Hospital cyberattacks like the University of Mississippi Medical Center ransomware incident disrupt patient care. Ricardo Amper explains why healthcare systems are targets.

Experience replay is an essential component in deep reinforcement learning (DRL), which stores the experiences and generates experiences for the agent to learn in real time. Recently, prioritized experience replay (PER) has been proven to be powerful and widely deployed in DRL agents. However, implementing PER on traditional CPU or GPU architectures incurs significant latency overhead due to its frequent and irregular memory accesses. This paper proposes a hardware-software co-design approach to design an associative memory (AM) based PER, AMPER, with an AM-friendly priority sampling operation. AMPER replaces the widely-used time-costly tree-traversal-based priority sampling in PER while preserving the learning performance. Further, we design an in-memory computing hardware architecture based on AM to support AMPER by leveraging parallel in-memory search operations. AMPER shows comparable learning performance while achieving 55x to 270x latency improvement when running on the proposed hardware compared to the state-of-the-art PER running on GPU.

An artificial intelligence (AI) companion for people with dementia is being developed in research involving the University of Strathclyde. The technology will aid memory recollection, boost confidence and combat depression in people living with Alzheimer's Disease and other types of dementia. Memory loss in people with Alzheimer's Disease occurs in reverse chronological order, with pockets of long-term memory remaining accessible even as the disease progresses. While most current rehabilitative care methods focus on physical aids and repetitive reminding techniques, the new project, named AMPER (Agent-based Memory Prosthesis to Encourage Reminiscing) will take an AI-driven, user-centred approach and will focus on personalised storytelling to help bring a patient's memories back to the surface. The research team is led at Heriot-Watt University and the National Robotarium, a partnership between Heriot-Watt University and the University of Edinburgh.

Researchers at the National Robotarium, hosted by Heriot-Watt University and the University of Edinburgh, are developing an artificial intelligence (AI) companion that will aid memory recollection, boost confidence and combat depression in people living with Alzheimer's disease and other types of dementia. The idea for the ground-breaking'Agent-based Memory Prosthesis to Encourage Reminiscing' (AMPER) project originated from Dr. Mei Yii Lim, a co-investigator of the project and an experienced memory modelling researcher. Memory loss in people with Alzheimer's disease occurs in reverse chronological order, with pockets of long-term memory remaining accessible even as the disease progresses. While most current rehabilitative care methods focus on physical aids and repetitive reminding techniques, AMPER's AI-driven user-centred approach will focus on personalised storytelling to help bring a patient's memories back to the surface. Dr. Lim explains "AMPER will explore the potential for AI to help access an individual's personal memories residing in the still viable regions of the brain by creating natural, relatable stories. These will be tailored to their unique life experiences, age, social context and changing needs to encourage reminiscing."

If you have been watching the world of artificial intelligence (AI), then you see science fiction come to life before your eyes. Not only are we watching it achieve incredible feats, but we are also seeing them created at an amazing rate. It's just a matter of time before AI becomes a normal functioning member of our society. Those who are resistant to change and new methods are in for a rough time. This is because more and more of our society's occupations will rely on AI in some form or fashion.

Right now, AI music services are all the rage, and rightly so. The technology, data, and demand is there. As a producer, if you can use online tools to help inspire or improve your productions, why wouldn't you use them? And with platforms such as TikTok and YouTube, the demand to license straight-up beats and background music has never been larger. In this piece, we'll outline the AI services that you can work along side to create new formulas, sounds, and ultimately, songs.

In November, the musician Grimes made a bold prediction. "I feel like we're in the end of art, human art," she said on Sean Carroll's Mindscape podcast. "Once there's actually AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), they're gonna be so much better at making art than us." Her comments sparked a meltdown on social media. The musician Zola Jesus called Grimes the "voice of silicon fascist privilege."

Incode, a San Francisco startup developing what it describes as an omnichannel biometric identity platform, today announced that it's raised $10 million in seed funding from undisclosed investors. Founder and CEO Ricardo Amper said that the newfound capital will enable Incode to accelerate the development and rollout of its tools globally, some of which are already being used by major banks, financial institutions, governments, and retailers. "The modern consumer is all about experiences and convenience," said Amper. "What they want is a seamless, consistent and secure way to perform daily tasks like access their ATM, make payments, and access online accounts. Yet, what they get today is quite the opposite. The ecosystem is fragmented by multiple vendors and devices, making processes clunky and inefficient. That's precisely why we've built Incode Omni: to help companies provide a frictionless, secure and convenient experience for the next generation of consumers."

After a career as a film composer in L.A., Drew Silverstein moved to New York where he co-founded Amper Music. To combine the highest levels of artistry with groundbreaking artificial intelligence technology to empower anyone to create unique music, instantly. In 2017, Amper raised $4 million in seed funding and is now at the cutting edge of the race to crack AI music. Hot Press caught up with the Amper CEO in Rome, after his recent TEDx Talk, to find out what AI means for our future music consumption, how it will affect our approach to songwriting, how to collaborate with a digital version of yourself, the exploitation of intellectual property by Facebook and Google, the probability of robot composers with feelings, and why he predicts AI to be the greatest creative revolution in the history of music. MARK HOGAN: What is Amper? DREW SILVERSTEIN: Amper is an AI composer, performer and producer that creates unique and professional music in a matter of seconds. The music can be tailored to content or it can be standalone. Our mission is to enable anyone around the world to express themselves creatively through music regardless of their background, expertise or access to resources. Because fundamentally, every person is creative – by the fact that we're people. But just being creative doesn't mean we have the ability to express our creativity. Singing in the shower is easy.

The Amper app allows a user to pick a genre of music (rap, folk, rock) and a mood (happy, sad, driving) before spitting out a song. The user can then change the tempo, add instruments or switch them out until the result is satisfactory. Two songs created by Amper at SXSW -- using the public's choice of pop and hip hop as the genres and tender or sad for the mood -- clearly aren't likely to top the charts. But the pieces were pleasant enough to the ear and perfectly usable as background music to illustrate a video or a computer game. Such songs are described by Amper as "functional music" as opposed to "artistic music."