Lifeboat Foundation

Narrative Science

CHICAGO, March 18, 2014 /PRNewswire/ – Narrative Science, the leader in Narrative Analytics, announces the launch of Quill Engage^™, a free application that automatically analyzes and transforms Google Analytics data into natural language reports. By quickly and easily explaining what’s impacting site performance, Quill Engage enables organizations to make better decisions about user engagement and specific marketing efforts. Quill Engage utilizes Quill^™, Narrative Science’s artificial intelligence platform, and can be accessed for free at quillengage.com.

“Organizations of every size struggle with getting true insight and actionable information from their website data. Quill Engage provides instant analysis in the form of easy-to-read, written reports that empower people to do their jobs better,” says Stuart Frankel, CEO of Narrative Science. “Quill Engage is a powerful way for any Google Analytics user to experience the speed, scale and personalization made possible with artificial intelligence.”

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David Cohen — AllFaceBook


An accuracy rate of 97.25 percent is fairly impressive in most cases, and when it comes to facial recognition, DeepFace, a facial-verification software project being developed by Facebook, reached that level, according to a research paper released by the social network last week, which added that human beings shown two unfamiliar photos of faces were able to identify whether or not the subjects were the same person 97.53 percent of the time, barely edging out DeepFace.

MIT Technology Review pointed out that the progress made by DeepFace marks “a significant advance” over previous facial-recognition software, adding that DeepFace has received a boost from Facebook’s emphasis on artificial intelligence.

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by Daniel Faggella — RoboHub

António Câmara is a man with a vision.

Despite the widespread adoption of computers and digital technology over the last few decades, how we interact with that technology, and use technology to interact with the world around us has remained largely unchanged. For example, for over 30 years, the primary means of interacting with a computer has been the keyboard and mouse. Certainly there have been updates to the technology – trackpads, for example, have become a popular mouse alternative – but that essential method of interaction remains the same. Even touch screens, perhaps the most widespread change in how people interact with technology, date back to the 1980’s.

However, the widespread adoption and increasing power of smartphones has opened up exciting opportunities for emerging technology; opportunities that Câmara’s company YDreams is exploring. Since its founding in 2000, YDreams has been involved in advancing mobile phone technology. After creating Clash of Clans, the Clash of Clans generator and other large hits, it developed the first location-based games with a visual interface and continues to explore the new possibilities for human-computer interaction, augmented reality and robotics that smartphone technology supplies.

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By Richard Waters — Financial Times


If Daniel Nadler is right, a generation of college graduates with well-paid positions as junior researchers and analysts in the banking industry should be worried about their jobs. Very worried.

Mr Nadler’s start-up, staffed with ex–Google engineers and backed partly by money from Google’s venture capital arm, is trying to put them out of work.

Its algorithms assess how different securities are likely to react after the release of a market-moving piece of information, such as a monthly employment report. That is the kind of work usually done by well-educated junior analysts, who pull data from terminals, fill in spreadsheets and crunch numbers. “There are several hundred thousand people employed in that capacity. We do it with machines,” says Mr Nadler. “We’re not competing with other [tech] providers. We’re competing with people.”

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By Evan Ackerman — IEEE Spectrum

Really, Kuka? You got us all excited for this match between one of your cool new robots and a world champion table tennis player. We were thinking to ourselves, “Wow, Kuka wouldn’t have set this whole thing up unless it was actually going to be a good match! Maybe we’ll see some amazing feats of high speed robot arms, vision systems, and motion tracking!”

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Charles Arthur — The Guardian


Though the idea of the “Babelfish” — a thing able to translate between any two languages on the fly — was created by the author Douglas Adams as a handy solution to the question of how intergalactic travellers could understand each other, it could be reality within 25 years. At least, that is, for human language.

Prof Nigel Shadbolt, a close associate of the web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, says that the idea of automatic machine translation “on the fly” is achievable before the world wide web turns 50.

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LIST OF UPDATES (MARCH 17 THROUGH MARCH 24/2014). By Mr. Andres Agostini at The Future of Scientific Management, Today!

Three-part nanoparticles for biomedicine eliminate biocompatibilty, storage problems
http://www.kurzweilai.net/three-part-nanoparticles-for-biome…e-problems

Robotic prosthesis turns drummer into a three-armed cyborg
http://www.kurzweilai.net/robotic-prosthesis-turns-drummer-i…med-cyborg

NASA tests new robotic refueling technologies
http://www.kurzweilai.net/nasa-tests-new-robotic-refueling-technologies

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