Lifeboat Foundation

Give people a barrier, and at some point they are bound to smash through. Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947. Yuri Gagarin burst into orbit for the first manned spaceflight in 1961. The Human Genome Project finished cracking the genetic code in 2003. And we can add one more barrier to humanity’s trophy case: the exascale barrier.

The exascale barrier represents the challenge of achieving exascale-level computing, which has long been considered the benchmark for high performance. To reach that level, however, a computer needs to perform a quintillion calculations per second. You can think of a quintillion as a million trillion, a billion billion, or a million million millions. Whichever you choose, it’s an incomprehensibly large number of calculations.

Continue reading “Supercomputer uses machine learning to set new speed record” »

At an APS fluid dynamics meeting, researchers showed off new robotic technologies for studying atmospheric pollution.

The nature of work is evolving at an unprecedented pace. The rise of generative AI has accelerated data analysis, expedited the production of software code and even simplified the creation of marketing copy.

Those benefits have not come without concerns over job displacement, ethics and accuracy.

At the 2024 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), IEEE experts from industry and academia participated in a panel discussion discussing how the new tech landscape is changing the professional world, and how universities are educating students to thrive in it.

Townships get little by way of public resources compared with rich suburbs. By mapping the problem, researchers like Raesetje Sefala hope to reverse it.

Eno, the career-spanning documentary about Brian Eno that premieres at the Sundance Film Festival, is a bracing dive into the brain of one of the most transformative musicians, producers and sound pioneers of the past half century.

‘Eno’ uses generative AI to create an always-changing, but compelling story about musician and producer Brian Eno.

Japanese toy manufacturer Takara Tomy developed the lunar rover, SORA-Q, in association with JAXA, Sony Group, and Doshisha University.

Innovative offering

Continue reading “Compact, shape-shifting robot by Transformers’ inventors lands on Moon” »

UCL study reveals how generative AI elucidates memory’s role in learning, reliving, and imaginative planning.

In a breakthrough research, UCL scientists reveal how generative AI models mirror brain functions in memory and imagination.

BMW Manufacturing has announced a new partnership with Figure, a robotics startup that specializes in humanoid robots. The partnership will see Figure’s robots being deployed in BMW’s facility in Spartanburg, South Carolina, the largest automotive exporter in the US.

This is the first commercial deal that Figure has signed since it was founded in 2022. The company did not reveal how many robots BMW will be using but said that the partnership will begin with small quantities and scale up if the robots meet the performance expectations.

The OpenDAC project is a collaborative research project between Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) at Meta and Georgia Tech, aimed at significantly reducing the cost of Direct Air Capture (DAC).

Direct Air Capture (DAC) involves directly capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and has been widely recognized as a crucial tool in combating climate change. Despite its potential, the broad implementation of DAC has been impeded by high capture costs. Central to overcoming this hurdle is the discovery of novel sorbents — materials that pull carbon dioxide from the air. Discovering new sorbents holds the key to reducing capture costs and scaling DAC to meaningfully impact global carbon emissions.

The DAC space is growing rapidly with many companies entering the space. To engage the broader research community as well as the budding DAC industry, we have released the OpenDAC 2023 (ODAC23) dataset to train ML models. ODAC23 contains nearly 40M DFT calculations from 170K DFT relaxations involving Metal Organic Frameworks (MOFs) with carbon dioxide and water adsorbates. We have also released baseline ML models trained on this dataset.