Lifeboat Foundation

It’s a sad day. The observatory has not only been used to observe radio wave signals in deep space. It’s also become an iconic landmark over the decades after being featured in countless films and TV shows including the 1995 James Bond blockbuster “GoldenEye.”

The observatory has also made significant contributions to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), spotting mysterious radio signals emanating from distant corners of the universe.

“This decision is not an easy one for NSF to make, but safety of people is our number one priority,” Sean Jones, the assistant director for the mathematical and physical sciences directorate at NSF, told reporters today over a conference call, as quoted by The Verge.

Blizzard president J. Allen Brack said the system has dramatically reduced toxic chat and repeating offenses.

In April 2019, Blizzard shared some insights into how it was using machine learning to combat abusive chat in games like Overwatch. It’s a very complicated process, obviously, but it appears to be working out: Blizzard president J. Allen Brack said in a new Fireside Chat video that it has resulted in an “incredible decrease” in toxic behavior.

Continue reading “Overwatch toxicity has seen an ‘incredible decrease’ thanks to machine learning, says Blizzard” »

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In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) tools, including natural language processing (NLP) techniques, have become increasingly sophisticated, achieving exceptional results in a variety of tasks. NLP techniques are specifically designed to understand human language and produce suitable responses, thus enabling communication between humans and artificial agents.

Other studies also introduced goal-oriented agents that can autonomously navigate virtual or videogame environments. So far, NLP techniques and goal-oriented agents have typically been developed individually, rather than being combined into unified methods.

Continue reading “Teaching AI agents to communicate and act in fantasy worlds” »

SpaceX launched its first crewed mission to ISS in May this year. The company demonstrated its spacecraft is safe and reliable to carry humans to space and back. Axiom’s space tourist mission with SpaceX is scheduled to be a 10-day journey that will launch civilians aboard Crew Dragon to the space station atop a Falcon 9 rocket. The space tourists will stay at ISS for 8 days, where they will experience microgravity and amazing views of our planet.

SpaceX’s first private civilian flight will carry three Axiom customers who will fly alongside former NASA Astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, he will be commander during the mission. Earlier this year, NASA and SpaceX announced Hollywood actor Tom Cruise will film a movie at the space station and fly aboard Crew Dragon. Then, reports surfaced about Cruise and his film production agency working with Axiom is responsible for providing ‘training, mission planning, hardware development, life support, medical support, crew provisions, hardware and safety certifications, on-orbit operations and overall mission management.’ However, Axiom has not officially disclosed who their private passengers will be on their first mission in collaboration with SpaceX.

Now there’s another feat to add to GPT-3’s list: it wrote a screenplay.

It’s short, and weird, and honestly not that good. But… it’s also not all that bad, especially given that it was written by a machine.

Continue reading “OpenAI’s GPT-3 Wrote This Short Film—Even the Twist at the End” »

A robot controlled by a neural network algorithm that was trained in a video game-like simulation is better able to navigate difficult terrain in real life.

Interesting…

The new Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 is a gaming powerhouse, but that’s not all it can do. According to the makers of a popular password recovery application, the RTX 3090 is also good at brute-forcing passwords. That’s great if you forget an important password, but that’s probably not why people are using such tools. The latest Nvidia cards could make cracking someone else’s files almost trivially easy.

The RTX 3090 is Nvidia’s latest top-of-the-line GPU with a GA102 graphics processor sporting 10,496 cores and 24GB of GDDR6X memory. It is monstrously, obscenely powerful by today’s gaming standards, and comes with a correspondingly high price of $1,500, give or take a few hundred depending on supply. With a focus on high core counts, GPUs are also great for parallel computing. That’s why you couldn’t even buy a GPU for several months when Bitcoin was at its peak. In the same vein, GPUs are very good at cracking passwords.

Continue reading “The Nvidia RTX 3090 GPU Can Probably Crack Your Passwords” »

Over the past few decades, technological advances have enabled the development of increasingly sophisticated, immersive and realistic video games. One of the most noteworthy among these advances is virtual reality (VR), which allows users to experience games or other simulated environments as if they were actually navigating them, via the use of electronic wearable devices.

Most existing VR systems primarily focus on the sense of vision, using headsets that allow users to see what is happening in a game or in another simulated environment right before their eyes, rather than on a screen placed in front of them. While this can lead to highly engaging visual experiences, these experiences are not always matched by other types of sensory inputs.

Researchers at Nagoya University’s School of Informatics in Japan have recently created a new VR game that integrates immersive audiovisual experiences with tactile perception. This game, presented in a paper published in the Journal of Robotics, Networking and Artificial Life, uses a player’s biometric data to create a spherical object in the VR space that beats in alignment with his/her heart. The player can thus perceive the beating of his/her heart via this object visually, auditorily and tactually.

In his quest to bring ever-faster cameras to the world, Caltech’s Lihong Wang has developed technology that can reach blistering speeds of 70 trillion frames per second, fast enough to see light travel. Just like the camera in your cell phone, though, it can only produce flat images.

Now, Wang’s lab has gone a step further to create a camera that not only records video at incredibly fast speeds but does so in three dimensions. Wang, Bren Professor of Medical Engineering and Electrical Engineering in the Andrew and Peggy Cherng Department of Medical Engineering, describes the device in a new paper in the journal Nature Communications.

The new camera, which uses the same underlying technology as Wang’s other compressed ultrafast photography (CUP) cameras, is capable of taking up to 100 billion frames per second. That is fast enough to take 10 billion pictures, more images than the entire human population of the world, in the time it takes you to blink your eye.