A scientific hypothesis starts the process of scientific enquiry. False hypotheses can start the path to disaster, as was seen with the geocentric model of the'universe' in which heavenly bodies moved in circular orbits. It became heresy to suggest that orbits aren't circular around the stationary earth, leading to epicycles. It's a good story worth studying in school to appreciate how a hypothesis is critical to validating science. Here's an important hypothesis: "The fundamental aim in the linguistic analysis of a language L is to separate the grammatical sequences which are the sentences of L from the ungrammatical sequences which are not sentences of L and to study the structure of the grammatical sequences."

The team recently published a paper detailing their findings: "Creating Glasswing-Butterfly Inspired Durable Antifogging Omniphobic Supertransmissive, Superclear Nanostructured Glass Through Bayesian Learning and Optimization" in Materials Horizons (doi:10.1039/C9MH00589G). They recently presented this work at the ICML conference in the "Climate Change: How Can AI Help?" workshop. The nanostructured glass has random nanostructures, like the glasswing butterfly wing, that are smaller than the wavelengths of visible light. This allows the glass to have a very high transparency of 99.5% when the random nanostructures are on both sides of the glass. This high transparency can reduce the brightness and power demands on displays that could, for example, extend battery life.

New Cleveland Clinic-led research shows that artificial intelligence (AI) can use medical scans and health records to personalize the dose of radiation therapy used to treat cancer patients. Published June 27 in The Lancet Digital Health, the research team developed an AI framework based on patient computerized tomography (CT) scans and electronic health records. This new AI framework is the first to use medical scans to inform radiation dosage, moving the field forward from using generic dose prescriptions to more individualized treatments. Currently, radiation therapy is delivered uniformly. The dose delivered does not reflect differences in individual tumor characteristics or patient-specific factors that may affect treatment success.

Computer scientists have developed a card-playing bot, called Pluribus, capable of defeating some of the world's best players at six-person no-limit Texas hold'em poker, in what's considered an important breakthrough in artificial intelligence. Two years ago, a research team from Carnegie Mellon University developed a similar poker-playing system, called Libratus, which consistently defeated the world's best players at one-on-one Heads-Up, No-Limit Texas Hold'em poker. The creators of Libratus, Tuomas Sandholm and Noam Brown, have now upped the stakes, unveiling a new system capable of playing six-player no-limit Texas hold'em poker, a wildly popular version of the game. In a series of contests, Pluribus handedly defeated its professional human opponents, at a level the researchers described as "superhuman." When pitted against professional human opponents with real money involved, Pluribus managed to collect winnings at an astounding rate of $1,000 per hour.

Thanks to the limitless possibilities that artificial intelligence (AI) has to offer, our lives have never been easier. From smartphones and personal assistants to home automation systems, AI is everywhere. The ability of machines to mimic human intelligence may seem frightening, but the truth is that AI is already transforming many industries. And it's inevitable that labor markets and traditional workplaces will become part of this transformation as well. Though this tech has been around for quite some time, recent advances in computing have started accelerating the growth of AI, and many companies are investing heavily in this technology.

It knows when to hold'em and when to fold'em. And, unlike in the old Kenny Rodgers ballad, it didn't need a grizzled cowboy gambler to teach it a trick or two. A poker bot has beaten a table full of pros at six-player, no-limit Texas Hold'em, the version of the game used by most tournaments, over the course of 10,000 hands of play. To master poker at this level, the A.I. learned entirely by playing millions of hands against itself, with no guidance from human card sharks. Among the players the bot, which is called Pluribus, beat were four-time World Poker Tour champion Darren Elias as well as World Series of Poker Main Event champions Chris "Jesus" Ferguson and Greg Merson.

Years ago, MIT Professor Neil Gershenfeld had an audacious thought. Struck by the fact that all the world's living things are built out of combinations of just 20 amino acids, he wondered: Might it be possible to create a kit of just 20 fundamental parts that could be used to assemble all of the different technological products in the world? Gershenfeld and his students have been making steady progress in that direction ever since. Their latest achievement, presented this week at an international robotics conference, consists of a set of five tiny fundamental parts that can be assembled into a wide variety of functional devices, including a tiny "walking" motor that can move back and forth across a surface or turn the gears of a machine. Previously, Gershenfeld and his students showed that structures assembled from many small, identical subunits can have numerous mechanical properties.

A team of researchers from the University of Münster, the University of Oxford and the University of Exeter has built an all-optical neural network on a single chip. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes their chip, which has no optical-to-electronic conversions, and how well it worked. Geoffrey Burr with IBM Research – Almaden has published a News and Views piece discussing the work by the team in the same journal issue. Modern computers run on electricity--it powers devices and serves as a storage and data medium. But for several decades, scientists have wondered if it might be possible to use light as the data medium--crunching photons instead of electrons.

Exxact Corporation, a leading provider of high performance computing solutions (HPC) for GPU-accelerated deep learning research, announced that its NVIDIA T4-powered Deep Learning Inference Servers are now shipping worldwide. Exxact Deep Learning Inference Servers bring revolutionary multi-precision inference performance to efficiently accelerate the diverse applications of modern AI. Powered by NVIDIA T4 GPUs, Exxact Deep Learning Inference Servers are optimized for use in image and video search, video analytics, object classification and detection, and a host of other scenarios. The NVIDIA T4 is the most versatile GPU to date -- bringing dramatic performance and efficiency gains to both deep learning training and inference. Built on NVIDIA's Turing architecture, the T4 also includes Tensor Cores for acceleration of deep learning inference workflows.

Clearsurance, the insurance industry's first unbiased peer review marketplace for insurance consumers, today announced its Recommendation Engine, a new solution driven by consumer data to help consumers view personalized, conflict-free insurance recommendations for the first time. By filtering and sorting based on their unique risk profile, consumers shopping for homeowners, rental or auto insurance can now view the top insurance policies for them without having to worry about financial conflicts of interest or their data surreptitiously being sold to third parties. "Many insurance consumers are eligible for discounts as a result of an affinity to specific groups and unique personal attributes that qualify them to save money on their personal insurance policies," said Michael Crowe, CEO and founder at Clearsurance. "Clearsurance's recommendation engine enables the consumer to identify discount attributes and get recommendations from insurance companies that offer such discounts." In addition to providing an easy-to-use interface designed to simplify an ordinarily complex process, the recommendation engine addresses critical data privacy concerns.