinking about money and value? How can we create new systems of wealth generation and abundance?

What does the future hold for banks and other financial institutions in the wake of massive peer to peer exchange? The future of money begins a conversation on these topics and invites your participation.

This video was created as part of Venessa Miemis’ presentation at the Sibos conference in Amsterdam in 2010. The interviews were conducted with participants in America, England, Sweden, Mexico, Germany and Thailand from Berlin, Germany.

on the web | essentials

KS12 | Vimeo channel
Sibos | main

Emergence Collective | main
Emergence Collective | the future of money

infographic | the future of money + mobile payments

Dr. Demis Hassabis is the Co-Founder and CEO of DeepMind, the world’s leading General Artificial Intelligence (AI) company, which was acquired by Google in 2014 in their largest ever European acquisition. Demis will draw on his eclectic experiences as an AI researcher, neuroscientist and video games designer to discuss what is happening at the cutting edge of AI research, including the recent historic AlphaGo match, and its future potential impact on fields such as science and healthcare, and how developing AI may help us better understand the human mind. — CBMM

“One of our goals over this next year is kind of create the rat-level AI, an AI agent that’s capable of doing all the things a rat can do.” — Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind

Spot-Mini performs some tasks by itself — but often uses a human for high-level guidance.

Boston Dynamics | main
Boston Dynamics

Academy Award-nominated director Orlando von Einsiedel, Executive Producer J.J. Abrams, Bad Robot and Epic Digital have joined forces with Google and XPRIZE to create a documentary web series about the people competing for the Google Lunar XPRIZE.

The Google Lunar XPRIZE is the largest prize competition of all time with a reward of $30 million and aims to incentivize entrepreneurs to create a new era of affordable access to the Moon and beyond, while inspiring the next generation of scientists, engineers, and explorers.

This character-driven, emotional, awe-inspiring series of 9 short films will follow a selection of the teams currently racing to complete their missions. It will explore the lives of their charismatic, quirky members, the sacrifices they have made to get to where they are today, and crucially, what drives them on this incredible journey.

Follow us here to catch the series, and on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+.

— Google Lunar XPRIZE

“Everything in my mind works like a search engine set for the image function.” — Temple Grandin in 2008, from an oral history at Colorado State University

You’ve probably heard the story that Einstein – whose name is synonymous with genius — didn’t seem destined for much when he was a small child. He was years behind other children when it came to learning to talk, he did horribly in school. It seems that Einstein’s brain just worked differently than most other people’s. And many people these days are saying that Einstein was probably autistic — one of them is Temple Grandin.

Temple Grandin is a professor of animal sciences who’s worked in the meat industry to invent kinder ways to lead cattle to slaughter. She’s also autistic – the high-functioning version known as Asperger’s Syndrome. Autism, in case you don’t know, is a brain disorder that tends to affect people’s social skills, like the ability to read facial expressions and body language, but it can also mean extraordinary talent in math, music and the visual arts.

Temple Grandin has become something of a celebrity of autism. She’s written books, given TED talks, and she’s been around the world to speak on the subject. Claire Danes has even played her in a movie about her life.

As part of our special series, The Experimenters — where we uncover interviews with the icons of science, technology, and innovation… — we found this interview in the holdings of Colorado State University, where Temple teaches. In this conversation, Temple’s at her best, explaining for the rest of us what it’s really like to have an autistic brain and how Einstein’s not the only genius who could have been dismissed for being different.

— Blank on Blank

• Understanding how the brain works: “The brain is 400 different computers.”
• Modeling and building a brain: “You can’t do it from the bottom up.”
• Backing up the brain: “There’s no ‘you.’ … I’m not exactly like I was five minutes ago….”
• Is the brain “just” a machine? “There’s no person in here … identity is an illusion.”
• Emotional intelligence: “‘Emotions are different from thinking’: that’s nonsense.”
• Human-level artificial intelligence: “We will need AIs because longevity is increasing. … There will be no one to do the work. … We’ll need to find something else to do.”
• Unfriendly AI: “Machines may re-compile themselves. … People say, ‘Scientists should be more responsible for what they do.’ The fact is, the scientist is no better and possibly worse than the average person at deciding what’s good and what’s bad, and if you ask scientists to spend a lot of time deciding what to invent or not, all you can get from that is that they won’t invent some things that might be wonderful.”
• Is the Singularity near? “Yes, depending on what you mean by ‘near’ … It may well be, within our lifetimes.”

Deep Learning in Action | A talk by Juergen Schmidhuber, PhD at the Deep Learning in Action talk series in October 2015. He is professor in computer science at the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research, part of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland.*

Juergen Schmidhuber, PhD | I review 3 decades of our research on both gradient based and more general problem solvers that search the space of algorithms running on general purpose computers with internal memory.

Architectures include traditional computers, Turing machines, recurrent neural networks, fast weight networks, stack machines, and others. Some of our algorithm searchers are based on algorithmic information theory and are optimal in asymptotic or other senses.

Most can learn to direct internal and external spotlights of attention. Some of them are self-referential and can even learn the learning algorithm itself, recursive self-improvement. Without a teacher, some of them can reinforcement learn to solve very deep algorithmic problems — involving billions of steps — not feasible for more recent memory based deep learners.

And algorithms learned by our long short term memory recurrent networks defined the state of the art in handwriting recognition, speech recognition, natural language processing, machine translation, image caption generation, etc. Google and other companies made them available to over a billion users.

about | The event Deep Learning in Action is organized by the Association of Computing Machinery* — Munich, Germany student chapter. The chapter advances computing as a science and profession by supporting and training the next generation. They invite distinguished speakers from academia and industry to speak at lecture halls, encouraging students to present their hacks publicly, and providing opportunities to explore latest tech with the chapter’s hackspace and the forefront of computer research with its student labs — to collaborate, define and solve tomorrow’s problems.

related reading:
Deep Learning in Action | main
Wikipedia | Juergen Schmidhuber, PhD

Wikipedia | algorithm
Wikipedia | artificial intelligence
Wikipedia | artificial neural networks
Wikipedia | automated reasoning
Wikipedia | deep learning
Wikipedia | machine learning
Wikipedia | natural language processing

University of Applied Sciences + Arts of Southern Switzerland | Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research
University of Applied Sciences + Arts of Southern Switzerland | Juergen Schmidhuber, PhD

blog | How bio inspired deep learning keeps winning competitions
Fast ML | Juergen Schmidhuber PhD answers from Reddit “ask me anything”

Association of Computing Machinery | main
Association of Computing Machinery | student chapter of Munich, Germany: main
Association of Computing Machinery | student chapter of Munich, Germany: YouTube channel

about | Juergen Schmidhuber, PhD is a German computer scientist and artist known for his work on machine learning, artificial intelligence, artificial neural networks, digital physics, and low complexity art. His contributions also include generalizations of Kolmogorov complexity and the Speed Prior. From 2004 to 2009 he was professor of cognitive robotics at the Technical University of Munich.

Since 1995 he has been co-director of the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research* — part of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland.*

Between 2009 and 2012, the recurrent neural networks and deep feed-forward neural networks developed in his research group, have won 8 international competitions in pattern recognition and machine learning. He was elected to the European Academy of Sciences and Arts in 2008.

* IDSIA is the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research
* SUPSI is the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland
* ACM is the Association of Computing Machinery

related reading:
NASA | main*
NASA | Piece by Piece — NASA team moves closer to building a 3D printed rocket engine

Wired | NASA fires up rocket engine made of 3D printed parts

* NASA is United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration

credit | NASA

— American Chemical Society

Watch the video above with 3D glasses for proper effect. — credit | Keiichi Matsuda

Keiichi Matsuda | Augmented City 3D — an artist’s concept of embedded, real time augmented reality.

The architecture of the contemporary city is no longer simply about the physical space of buildings and landscape, more and more it is about the synthetic spaces created by the digital information that we collect, consume and organize.

An immersive interface may become as much part of the world we inhabit as the buildings around us. Augmented reality is an emerging technology defined by its ability to overlay physical space with information.

Image from the concept film Augmented City 3D. — credit | Keiichi Matsuda

It is part of a paradigm shift that succeeds virtual reality. Instead of disembodied occupation of virtual worlds, the physical and virtual are seen together as a contiguous, layered and dynamic whole.

It may lead to a world where media is indistinguishable from “reality.” The spatial organization of data has important implications for architecture, as we re-evaluate the city as an immersive human computer interface.

related reading:
Keiichi Matsuda | main
Keiichi Matsuda | YouTube channel
Keiichi Matsuda | Augmented City 3D

credit | Harry Campbell

The Daily Conversation | The future of driverless cars. Autonomous vehicles have made significant progress in the last decade. This report looks at the history of self driving vehicles, and where the industry is heading.

An autonomous car — also called a driverless car, self driving car, robotic car — is an automated vehicle capable of sensing its environment and driving without human input, or with limited human interaction. Robotic cars are mainly prototypes and demonstrations. Several major companies and research organizations have working prototypes.

Concept sketch of a driverless car. — credit | Mercedes Benzreading:

Wikipedia | vehicular automation
Wikipedia | mechatronics

Wikipedia | autonomous car
Wikipedia | history of autonomous cars

related infographics:
Related set of infographics on automated automobiles.

infographic 1:

credit | Josh McKibble

infographic 2:

credit | United Kingdom Department for Transport

infographic 3:

credit | BMW

infographic 4:

credit | James Provost

Related set of videos from Innovate United Kingdom’s Catapult transport systems research and development center.

video 1:

Innovate United Kingdom’s Catapult — transport systems | Tech talk on two of our most exciting projects, from autonomous pods that can drive themselves to how we’re reducing take off delays at airports.

Lutz Pathfinder driverless pod prototype. — credit | Innovate United Kingdom’s transport systems

video 2:

Innovate United Kingdom’s Catapult — transport systems | An explanation the goal for intelligent mobility.

video 3:

Innovate United Kingdom’s Catapult — transport systems | Imagination, innovation, and intelligent mobility are imovation. Catapult’s transport systems story in a nutshell.

Wikipedia | Innovate United Kingdom
Wikipedia | Catapult centers

Innovate United Kingdom — Catapult | main
Innovate United Kingdom — Catapult | transport systems
Innovate United Kingdom — Catapult | YouTube channel: main
Innovate United Kingdom — Catapult | YouTube channel: transport systems

The Daily Conversation is an independent news network that explores a wide range of well researched topics. We are a progressive news and information source bringing you intelligent, interesting, important stories in a documentary style.

Our video stories and breaking news range from science, history, technology, health, business, politics & sports.

The Daily Conversation | main
The Daily Conversation | YouTube channel

PBS Newshour | Teaching computers how to play Atari better than humans.

This version of Atari’s “Space Invaders” isn’t being played by a person, but a system of computer algorithms that is learning how to play it just by looking at the pixels on the screen.

related reading:
PBS | Newshour
PBS | YouTube channel: main
PBS | YouTube channel: Newshour

full transcript:

GWEN IFILL: Playing video games might seem like child’s play. But as Tom Clarke of Independent Television News reports, it’s also at the frontier of artificial intelligence.

TOM CLARKE: It was the late 1970s, and for the first generation of video gamers, Atari was king. By the standards of the day, the graphics were mind blowing.

The sound was out of this world. And the selection of games just went on and on and on. Compared to the video games of today, Atari looks pretty clunky.

The games are still quite difficult to play, especially if you haven’t picked one up for 30 years, like me. But it’s that exact combination of simple graphics, but quite challenging game play, that has attracted the cutting edge of artificial intelligence researchers back to the 1970s.

Atari “Space Invaders” played by a system of computer algorithms that is learning how to play by looking at pixels on screen. — credit | Atari

This version of “Space Invaders” isn’t being played by a person, but a system of computer algorithms that is learning how to play it just by looking at the pixels on the screen.

It may not sound like it, but it’s something of a breakthrough, the work of one of the finest young minds in AI research, North Londoner Demis Hassabis.

DEMIS HASSABIS, Vice President, DeepMind Technologies: We don’t actually give any clues to the system about what it is supposed to do in the game, what it’s controlling, how it gets a score, what’s valuable in the game, what the right strategies are. It has to learn all those things from first principles.

TOM CLARKE: Hassabis shows me his system playing the classic paddle game “Breakout.”

DEMIS HASSABIS: So now, about two hours in, now it can play the game pretty much as good as any human, professional human player could, even when it’s coming at very fast angles. And then we thought, well, that’s pretty good, but what would happen if we just left it playing for another couple of hours?

And then it did this unexpected thing where it found the optimal strategy was to dig a tunnel around the side and send the ball behind the wall, which is obviously the optimal strategy and the safest strategy.

TOM CLARKE: Out of 49 completely different Atari games tested, the system played more than half of them better than a human, a simple demonstration of what A.I. researchers call general nontrivial intelligence.

DEMIS HASSABIS: This is what the essence of intelligence is, is finding structure and meaning in your perception inputs, and then being able to act intelligently to make a plan using that model of the world.

TOM CLARKE: And that’s what this is?

DEMIS HASSABIS: And that’s what the system does, yes.

But it’s important to discuss some of the risks and make sure we’re aware of those. And it’s decades and decades away before we will have anything that is powerful enough to be a worry, but we should be discussing that and beginning that conversation now.

TOM CLARKE: They have been around since the 1970s, and the machines haven’t taken over yet — but humanity, watch this space.

Cambridge University & Toshiba | Meet Zoe, a digital talking head that can express human emotions on demand with unprecedented realism and could herald a new era of human computer interaction.

A virtual talking head that can express a full range of human emotions and could be used as a digital personal assistant, or to replace texting with face messaging, has been developed by researchers. The lifelike face can display emotions such as happiness, anger, and fear, and changes its voice to suit any feeling the user wants it to simulate.

Users can type in any message, specifying the requisite emotion as well, and the face recites the text. According to its designers, it is the most expressive controllable avatar ever created, replicating human emotions with unprecedented realism.

The system, called Zoe, is the result of a collaboration between researchers at Toshiba’s Cambridge Research Lab and the University of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering. Students spotted a striking resemblance between the head and the ship’s computer “Holly” in science fiction comedy Red Dwarf.

(credit: Cambridge University & Toshiba Cambridge Research Lab )

The face is Zoe Lister’s, an actress known as Zoe Carpenter in the series, Hollyoaks.

To recreate her face and voice, researchers spent several days recording Zoe’s speech and facial expressions.

The result is a system that is light enough to work in mobile technology.

It could also be used as a personal assistant in smartphones, or to “face message” friends.

The framework behind Zoe is a template that could enable people to upload their own faces and voices — but in a matter of seconds, rather than days.

That means in the future, users will be able to customize and personalize their own, emotionally realistic, digital assistants. For example, you could text the message “I’m going to be late” and ask it to set the emotion to “frustrated.”

Your friend would then receive a “face message” that looked like the sender, repeating the message in a frustrated way. The team who created Zoe are currently looking for applications, working with a school for autistic and deaf children, where the technology could help them read emotions and lip read.

Ultimately, the system could have multiple uses — including gaming, audio-visual books, online lectures, and other user interfaces.

“This could be the start of a new generation of interfaces that make computer interaction more like talking to a human,” said Professor Roberto Cipolla, from the Department of Engineering, Cambridge University.

“It took days to create Zoe. We had to teach the system to understand language and expression. Now that it understands those things, it shouldn’t be too hard to transfer the same blueprint to a different voice and face.”

As well as being more expressive than any previous system, Zoe is also remarkably data light. The program used to run her is just tens of megabytes in size, and can be easily incorporated into the smallest computer devices, including tablets and smartphones.

It works by using a set of fundamental, “primary color” emotions. Zoe’s voice, for example, has six basic settings — Happy, Sad, Tender, Angry, Afraid and Neutral. The user can adjust the settings to different levels, as well as altering the pitch, speed and depth of the voice itself.

By combining these levels, it becomes possible to pre-set or create almost infinite emotional combinations. For example, combining happiness with tenderness and slightly increasing the speed and depth of the voice makes it sound friendly and welcoming. A combination of speed, anger and fear makes Zoe sound as if she is panicking. This allows for a level of emotional subtlety which, the designers say, has not been possible in other avatars like Zoe until now.

To make the system as realistic as possible, the research team collected a data set of thousands of sentences, which they used to train the speech model with the help of real-life actress, Zoe Lister. They also tracked Lister’s face while she was speaking using computer vision software. This was converted into voice and face-modelling, mathematical algorithms which gave them the voice and image data they needed to recreate expressions on a digital face, directly from the text alone.

The effectiveness of the system was tested with volunteers via a crowd sourcing website. The participants were each given either a video or audio clip of a single sentence from the test set, and asked to identify which of the six basic emotions it was replicating. Ten sentences were evaluated, each by 20 different people.

Volunteers who only had video and no sound successfully recognized the emotion in 52% of cases. When they only had audio, the success rate was 68%. The two together, however, produced a successful recognition rate of 77% — slightly higher than the recognition rate for the real life Zoe, which was 73%.

This higher rate of success compared with real life is probably because the synthetic talking head is deliberately more stylized in its manner. As well as finding applications for their new creation, the research team will now work on creating a version of the system which can be personalized by users themselves.

“Present day human-computer interaction still revolves around typing at a keyboard or moving and pointing with a mouse.” Cipolla added. “For a lot of people, that makes computers difficult and frustrating to use. In the future, we will be able to open up computing to far more people if they can speak and gesture to machines in a more natural way.

That is why we created Zoe — a more expressive, emotionally responsive face that human beings can actually have a conversation with.”

related reading:
Cambridge University | Department of Engineering
Cambridge University | YouTube channel
Toshiba | Cambridge Research Lab

Air Shepherd | Join us to stop the poaching of elephants and rhinos. 40,000 elephants were killed by poachers last year. Drones and supercomputers can stop it.

With 40% of the goal already raised, the campaign runs until April 11th, 2015 so there is still time to support this humane initiative. Visit the Indiegogo campaign to contibute to the project.

fundraising:
Indiegogo | Air Shepherd drones stop elephant & rhino poaching
Facebook | Air Shepherd

related reading:
Lindbergh Foundation | main
Lindbergh Foundation | Air Shepherd

Air Shepherd | YouTube channel
UAV & Drone Solutions | main

University of Maryland | Institute for Advanced Computing: main
University of Maryland | Institute for Advanced Computing: anti-poaching engine project

The Huffington Post | Algorithms for elephants and rhinos
by Celia Black

It is twilight, between 6:30 pm and 8:30 pm. A team of poachers feigns a distressed vehicle on a roadside near an animal reserve somewhere in southern Africa.

Having scouted the animal earlier in the day, or having been tipped off by a corrupt official or willing tribesman, they quickly move into action. They kill, cut off horns and tusks, and rapidly leave the area, all under the cover of darkness. Poachers operate under the cover of night — rangers haven’t had an effective way to anticipate where attacks are likely to occur across the vast land areas that need protecting — until now.

Air Shepherd, a new initiative of the Lindbergh Foundation is bringing together technology partners: Peace Parks Foundation (PPF), UAV and Drone Solutions (UDS) and the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), for an innovative new approach to successfully stop poaching of elephants and rhinos in southern Africa.

Exponential loss

Africa is loosing about 7% of its elephant population to poaching annually, according to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, nearly 40,000 elephants were killed by poachers last year alone.

Elephant births occur at a rate of only 5% annually — this means, more elephants are being killed than are being born. At this rate, based on current animal population rates from the African Elephant Database (AED), all elephants in the wild will be dead in approximately ten years.

(credit: Air Shepherd)

The situation is equally dire for rhinos, according to 2015 data published by the South African Department of Environmental Affairs an astounding 1,215 rhinos were killed by poachers in South Africa in 2014 — that’s 3 rhinos per day — one rhino every eight hours.

The Western black rhino was declared extinct by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in 2011 with poaching indicated as the primary cause. The IUCN has recently placed all five remaining rhinos species on the RED LIST of threatened species. Three out of five rhino species are classified as critically endangered due to poaching. As with elephants, we will soon reach a tipping point with rhinos as well, where deaths outpace births.

(credit: Save the Rhino)

Exponential demand

The demand for ivory is a new phenomenon that has grown exponentially over the last ten years. Tusks can be worth $150,000 or more and an average rhino horn (1-3 kg each, depending on the species) can garner over a quarter million dollars. The price per kilogram on the black market has soared to as much as $65,000 per kilogram, or nearly $30,000 per pound, making it more valuable per ounce than gold, platinum or cocaine.

Since 2000, the burgeoning middle class in China has been driving the demand for ivory carvings and trinkets to symbolize their new found wealth. Likewise, Vietnam is leading the demand for rhino horn, where it is being ground into a powder as an additive for cocktails, touted as cure for cancer and hangovers, and to increase virility.

In a survey carried out by TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring network, they identified that these consumers are motivated primarily by image and status among their peers.

Elephant tusks and rhino horns flow from east African ports to Asia. (credit: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime)

The illegal wildlife trade is emerging as one of the world’s most lucrative criminal activities. Well organized syndicates operating as transnational criminal networks linked to poaching often participate in other illegal activities, including trafficking of narcotics and weapons, some with ties to terrorist networks.

According to a report by Chatham House, smuggling of endangered species and their products mainly from sub-Saharan Africa by international organized crime rings and armed groups is now worth as much as $10 billion annually.

The methods currently being employed to stop elephant and rhino poaching are simply not enough to combat the problem.

Drones and Data make the Difference

Tom Snitch, PhD, at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computing has developed breakthrough technology, APE (Anti-Poaching Engine).

It uses sophisticated predictive analytic software, originally developed for the military to predict insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with high resolution satellite imagery, intricate mathematics and complex algorithms to determine exactly where animals and poachers are likely to be on a given night.

Snitch makes the analogy that rhinos are to US troops as poachers are to terroristic bombers saying, “we used UAVs in Baghdad to find IED bombers and now we are using UAVs to find poachers in South Africa.”

Photo of mobile aerial command with UAVs. (credit: UDS)

The UAVs operated by UDS, are equipped with infrared cameras and GPS to identify animals and poachers with thermal imaging. They can see any heat image moving across the plains at night in real time.

The drones are battery powered — almost completely silent and nearly invisible, providing operators with the critical intelligence necessary to rapidly deploy rangers to the location of the poacher before he kills.

“We don’t necessarily look for poachers, but we really need to know where the animals are. With this knowledge, we can fly UAVs in the African night sky with infrared cameras to alert us to where the poachers are coming from to attack the prey,” said Snitch.

Mathematics and migration models

According to Snitch, he mathematically recreates what the environment was like on nights that experienced poaching in order to identify patterns of behavior. A massive amount of data is collected such as, weather conditions, wind speeds, moon phases, criminal events, ranger patrol patterns, and animal migration models — and then superimposed on high resolution satellite imagery of the area to create maps.

These maps help to determine UAV flight paths, “the algorithms tell us precisely where the UAVs should look for rhinos and poachers and the model strategically places the rangers very near the animals” says, Snitch. APE has been predicting where poaching is likely to happen with more than 90% accuracy.

Seven African countries have asked us to develop anti-poaching programs. Countries need multiple Air Shepherd teams. Our goal is to rapidly proliferate our capability across Africa and dramatically reduce big-time poaching. (credit: Air Shepherd)

UAVs transmit infrared images in real time to operators in mobile command units– rangers that have been pre-positioned are vectored to precise locations when poachers are identified.

“In short, our team has created the world’s most sophisticated model of poaching behavior,” said Tom Snitch, “we have completed analytical studies of how animals, poachers, rangers and UAVs simultaneously move through space and time.

In tests conducted in association with Peace Parks Foundation over the last 24 months, in over 650 missions flown, and over 1000 flight-hours, no animals were killed while drones were in flight according to Air Shepherd officials.

“We have the distinct potential of being able to turn the tables on this threatening trend in a very short time,” said John Petersen, chairman Lindbergh Foundation, “once we have these teams in the field, our experience says that the killing starts to rapidly grind to a stop.”

SANParks (South African National Parks) announced Thursday that these UAV solutions are an integral part of the current strategy to combat rhino poaching in the Kruger National Park.

The Lindbergh Foundation aims to raise $500,000 through Indiegogo to fully implement the Air Shepherd program for one year at Ezemvelo KwaZulu-Natal Wildlife.

Its future plan is to expand into seven additional African countries that have indicated an interest in implementing the program.

related viewing from Inside Edition:

Inside Edition | Endangered rhinoceroses and elephants have a fighting chance against poachers thanks to drone technology.

Over 100,000 elephants were poached in the last three years and 1,200 rhinos were killed last year alone.

Poachers are killing the magnificent animals for the elephant usks and rhino horns. But now, supercomputer powered drones are chasing away poachers day and night.

related reading:
Gizmag | Air Shepherd drones keep a watchful eye over endangered species
EE Times | Big data sets drones to fly
Network Computing | Drone initiative saves elephants from poaching

About the Lindbergh Foundation

In 1977, the 50th Anniversary year of Charles Lindbergh’s epic New York to Paris flight, friends of the Lindbergh’s at The Explorers Club in New York City conceived the idea and General James H. Doolittle and Astronaut Neil Armstrong led a national campaign that resulted in the establishment of the Charles A. and Anne Morrow Lindbergh Foundation.

For decades, the Lindbergh Foundation has been a leader in encouraging the use of technology to protect the environment. The foundation focuses on technological breakthroughs to address environmental issues. The foundation is supported by contributions from individuals, companies, foundations, and other organizations.

related viewing from the Lindbergh Foundation:

related reading:
Lindbergh Foundation | YouTube channel

In theaters March 6

— Sony Pictures

The Voxel8 printer truly allows you to combine electronics with novel mechanical forms. Visit voxel8.co for more information. What would you print?

— Voxel8

Hat tip: “Starheart”

By 2020, 30 billion connected devices will generate unprecedented amounts of data. The infrastructure required to collect, process, store, and analyze this data requires transformational changes in the foundations of computing. Bottom line: current systems can’t handle where we are headed and we need a new solution.

HP has that solution in The Machine. By discarding a computing model that has stood unchallenged for sixty years, we are poised to leave sixty years of compromises and inefficiencies behind. We’re pushing the boundaries of the physics behind IT, using electrons for computation, photons for communication, and ions for storage.

The Machine will fuse memory and storage, flatten complex data hierarchies, bring processing closer to the data, embed security control points throughout the hardware and software stacks, and enable management and assurance of the system at scale.

The Machine will reinvent the fundamental architecture of computers to enable a quantum leap in performance and efficiency, while lowering costs over the long term and improving security.

The industry is at a technology inflection point that HP is uniquely positioned to take advantage of going forward. The Machine demonstrates the innovation agenda that will drive our company, and the world, forward.

— HP

related reading:
Wikipedia | Juergen Schmidhuber, PhD

excerpt | Jürgen Schmidhuber, PhD, is a computer scientist and artist known for his work on machine learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), artificial neural networks, digital physics, and low-complexity art. His contributions also include generalizations of Kolmogorov complexity and the Speed Prior. From 2004 to 2009 he was professor of Cognitive Robotics at the Tech. University Munich. Since 1995 he has been co-director of the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA in Lugano, since 2009 also professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Lugano. Between 2009 and 2012, the recurrent neural networks and deep feedforward neural networks developed in his research group have won eight international competitions in pattern recognition and machine learning.^[1] In honor of his achievements he was elected to the European Academy of Sciences and Arts in 2008.

Recently, professor Juergen Schmidhuber gave a dozen talks on “Deep Learning” in New York and the Bay Area, for the ML meetup in the Empire State Building, Yahoo, SciHampton, IBM Watson, Google Palo Alto, SciFoo at the Googleplex, Stanford University, ML meetup San Francisco, ICSI, Berkeley University. Similar material was used for invited plenary talks / keynotes at KAIST 2014 (South Korea), ICONIP 2014 (Malaysia), INNS-CIIS 2014 (Brunei). Links to videos are listed below.

Typical title:  Deep Learning RNNaissance (abstract above)

Talk slides: http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/deeplearning2014slides.pdf

Outline of slides:

– First Deep Learning (DL) (Ivakhnenko, 1965)

– History of backpropagation: Bryson, Kelley, Dreyfus (early 1960s), Linnainmaa (1970), Speelpenning (1980), Werbos (1981), Rumelhart et al (1986), others

– Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) – the deepest of all NNs – search in general program space!

– 1991: Fundamental DL problem (FDLP) of gradient-based NNs (Hochreiter, my 1st student, now prof)

– 1991: Our deep unsupervised stack of recurrent NNs (RNNs) overcomes the FDLP: the Neural History Compressor or Hierarchical Temporal Memory / related to autoencoder stacks (Ballard, 1987) and Deep Belief Nets (Hinton et al, 2006)

– Our purely supervised deep Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) RNN overcomes the FDLP without any unsupervised pre-training (1990s, 2001, 2003, 2006-, with Hochreiter, Gers, Graves, Fernandez, Wierstra, Gomez, others)

– How LSTM became the first RNN to win controlled contests (2009), and set standards in connected handwriting and speech recognition

– Industrial breakthroughs of 2014: Google / Microsoft / IBM used LSTM to improve machine translation, image caption generation, speech recognition / text-to-speech synthesis / prosody detection

– 2010: How our deep GPU-based NNs trained by backprop (3-5 decades old) + training pattern deformations (2 decades old) broke the MNIST record

– History of feedforward max-pooling (MP) convolutional NNs (MPCNNs, Fukushima 1979-, Weng 1992, LeCun et al 1989-2000s, others)

– How our ensembles of GPU-based MPCNNs (Ciresan et al, 2011) became the first DL systems to achieve superhuman visual pattern recognition (traffic signs), and to win contests in image segmentation (brain images, 2012) and visual object detection (cancer cells, 2012, 2013) / fast MPCNN image scans (Masci et al, 2013)

– Why it’s all about data compression

– 2014: 20 year anniversary of self-driving cars in highway traffic (Dickmanns, 1994)

– Reinforcement Learning (RL): How NN-based planning robots won the RoboCup in the fast league (Foerster et al, 2004)

– Our deep RL through Compressed NN Search applied to huge RNN video game controllers that learn to process raw video input (Koutnik et al, 2013)

– Formal theory of fun and creativity

Selected videos of those talks, with variations due to questions from the audience:

1. New York City Machine Learning Meetup hosted by ShutterStock in the Empire State Building:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bOMf9zr7N8

Also at Vimeo:

http://vimeo.com/113402131

2. ICSI, Berkeley:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4FqFss9hEY

3. Bay Area ML Meetup hosted by upsight.com in downtown San Francisco:

https://vimeo.com/105972440

4. Google, Palo Alto (only voice and slides):

http://youtu.be/obGrn1oVJsY

Numerous earlier videos:

http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/videos.html

Details in the invited Deep Learning Survey (88 pages, 888 references):

http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning-overview.html

http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.7828

Published online by Neural Networks (2014):

http://authors.elsevier.com/a/1Q3Bc3BBjKFZVN

Hardcopy to appear in Vol. 61, p. 85–117, January 2015

Life 2.0 film trailer:

Life 2.0 | This feature length documentary follows a group of people whose lives are dramatically transformed by a virtual world — reshaping relationships, identities, and ultimately the very notion of reality.

Roco Films | Every day, across all corners of the globe, millions of users log onto Second Life, a virtual online world populated by real lifelike avatars.

Life 2.0 follows a group of people whose lives are dramatically consumed by the virtual world of Second Life.

They reside in this new reality, where inhabitants assume alternate personas in the form of avatars — with digital alter egos that can be sculpted and manipulated on a whim.

More than an examination of a hot new technology, Life 2.0 is an intimate, character based drama about people who look to a virtual world in search of something they are missing in their real lives. The results are unexpected and often disturbing: reshaping relationships, identities and ultimately the notion of reality.

Sundance Film Festival | About the film Life 2.0. Every day, across all corners of the globe, hundreds of thousands of users log onto Second Life, a virtual online world not entirely unlike our own. They enter a new reality, whose inhabitants assume alternate personas in the form of avatars — digital alter egos that can be sculpted and manipulated to the heart’s desire, representing reality, fantasy, or a healthy mix of both.

Within this alternate landscape, escapism abounds, relationships are formed, and a real world economy thrives, effectively blurring the lines between reality and virtual reality.

Director Jason Spingarn-Koff digs deeply into the core of basic human interaction by assuming his own avatar and immersing himself in the worlds of Second Life residents, whose real lives have been drastically transformed by the new lives they lead in cyberspace. In doing so, he manages to create an intimate, character based drama that forces us to question not only who we are, but who we long to be.

related reading:
Roco Films | Life 2.0
Life 2.0 | main
Second Life | main

Old Spice — 4th and Touchdown | Drew Brees, Jamaal Charles, AJ Green, Earl Thomas, and robot walked into a talk show. It’s called 4th and Touchdown.

Old Spice — 4th and Touchdown | Jamaal Charles: Watching this video of a robot interviewing a running back interview will not only turn you into the smartest running back robot of all time, it will also not do any of those things.

Old Spice — 4th and Touchdown | Earl Thomas: The football life is a dog eat dog, dog eat more dog, dog eat food, dog eat hotdog, dog eat tacos, dog do interviews, dog meet robot, dog talk robot, dog watch video kind of life that we all can learn something from.

Old Spice — 4th and Touchdown | Drew Brees: When science meets the gridiron two things are mathematically inevitable. 1) Stellar interview conversations about dreams, children, and sunglasses happen. And 2) Hotdog cloning. Let’s keep this trend moving.

Old Spice — 4th and Touchdown | AJ Green: This is not a cat climbing into a small shoebox and pouncing on a tiny puppy video. Because if it was it would have significantly more cuteness and less real life truth lessons about football.

related reading:
Old Spice | main
Old Spice | YouTube channel

Old Spice — Smell Like a Man from Head to Toes | Stairs: Wash away embarrassing computer chip odors from your shameful plastic and metal body with Old Spice body wash and deodorant.

Old Spice — Smell Like a Man from Head to Toes | Hot Tub: I’m not a real human man, but you’d never know it because I use Old SSSSSppp¡ £¢ƒ§¶ªº8CˆÏÏÅE // ERROR: 20800B_CPU/ / / File Not Found_

Old Spice — Smell Like a Man from Head to Toes | Soccer: Experience the freedom of smelling like a real human man at the beach, at parties or wherever your extension cord will allow you to go, with Old Spice.

Old Spice — Smell Like a Man from Head to Toes | Nightclub: Face or no face, women love a guy who smells like a real man all over his body, even if he’s not a real man and no longer has a face.

related reading:
Old Spice | main
Old Spice | YouTube channel

Arizona Daily Star | Alan Eustace, PhD, a Senior Vice President at Google, breaks the world record for high altitude jumps on October 24, 2014.

Eustace made history with a near space dive from a high altitude balloon at approximately 135,000 feet. Eustace broke several records, including national record for highest exit altitude; world and national record for free fall under a drogue chute; national record for vertical speed.

Additionally, he became the second person to break the sound barrier outside an aircraft, announced Tucson, Arizona’s Paragon Space Development Corporation and its Stratospheric Explorer team, which supported the dive.

Eustace was lifted to his peak altitude by a helium filled scientific balloon while wearing a custom made pressurized spacesuit. At over 135,000 feet, he began his dive, remaining in free fall for approximately 4.5 minutes before landing safely nearly 70 miles from his launch point, Paragon officials said.

related reading:
Arizona Daily Star | “Tucson company completes record breaking near space dive”
The New York Times | “Parachutist’s record fall: over 25 miles in 15 minutes”

Atomic Entertainment | On October 24, 2014, after several years of development and testing with Paragon Space Development, Alan Eustace — Google’s Senior Vice President of Knowledge — broke all free fall dive records, as well as the sound barrier, as he demonstrated the viability of a new means of stratospheric exploration.

The full length feature StratEx: Edge of Space will soon be available. The film will include the dramatic engineering process, Alan Eustace’s view from space, and incredible footage of his ascent and Mach 1 descent.

related reading:
Atomic Entertainment | main
Atomic Entertainment | YouTube channel

related reading:
Paragon Space Development Corporation | main
Paragon Space Development Corporation | Stratospheric Explorer

related reading:
Wikipedia | Paragon Space Development Corporation
Wikipedia | Alan Eustace
Wikipedia | Taber MacCallum
Wikipedia | Biosphere 2

excerpt | Alan Eustace, PhD, is a Senior Vice President at Google in its Knowledge department. Eustace earned a PhD in computer science, authored 9 publications and holds 10 patents.

Prior to Google, Eustace spent 15 years at Digital, Compaq and then HP’s Western Research Laboratory, working on chip design and architecture projects. He worked with Amitabh Srivastava on ATOM in the 1990s, a binary code instrumentation system that forms the basis for a wide variety of program analysis and computer architecture analysis tools.

These tools had a profound influence on the design of the EV5, EV6 and EV7 chip designs. Eustace was promoted to director of the Western Research Laboratory in 1999, where he was active in pocket computing, chip multi-processors, power and energy management, internet performance, and frequency and voltage scaling.

Eustace joined Google in 2002 and is a Senior Vice President of Knowledge department, which includes research. He was previously the Senior Vice President of Engineering.

In 2011, Alan Eustace decided to pursue a stratosphere jump and met with Taber MacCallum, one of the founding members of Biosphere 2, to begin preparations for the project. MacCallum’s company, Paragon Space Development Corporation then began creating a life support system to make it possible for Eustace to breathe pure oxygen in a pressure suit during his ascent and fall. Over the next three years, the Paragon Space Development technical team designed and redesigned many of the components of his parachute and life support system.

On October 24, 2014, Eustace made a jump from the stratosphere, breaking Felix Baumgartner’s world record. The launch point for his jump was from an abandoned runway in Roswell, New Mexico, where he began his balloon powered ascent early that morning.

He reached a reported maximum altitude of 135,908 feet but the final number submitted to the World Air Sports Federation was from 135,890 feet. His descent to Earth lasted 15 minutes and stretched 26 miles with peak speeds exceeding 800 miles per hour.

Unlike Baumgartner, Eustace was not widely known as a daredevil prior to his jump, but does pilot a Cessna twin engine jet.

related viewing from Red Bull Stratos and prior world record holder Felix Baumgartner:

Red Bull | See through the eyes of Felix Baumgartner as he completes his world record breaking jump from the stratosphere.

Red Bull | Baumgartner reached an estimated speed of 843.6 miles per hour, or Mach 1.25, jumping from the stratosphere, which when certified will make him the first man to break the speed of sound in freefall and set several other records while delivering valuable data for future space exploration.

related reading:
Red Bull | Red Bull Stratos
Red Bull | YouTube channel

Wikipedia | Red Bull Stratos
Wikipedia | Felix Baumgartner

excerpt | Felix Baumgartner is an Austrian daredevil skydiver. He set a world record for skydiving an estimated 24 miles, reaching an estimated speed of 843.6 miles per hour, or Mach 1.25, on October 14, 2012, and became the first person to break the sound barrier without vehicular power on his descent.

He held the skydiving record until October 24, 2014 when Alan Eustace jumped from 135,890 feet, or 25.74 miles.  Baumgartner is renowned for the particularly dangerous nature of the stunts he has performed during his career. Baumgartner spent time in the Austrian military where he practiced parachute jumping, including training to land on small target zones.

Baumgartner’s most recent project was Red Bull Stratos, in which he jumped to Earth from a helium balloon in the stratosphere on October 14, 2012. As part of this project, he set the altitude record for a manned balloon flight, parachute jump from the highest altitude, and greatest free fall velocity.

Wired | Steve Aoki talks with famed futurist Ray Kurzweil about how technology will shape our future, in terms of creativity, consciousness, and the coming singularity.

related viewing from Steve Aoki:

Steve Aoki | Extended edit. Steve Aoki talks with famed futurist Ray Kurzweil about how technology will shape our future, in terms of creativity, consciousness, and the coming singularity. Check out the Wired edit as well.

related reading:
Wired | YouTube channel
Wired | series: main
Wired | series: Neon Future sessions

related viewing from the album Neon Future by Steve Aoki:

Steve Aoki | Album Neon Future featuring track “Transcendence” with cameo by Ray Kurzweil.

related viewing from the album It’s the End of the World as We Know It by Steve Aoki:

Steve Aoki | The official music video for “Singularity” by Steve Aoki featuring My Name Is Kay and Angger Dimas. Featuring a special appearance by futurist and technologist Ray Kurzweil.

related reading:
Wikipedia | Steve Aoki
Wikipedia | It’s the End of the World as We Know It album by Steve Aoki
Wikipedia | Wonderland album by Steve Aoki
Wikipedia | Neon Future 1 album by Steve Aoki

related reading:
Twitch | “Free concert: Steve Aoki Live from Ibiza”

Twitch | Steve Aoki is a pioneer in another realm as well. Last month he became the first artist to live stream their concert on Twitch. Twitch has considered expanding into music in the past and this was a test of that. It had more than 250,000 viewers and a peak concurrent viewership of 27,000.

National Federation of the Blind | Snap pictures, listen to printed text read aloud, store and share documents and more using the KNFB Reader iPhone app. The KNFB Reader app for iPhone is available in the Apple iTunes app store.

related reading:
KNFB Reader | main
Apple iTunes | KNFB Reader

AppleVis | “KNFB Reader Mobile podcast”

National Federation of the Blind | “NFB applauds release of KNFB Reader iPhone app”
National Federation of the Blind | “KNFB Reader official unveiling podcast”

(credit: KNFB Reading Technology)

related reading:

Reuters | “New smartphone app gives sight to the blind”

excerpt | Jonathan Mosen, who has been blind since birth, spent his evening snapping photos of packages in the mail, his son’s school report and labels on bottles in the fridge. In seconds, he was listening to audio of the printed words the camera captured, courtesy of a new app on his Apple iPhone. “I couldn’t believe how accurate it was,” said Mosen, an assistive technology consultant from New Zealand.

related reading from the National Federation of the Blind:

National Federation of the Blind | “NFB applauds release of KNFB Reader iPhone app”

(credit: KNFB Reading Technology)

The National Federation of the Blind, the nation’s leading advocate for access to print by the blind, has applauded the release of KNFB Reader, a new app for the iPhone and other Apple iOS devices, which uses the phone’s camera and state of the art optical character recognition (OCR) technology to give the blind instant access to the contents of print materials.

Members of the National Federation of the Blind have worked with KNFB Reading Technology, which developed the app along with Sensotec, KNFB Reader is now available in the Apple iTunes app store.

Mark Riccobono, President of the National Federation of the Blind, said: “The National Federation of the Blind has been involved for forty years in the development of technology that helps blind people to acquire access to the various print materials that we all encounter from day to day.

Ever since our first collaboration with Ray Kurzweil to develop the Kurzweil Reading Machine, which was the size of a household appliance, we have been interested in the development of better and more portable reading technology.

Print on office documents, flyers, letters, menus, labels, and throughout our environment is still a part of everyday life, even with the increased electronic transmission of documents. Now revolutionary technology that resides on the phones that many of us carry each day provides instant access to the printed word.

We can hear our mail or the menu at our favorite restaurant spoken with the iPhone’s built-in text-to-speech technology, or read it in braille with a refreshable braille display. This app will fundamentally change the everyday lives of many blind people, helping us to get the information we need and live the lives we want.”

related reading from Apple iTunes:

KNFB Reader | App description

The highly anticipated KNFB Reader converts printed text into high quality speech to provide accurate, fast, and efficient access to both single and multiple page documents with the tap of a button on the iPhone. Picture accuracy is facilitated by a Field of View Report, Automatic Page Detection, and Tilt Control. Our app allows users to capture pictures of virtually any type of printed text, including mail, receipts, class handouts, memos and many other documents that you may encounter.

Proprietary document analysis technology determines the words and reads them aloud to the user with high quality text-to-speech and braille access. Individuals with print disabilities will benefit from the synchronized speech and text highlighting capabilities. KNFB Reader will revolutionize access to print materials for the mobile professional and busy student by providing advanced state of the art mobile reading technology in a single hand-held device.

Features:

• Fast, accurate, and efficient mobile text recognition that delivers near instantaneous results.
• Reading modes for books, articles and labels, bills and memos.
• Synchronized text highlighting with high quality speech and braille output.
• Field of view report to assist with aligning the camera relative to the document.
• Tilt guidance feature to assist with capturing the perfect picture of a document.
• Automatic text detection to enable hands-free operation.
• Ability to import, OCR, and read image-based pdf and jpg files
• Export txt and html formatted text files to cloud storage services including Dropbox and Google Drive.
• Batch scan mode to process and read multiple pages.
• Recognize and read text in multiple languages; please visit our website for details.
• Additional features including language translation, text editing, and more coming soon.

Supported devices:

• iPhone 5s
• iPhone 5c
• iPhone 5

Defense Distributed, the controversial research and development firm that has publicly released files for 3D printed guns, just posted a mysterious video showing what appears to be World War II bombers in flight. They stated, “Respectfully requesting your attendance for an October Surprise. September 30, 2014.”

“October surprise” traditionally refers to a news event deliberately created to influence the outcome of an election in November. Any guesses?

related reading:
Defense Distributed | main
Defense Distributed | YouTube channel

Wikipedia | Defense Distributed
Wikipedia | October Surprise

related viewing from Vice & Motherboard:

Vice | Cody R. Wilson has figured out how to print a semi-automatic rifle from the comfort of his own home. Now he’s putting all the information online so that others will join him. This is a story about the rapid evolution of a technology that has forced the American legal system to play catch up.

Cody Wilson, a 25 year old University of Texas Law student, is an advocate for the open source production of firearms using 3D printing technology. This makes him a highly controversial figure on both sides of the gun control issue. Motherboard sat down with Cody in Austin, Texas to talk about the constitution, the legal system, and to watch him make and test fire a 3D printed gun.

related listening from Vice & Motherboard:
Vice | “Podcast with Cody R. Wilson”

Vice | The Vice Podcast is a weekly unedited discussion where we go inside the minds of some of the most interesting, creative, and bizarre people we come across in the Vice universe. This week, Vice’s Eddy Moretti sits down with Cody Wilson, the focus of the Motherboard documentary Click, Print, Gun. Listen as they discuss the recent press coverage of his 3D printable gun, as well as the controversy surrounding the piece.

NBC | Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issues highest level travel warning as Ebola spreads.

related reading:
NBC | Ebola outbreak
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention | main
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention | Ebola

related viewing:

CNN | CNN’s Christiane Amanpour speaks with Peter Piot, MD, PhD about an out of control Ebola epidemic in West Africa.

relate reading:
Wikipedia | Peter Piot, MD, PhD
Wikipedia | Ebola virus

related reading:
Visual Science | 3D model of Ebola virus

(credit: Visual Science)

Patrick Kalyn | Mech: Human Trials short film. After a serious accident, a man is introduced to a designer street drug promising to restore his ravaged body. Desperate to mend himself, he becomes consumed by the drug, only to discover it is threatening his humanity. The film is a take on the emergence of nantotechnology and its perils.

Patrick Kalyn has been a world class visual effects artist for over 10 years on top grossing films such as Avatar, King Kong, X-Men: The Last Stand and District 9. Patrick segued into directing with short films Somnolence and Hybrids and is in development on his first feature.

(credit: Patrick Kalyn)

writer, director and producer: Patrick Kalyn
starring: Steve Baran
cinematography: Cliff Hokanson
aerial photography: Axiom Images
music: Sam Hulick and Nick Borrego
manager: Scott Glassgold, IAM Entertainment
Twitter: @dontdomech

related reading:
Mech: Human Trials | viral campaign

Public service ad from the film’s viral campaign. (credit: Patrick Kalyn)

Triton Films | By 2031, Earth has exhausted its supply of fossil fuels. With the world on the verge of collapse, nations from around the globe form a coalition called AREN: the Manhattan Project of clean, self-replenishing energy. When an experiment goes wrong that threatens the world’s existence, David Canterra and a team of elite soldiers are sent on a mission to stop the anomaly. What they find is a mind-bending alternate dimension, and their only way home is through the fabric of time.

(credit: Triton Films)

writer, director: Patrick Kalyn
producer: Gabriel Paul Napora, Triton Films

related reading:
Somnolence | main
Triton Films | main

Triton Films | A soldier seeks revenge after losing her daughter at the hands of an alien infestation. In the wake of an alien infestation, an ex-special forces soldier’s daughter is killed in an alien attack. Seeking revenge, she leads a team deep into alien territory to a quarantined lab. Soon, she discovers the aliens aren’t alien at all, but a failed government experiment to create a bio-hybrid soldier. She must then expose the government’s cover-up, and save the last standing city in the quarantined zone from falling.

(credit: Triton Films)

writer, director: Patrick Kalyn
cinematographer: Cliff Hokanson
producer: Gabriel Paul Napora, Triton Films
music: Sam Hulick
manager: Scott Glassgold, IAM Entertainment

related reading:
Hybrids | main
Hybrids | soundtrack

Triton Films | main

Nike | The Last Game is a story about risky soccer versus safe soccer. The scientist and the clones want to prove that riskless soccer is more effective.

Ronaldo Fenomeno and the original players disagree, and they are willing to risk everything to prove the scientist wrong. There is only one way to know who is right: the last game. Register for the new Nike Soccer app and get the gear to risk everything.

Featuring animated Cristiano Ronaldo, animated Wayne Rooney, animated Neymar Jr., animated Zlatan Ibrahimović, animated Andrés Iniesta, animated David Luiz, animated Franck Ribéry, animated Tim Howard and animated Ronaldo Fenomeno.

related viewing from Nike:

Nike | #AskZlatan anything on Twitter. about link

related reading:
Nike | main
Nike | The Last Game collection

Nike | YouTube channel: main
Nike | YouTube channel: Nike football
Nike | YouTube channel: Nike soccer

related viewing from Nike FIFA World Cup ads:

related viewing from Nike:

** computer graphics collection ** ** FIFA World Cup collection **

Nike | Jack Wilshere “Never play it safe” — about link

Nike | about link

Nike | about link

** computer graphics collection **

Nike |

** computer graphics collection **

Nike | Tiempo Legend V: link

** computer graphics collection **

Nike | about link

** computer graphics collection **

Nike | about link

** computer graphics collection **

Nike | about link

** wearable technology collection **

Nike | about link

** wearable technology collection **

** immersive gaming collection **

Nike | NikeFuel Missions

Ubergeek Sheldon explains to his roommate and best friend Leonard that he is trying to determine how much longer he has to live to see the technological singularity. (credit: CBS)

Episode “The Cruciferous Vegetable Amplification” of CBS hit sitcom The Big Bang Theory brings the concept of technological Singularity to one of its widest audiences.

In the opening teaser, ubergeek Sheldon (Jim Parsons) explains to his roommate and best friend Leonard (Johnny Galecki) that he is trying to determine how much longer he has to live.

Referring to his timeline, he laments that he will probably not survive to see the coming future.

related viewing from CBS The Big Bang Theory:

CBS The Big Bang Theory | “The Cruciferous Vegetable Amplification”

Sheldon: At best I have 60 years left. 60 only gets me to here. I need to get here.

Leonard: What’s there?

Sheldon: The earliest estimate of the Singularity, when man will be able to transfer his consciousness into machines and achieve immortality.

Leonard: So, you’re upset about missing out on becoming some sort of freakish, self-aware robot.

Sheldon: By this much!

Leonard: Tough break. You want eggs?

Sheldon: You don’t get it, Leonard. I’m going to miss so much: the Unified Field Theory, Cold Fusion, the dogopus.

Leonard: What’s a dogopus?

Sheldon: A hybrid dog and octopus — man’s best underwater friend.

Leonard: Is somebody working on that?

Sheldon: I was going to. I planned on giving it to myself for my 300th birthday.

Sheldon talks to Steve Wozniak from his virtual telepresence robot. (credit: CBS)

In the episode “The Cruciferous Vegetable Amplification,” ­Sheldon — determined to live long enough for the moment when man and machine become one, called the “technological singularity” — decides he must cease all physical contact with the outside world.

When Sheldon calculates that the technology to download his consciousness into a robot won’t be invented soon enough, he desperately tries to find a way to increase his lifespan.

Sheldon no longer goes out into the world, since he thinks his body is too fragile to resist it, and creates a virtual telepresense — “Shelbot” — instead. Using a computer screen and basic, roving robot technology, he ends up alienating the entire gang.

He joins the gang at The Cheescake Factory where they see the famous Steve Wozniak sitting nearby. Shelbot approaches him, and Wozniak compliments his machine.

related reading:

 by Phil Bowermaster in The Speculist

Popular both with geeks and with the intellectually inferior sorts that Sheldon refers to as “muggles,” The Big Bang Theory (now in its fourth season) is a major hit, claiming an average of 14 million viewers per week. The show is also critically acclaimed. Just a few weeks ago, Parsons won the 2010 Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a comedy series.

If Sheldon’s description of the Singularity seems imprecise, that’s probably by design. While a serious in-depth explanation of what the Singularity is all about would be edifying, it probably wouldn’t make it onto TV.

Certainly not network TV. In primetime. On a popular sitcom. Twisting serious scientific and technological ideas into comedic material is one of the show’s major tropes. So the audience gains a certain familiarity with terminology and concepts, but something less than a real understanding of these ideas. Hey, it’s a start.

Another major contribution of The Big Bang Theory is that it serves as a kind of mainstream endorsement of geek culture. The Geek Chic movement was one thing, but this is something bigger. As I wrote in 2007 after watching the first few episodes:

After all, isn’t it amazing that a show like this can feature four such characters, not as the annoying neighbors or as the object of derision or pity of the real heroes of the show? These guys are the heroes.
Three physicists and an engineer — heroes for our time.

One major difference between Sheldon’s description of the Singularity and references we may have seen to it elsewhere in prime time (in Fringe, for example) is that Sheldon describes the Singularity not as a catastrophe to be avoided, or something that is simply “going to happen,” but rather as a goal. In just a few short sentences he makes a case for life extension, uploading of consciousness, and the achievement of major longstanding scientific aims via cooperation between human and artificial intelligence.

Sheldon is a transhumanist!

Sure, these ideas are all portrayed as bizarre and ridiculous, but that’s because Sheldon is the nerd of the group. But that’s okay. If The Big Bang Theory has demonstrated anything, it’s how quickly and easily nerdy ideas can become mainstream. Stay tuned.

Warner Brothers | In the future, governments and economies across the globe have collapsed, food is scarce, NASA is no more, and the 20th Century is to blame.

A mysterious rip in spacetime opens and it’s up to whatever is left of NASA to explore and offer up hope for mankind. “Manking was born on Earth, it was never meant to die here.”

Mainly based on the scientific theories and script treatment of renowned theoretical physicist, Kip Thorne, Interstellar is set to be released in late 2014, and is a film by director Christopher Nolan.

related reading:
Warner Brothers | Interstellar

As the simulation begins, we view an unequally matched pair of neutron stars weighing 1.4 and 1.7 solar masses. They are separated by only about 11 miles, slightly less distance than their own diameters. Redder colors show regions of progressively lower density.

As the stars spiral toward each other, intense tides begin to deform them, possibly cracking their crusts. Neutron stars possess incredible density, but their surfaces are comparatively thin, with densities about a million times greater than gold. Their interiors crush matter to a much greater degree densities rise by 100 million times in their centers. To begin to imagine such mind-boggling densities, consider that a cubic centimeter of neutron star matter outweighs Mount Everest.

By 7 milliseconds, tidal forces overwhelm and shatter the lesser star. Its superdense contents erupt into the system and curl a spiral arm of incredibly hot material. At 13 milliseconds, the more massive star has accumulated too much mass to support it against gravity and collapses, and a new black hole is born. The black hole’s event horizon — its point of no return — is shown by the gray sphere. While most of the matter from both neutron stars will fall into the black hole, some of the less dense, faster moving matter manages to orbit around it, quickly forming a large and rapidly rotating torus. This torus extends for about 124 miles (200 km) and contains the equivalent of 1/5th the mass of our sun.

Scientists think neutron star mergers like this produce short gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). Short GRBs last less than two seconds yet unleash as much energy as all the stars in our galaxy produce over one year.

The rapidly fading afterglow of these explosions presents a challenge to astronomers. A key element in understanding GRBs is getting instruments on large ground-based telescopes to capture afterglows as soon as possible after the burst. The rapid notification and accurate positions provided by NASA’s Swift mission creates a vibrant synergy with ground-based observatories that has led to dramatically improved understanding of GRBs, especially for short bursts.

— NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

(Credit: CNET)

CNET’s Donald Bell shows off Parrot’s compact, tablet-controlled Bebop Drone and uses a pair of virtual reality goggles to see from a drone’s point-of-view.

Thug Notes | Thug Notes is your main hookup for classical literature summary and analysis, original gangster. I’m your host, Sparky Sweets, PhD.

You may have seen my ass on MTV, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, The Independent, and The Daily Dot. Educate yo self, son. Join me as I drop some of da illest classical literature you ever heard.

(credit: Thug Notes)

A hilarious, satirical collection of science fiction and futurism classics from the hit show Thug Notes.

related reading:
Thug Notes | YouTube channel
Thug Notes | profile

Thug Notes | Brave New World by Aldous Huxley science fiction book summary and analysis.

Thug Notes | Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury science fiction book summary and analysis.

Thug Notes | Frankenstein by Mary Shelley science fiction and biomedical futures book summary and analysis.

Thug Notes | 1984 by George Orwell science fiction book summary and analysis.

Thug Notes | Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut science fiction book summary and analysis.

— TED

Since the summer of 2013, the Project Tango team has been working closely with a team at the NASA Ames Research Center. The goal: to integrate a Project Tango prototype onto a robotic platform, called SPHERES, that flies inside the International Space Station. The SPHERES program aims to develop zero-gravity autonomous platforms that could act as robotic assistants for astronauts or perform maintenance activities independently on station. The 3D-tracking and mapping capabilities of Project Tango would allow SPHERES to reconstruct a 3D-map of the space station and, for the first time in history, enable autonomous navigation of a floating robotic platform 230 miles above the surface of the earth.

Project Tango and SPHERES are scheduled to be launched into orbit this summer. The future is awesome.

— Google ATAP

The recent resurrection of multi-layer neural networks is generating a lot of interest currently, with deep learning appearing on the New York Times front page, and big companies like Google and Facebook hunting for the experts in this field. Jürgen’s talk will shed more light on how deep learning methods work, and why they work.

Some news and links about deep learning:
http://www.press.usi.ch/en/comunicati…
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/24/sci…
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/deeplear…
http://www.thekurzweillibrary.com/how-bio-ins…
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/…

1st Züri Machine Learning Meetup
25th February 2014, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

— Zürich Machine Learning and Data Science Meetup

As part of an expedition sent to find a home beyond Earth, you will write the next chapter for humanity as you lead your people into a new frontier and create a new civilization in space. Explore and colonize an alien planet, research new technologies, amass mighty armies, build incredible Wonders and shape the face of your new world. As you embark on your journey you must make critical decisions. From your choice of sponsor and the make-up of your colony, to the ultimate path you choose for your civilization, every decision opens up new possibilities.

Join the Civilization community and learn more about the game.

— Sid Meier’s Civilization

CNET | At the company’s Build developer conference in San Francisco, Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore demos a new addition to the Windows Phone 8 operating system, a personal assistant called Cortana.

note | The character design for the Microsoft Windows Phone smart digital assistant Cortana is based on Microsoft Studios’ popular Halo game series, in which Cortana is a powerful artificial intelligence with human-level capabilities.

AI character Cortana from the popular Microsoft Studios video game Halo. (credit: Download Wallpaper HD)

Microsoft Studios | A look at the smart AI known as Cortana, from the video game Halo.

Housed in the MJOLNIR armor worn by the Master Chief, the Artificial Intelligence known as Cortana (CTN 0452-9) served on the frontlines against the Covenant during the final days of the war.

Microsoft | Watch Joe Belfiore introduce the new Windows Phone 8.1 start screen and Cortana, the personal smartphone assistant.

related reading:

Microsoft Windows Phone | Cortana
Microsoft Windows Phone | YouTube channel

Microsoft Studios | Halo
Wikipedia | Halo
Wikipedia | Cortana

Download Wallpaper HD | Cortana wallpaper

related viewing from Microsoft:

TED | Appearing by telepresence robot on March 18, 2014, Edward Snowden speaks at TED 2014 about surveillance and internet freedom in his talk titled “Here’s how we take back the internet.”

The right to data privacy, he suggests, is not a partisan issue, but requires a fundamental rethink of the role of the internet in our lives — and the laws that protect it. “Your rights matter,” he say, “because you never know when you’re going to need them.” Chris Anderson interviews, with special guest Tim Berners-Lee.

In 2013 Edward Snowden leaked thousands of classified American National Security Agency documents, sparking a global conversation about citizens’ rights to privacy on the internet.

related reading:
TED | Edward Snowden
TED | talk: “Edward Snowden | Here’s how we take back the internet”
TED | blog post: “We don’t have to give up liberty to have security: Edward Snowden at TED 2014”
TED | blog post: “Snowden selfies: Edward Snowden roams TED2014”

Suitable Technologies | Beam Pro
Suitable Technologies | YouTube channel

related viewing from Suitable Technologies:

(credit: Wolfram Research)

Wolfram Research | Stephen Wolfram, PhD, introduces the Wolfram Language in this video and demonstrates how the symbolic programming language enables functional programming, querying of large databases, flexible interactivity, and easy deployment.

Wikipedia | Wolfram Language is a highly general, multi-paradigm programming language developed by Wolfram Research, that serves as the main interfacing language for Wolfram Mathematica.

It is designed with emphasis on symbolic computation, functional programming, and rule-based programming. It is built to represent arbitrary structures and data.

The language is very large, touching on numerous domains, often specialized. For example, it includes built-in functions for generating and running Turing machines, creating graphics and audio, analyzing 3D models, and solving differential equations.

It is planned to be bundled with the system software installed on every Raspberry Pi. Intel Edison also integrates the language, and it is planned to be integrated in the Unity game engine.

related reading:
Wolfram Research | profile
Wolfram Research | public resources
Wolfram Research | Wolfram Language

related viewing:
Wolfram Research | YouTube channel
Wolfram Alpha | YouTube channel
Wolfram Mathematica | YouTube channel
Wolfram computer based math | YouTube channel

related reading:
Slate | “Language barriers: Stephen Wolfram claims he can make the world computable, is he on to something?”
Business Insider | “Computer genius builds language that lets anyone calculate anything”

(credit: Wolfram Research)

Google | The Google Science Fair is a global online competition open to students 13 to 18 years old. What do you love? What are you good at? What do you want to change? Learn more and start your project.

Wikipedia | The Google Science Fair is sponsored by Google, Lego, CERN, National Geographic and Scientific American. The competition is open to kids around the globe, who formulate a hypothesis, perform an experiment, and present results.

All students must have an internet connection and Google account to participate. Projects are submitted through Google Sites. The final submission includes 10 sections: summary, about me, project steps, and works cited.

Entries are judged on 8 criteria: presentation, question, hypothesis, research, experiment, data, observations, and conclusion. Grand prize is a National Geographic trip to the Galapagos Islands, $50,000 scholarship, and an experience at a sponsoring organization.

February 2014:

— Join Ray Kurzweil, one of the most innovative and prolific inventors of our time, on Friday, February 21, 2014 in a Google Science Fair 2014 Hangout on Air. Kurzweil, Director of Engineering at Google, is interviewed by Joe Hanson of It’s Okay to Be Smart. | link

— Join a Galactic Hangout 0n Air with Sam Branson and Virgin Galactic’s William Pomerantz. Why go to space? That’s the tantalizing question Sam and Will will answer, interviewed by former finalist Gavin Ovsak. | link

Google | upcoming events

related reading:
Google | Google Science Fair
Google Science Fair | YouTube channel
Wikipedia | Google Science Fair

Google | Register to compete in Google Science Fair 2014. | link

MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab | This video shows three of the first devices to be prototyped at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) using a new technology that could make it possible for the average person to design, customize and print a specialized robot in a matter of hours.

MIT is leading an ambitious new project to reinvent how robots are produced and designed, funded by a $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

related reading:
MIT | Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab | “CSAIL project could transform robotic design and production”
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab | YouTube channel