GERMANY ADOPTS FIRST ETHICS STANDARDS FOR AUTONOMOUS DRIVING SYSTEMS
Federal transport minister, Alexander Dobrindt, presented a report to Germany’s cabinet seeking to establish guidelines for the future programming of ethical standards into automated driving software. The report, was prepared by an automated driving ethics commission comprised of scientists and legal experts and produced 20 guidelines to be used by the automotive industry when creating automated driving systems. Shortly after its introduction, Dobrindt announced that the cabinet ratified the guidelines, making Germany the first government in the world to put such measures in place.
Read moreSELF-REPAIRING ORGANS COULD SAVE YOUR LIFE IN A HEARTBEAT
WHAT becomes of the broken-hearted? In cardiac medicine, the answer is usually brutally straightforward: they die. Heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide and there is often precious little we can do about it. Pacemakers bring some relief and transplants work, but there are nowhere near enough donated hearts to go around. And unlike skin and liver cells, heart muscle cells can’t remake themselves. Once they get damaged or die, they are gone forever.
Read more‘DOUBLE TROJAN HORSE’ DRUG TRICKS BACTERIA INTO COMMITTING SUICIDE
Bacteria come in two very broad categories based on the structure of their cell walls, the outer region that gives the cells shape and integrity. The cell walls of Gram-positive bacteria consist of a membrane surrounded by a thick layer of sugar and protein, while the cell walls of Gram-negative bacteria consist of a membrane surrounded by a second membrane. This fundamental anatomical difference has a profound medical implication: The types of antibiotics that can kill Gram-positive bacteria are likely ineffective against Gram-negative bacteria and vice versa.
Read moreAUTOMATIC PHOTOGRAPHY WITH GOOGLE CLIPS
How could we train an algorithm to recognize interesting moments? As with most machine learning problems, we started with a dataset. We created a dataset of thousands of videos in diverse scenarios where we imagined Clips being used. We also made sure our dataset represented a wide range of ethnicities, genders, and ages. We then hired expert photographers and video editors to pore over this footage to select the best short video segments.
Read more450,000 WOMEN MISSED BREAST CANCER SCREENINGS DUE TO “ALGORITHM FAILURE”
Last week, the U.K. Health Minister Jeremy Hunt announced that an independent inquiry had been launched to determine how a “computer algorithm failure” stretching back to 2009 caused some 450,000 patients in England between the ages of 68 to 71 to not be invited for their final breast cancer screenings. The errant algorithm was in the National Health System’s (NHS) breast cancer screening scheduling software, and remained undiscovered for nine years.
Read moreCUSTOM DEEP LEARNING LOSS FUNCTIONS WITH KERAS FOR R
I recently started reading “Deep Learning with R”, and I’ve been really impressed with the support that R has for digging into deep learning. One of the use cases presented in the book is predicting prices for homes in Boston, which is an interesting problem because homes can have such wide variations in values. This is a machine learning problem that is probably best suited for classical approaches, such as XGBoost, because the data set is structured rather than perceptual data.
Read moreNASA WILL SEND HELICOPTER TO MARS TO TEST OTHERWORLDLY FLIGHT
The Mars 2020 rover – accompanied by its helicopter companion – is due to launch in July of that year and arrive on the red planet in February 2021. Nasa is sending a helicopter to Mars, in the first test of a heavier-than-air aircraft on another planet. The Mars Helicopter will be bundled with the US space agency’s Mars rover when it launches in 2020. Its design team spent more than four years shrinking a working helicopter to ‘the size of a softball’ and cutting its weight to 1.
Read moreAPPLE MADE MORE PROFIT IN THREE MONTHS THAN AMAZON HAS GENERATED IN ITS LIFETIME
One word may explain Warren Buffett’s investment decisions on Apple and Amazon: profit. Last week Buffett both lamented on not investing in Amazon shares and revealed how he added massively to Berkshire Hathaway’s stake in Apple. The Oracle of Omaha’s moves may be explained by his philosophy of emphasizing a company’s historical financial track record versus putting credence in aggressive future forecasts from analysts. ‘I think it’s fair to say, we’ve never looked at a [analyst] projection in connection with either a security we’ve bought or a business we’ve bought,’ Buffett said during a Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder meeting in 1995, according to remarks found using CNBC’s Warren Buffett Archive.
Read moreON CUMULATIVE ADVANTAGE AND HOW TO THINK ABOUT LUCK
In the late 1970s the view in the publishing world was that an author should never produce more than one book a year. The thinking was that publishing more than one book a year would dilute the brand name of the author. However, this was a bit of a problem for Stephen King, who was writing books at a rate of two per year. Instead of slowing down, King decided to publish his additional works under the pen name of Richard Bachman.
Read moreAI CAN GENERATE ‘DOOM’ LEVELS NOW
Researchers recently successfully trained neural networks to generate level maps for Doom that, they report in a paper published to the arXiv preprint server in April, “proved to be interesting” to play. The work was carried out by researchers from the Polytechnic University of Milan and used Generative Adversarial Networks, a recent innovation in the field of deep learning. The goal of the technique, ultimately, is to reduce the time it takes to develop games by automating parts of level design and, arguably, letting humans do more creative work.
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