Lifeboat Foundation

When James Vlahos’ father was dying from terminal cancer, he decided to preserve as many memories as possible and code them into a chatbot (Dadbot) that could run on his cell phone.

In A Son’s Race to Give His Dying Father Artificial Immortality, James Vlahos recounts his efforts to turn the story of his father’s life — as told by his 80-year-old Dad in his final months after being diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer — into what Vlahos calls a Dadbot.

Continue reading “A Son Turned His Dying Father Into An Artificial Intelligence” »

Apple has officially been granted FCC approval for an experimental license to test 5G data technology — specifically in the short-range millimeter wave spectrum in the 28GHz and 39GHz bands, as reported by DSLReports. The FCC portioned off those chunks of spectrum last summer for companies to begin testing 5G technology, so it makes sense that Apple would want to start exploring 5G, especially given that it’s a major player in the world of mobile data due to the sheer weight of the iPhone in the market.

Disney’s Magic Bench shows off a way to let multiple users interact with AR characters in real time, with real immersive feedback.

Cyborg tech has mostly been backroom, squishy, bloody, and experimental. Now an FDA-approved surgically implanted hearing aid connects to your standard-issue iPhone.

Wireless charging is a relatively young technology, so it has a huge legroom for expansion. A team from Disney Research discovered one potential way to wirelessly charge mobile devices by just connecting to a WiFi signal.

CENTENNIAL, Colo., July 26, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — Cochlear Limited (ASX: COH), the global leader in implantable hearing solutions, introduces today its latest innovation, the Cochlear ^™ Nucleus^® 7 Sound Processor. Approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in June, the Nucleus 7 Sound Processor is the world’s first Made for iPhone cochlear implant sound processor and the smallest and lightest behind-the-ear cochlear implant sound processor available on the market.^1–3

When you use smartphone AI apps like Siri, you’re dependent on the cloud for a lot of the processing — limited by your connection speed. But what if your smartphone could do more of the processing directly on your device — allowing for smarter, faster apps?

MIT scientists have taken a step in that direction with a new way to enable artificial-intelligence systems called convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to run locally on mobile devices. (CNN’s are used in areas such as autonomous driving, speech recognition, computer vision, and automatic translation.) Neural networks take up a lot of memory and consume a lot of power, so they usually run on servers in the cloud, which receive data from desktop or mobile devices and then send back their analyses.

Continue reading “How to run faster, smarter AI apps on smartphones” »

Why fight to charge your phone at a public outlet when a robot could do it for you?