Group items tagged

A report on a blind schizophreniac person who regained vision in some of her personalities and in others not.

"As sensors in digital cameras fast approach the 127 megapixels of the human eye, clinical trials are under way to implant this technology directly into the retina".

Wow

additional info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himba_people#Exceptional_color_perception

Yeah that's interesting stuff... We have one prof in the lab who used to do some research related exactly to this (http://www.tech.plym.ac.uk/socce/staff/tonybelpaeme/research.html). Similar question (i.e. if/how language is involved in the formation of a concept) is also valid for numbers, see for instance this recent story: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20095-without-language-numbers-make-no-sense.html

Very recent paper on brain wave-sensing technology, where researchers were able to communicate words from one brain to another brain over the internet. The encoded information appeared as flashes of light in the receiver's brain at the corner of their vision.

love this one ... it seems to take physicist to explain to the AI crowd what they are actually doing ... Deep learning is a broad set of techniques that uses multiple layers of representation to automatically learn relevant features directly from structured data. Recently, such techniques have yielded record-breaking results on a diverse set of difficult machine learning tasks in computer vision, speech recognition, and natural language processing. Despite the enormous success of deep learning, relatively little is understood theoretically about why these techniques are so successful at feature learning and compression. Here, we show that deep learning is intimately related to one of the most important and successful techniques in theoretical physics, the renormalization group (RG). RG is an iterative coarse-graining scheme that allows for the extraction of relevant features (i.e. operators) as a physical system is examined at different length scales. We construct an exact mapping from the variational renormalization group, first introduced by Kadanoff, and deep learning architectures based on Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs). We illustrate these ideas using the nearest-neighbor Ising Model in one and two-dimensions. Our results suggests that deep learning algorithms may be employing a generalized RG-like scheme to learn relevant features from data.

"...the European Commission announced in 2016 that it was investing one billion euros in a research effort known as the Quantum Technology Flagship. The goal for this project is to develop four technologies: quantum communication, quantum simulation, quantum computing, and quantum sensing. After almost two years, how is it going?" arxiv link to the actual report: http://arxiv.org/abs/1712.03773

... finally Kostas vision comes true!

summary overview video to GDP development from OECD ... up to 2060 ...

interesting stuff ... I like this quote "When a man tells you about the time he planned to put a vegetable garden on Mars, you worry about his mental state. But if that same man has since launched multiple rockets that are actually capable of reaching Mars-sending them into orbit, Bond-style, from a tiny island in the Pacific-you need to find another diagnosis. That's the thing about extreme entrepreneurialism: There's a fine line between madness and genius, and you need a little bit of both to really change the world. All entrepreneurs have an aptitude for risk, but more important than that is their capacity for self-delusion. Indeed, psychological investigations have found that entrepreneurs aren't more risk-tolerant than non-entrepreneurs. They just have an extraordinary ability to believe in their own visions, so much so that they think what they're embarking on isn't really that risky. They're wrong, of course, but without the ability to be so wrong-to willfully ignore all those naysayers and all that evidence to the contrary-no one would possess the necessary audacity to start something radically new."

"The metamaterial aperature is only 40 centimeters long and it doesn't move. It's a circuit-board-like structure consisting of two copper plates separated by a piece of plastic. One of the plates is etched with repeating boxy structures, units about 2 millimeters long that permit different lengths of microwaves to pass through. Scanning the scene at various microwave frequencies allows the computer to capture all the information necessary to reproduce a scene."

where is Luzi's comment when one needs it ???

A nice quartz article about research in neuromorphic hardware in micro/nanotech out there and future vision of the field.

From my favourite, "applied science" series... "If you've ever had one too many and tumbled into bed with a vision, only to be greeted in the morning by a sight you'd gnaw off your own arm to escape, take heart". [Edit] Ah, and before you suggest this is AFD hoax, here's the ref: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22260359

We discussed a few times about whether it is possible to determine the quality of a paper by extracting visual features from the paper and then learning a mapping to a measure of quality such as the number of citations etc. This paper circulated at CVPR 2010, and does exactly that, mapping visual features to estimate whether it has been accepted for the main conference or the workshops.

The San Francisco-based team, which beat out approximately 9,000 competitors, used "custom-coded, computer-vision algorithms to suggest fragment pairings to human assemblers for verification."

amusing team name

visionary ..

looks like one of these visions of the future form the 60s...