Kinetic installation artist David Bowen has given a rhododendron a really big knife, the power to use it, and therefore, a degree of agency not enjoyed by the kingdom Plantae since the Cambrian era. His latest piece, Plant Machete, melds a woody shrub with an industrial robot arm and slaps a machete to the business end of it. On the other end, a series of electrical pickups monitor the bioelectrical noise generated by the plant. Living plant controls a machete through an industrial robot arm pic.twitter.com/jQYzMzoG0W "The system uses an open source microcontroller connected to the plant to read varying resistance signals across the plant's leaves," Bowen wrote.

Pre-trained language models derive substantial linguistic and factual knowledge from the massive corpora on which they are trained, and prompt engineering seeks to align these models to specific tasks. Unfortunately, existing prompt engineering methods require significant amounts of labeled data, access to model parameters, or both. We introduce a new method for selecting prompt templates without labeled examples and without direct access to the model. Specifically, over a set of candidate templates, we choose the template that maximizes the mutual information between the input and the corresponding model output. Figure 1: Performance of template selected by our maximum Across 8 datasets representing 7 distinct NLP mutual information method (MI) compared to tasks, we show that when a template has high the the worst, mean, median, and best prompt on GPT-3 mutual information, it also has high accuracy Davinci (175B). Our method performs at almost oracle on the task. On the largest model, selecting levels, without labels or access to model weights.

Space agencies across the world are working tirelessly to design the best ships and technologies for the chance to claim a stake of the final frontier for their country. Although it may seem like an act of national pride, a professor from Johns Hopkins University warns that space expansion may lead to the extinction of humanity, suggesting it should not be attempted at all. Daniel Deudney recently published a book titled'Dark Skies' that examines space expansionism through geopolitics revealing cosmic habitats could spark totalitarian empires. The political science professor also notes that if these settlements stretch across the solar system, nuclear weapons will become the gold standard in war, along with using asteroids to destroy enemy planets - but other experts feel these arguments are'too pessimistic.' 'I argue that the consequences of what has actually happened in space are much less positive than space enthusiasts and many others believe,' reads'Dark Skies.' 'In sum, this book argues that the large-scale expansion of human activities into space, past and future, should join the lengthening list of catastrophic and existential threats to humanity, and that the ambitious core of space expansionism should be explicitly relinquished.'

Technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) are rapidly expanding opportunities for teaching and learning, and they are giving college administrators new and different ways to track student outcomes. To learn more about the impact of these technologies, we attended a handful of panels on the topic led by higher education and technology leaders at Educause's annual conference in Denver this week. From teaching with VR to tracking student success with AI, we explore how colleges and universities are using new technologies to conduct research, teach students and create smarter campuses. Virtual and augmented reality tools can provide students with experiences that would be otherwise too expensive or even impossible to replicate in the real world, from exploring the inside of a cell to traversing faraway planets, said D. Christopher Brooks, director of research at the Educause Center for Analysis and Research. At Hamilton College, for example, these tools are changing the way the 1,850-student liberal arts institution teaches human anatomy.

Will artificial intelligence (AI) trigger a dystopic future (re: Skynet)? Will machine learning help cure cancer? Theories abound in the AI conversation. What's not debatable, however, is AI's popularity. Consumers are adopting it at a rapid clip and manufacturers are investing heavily in AI research and development.

Baseball arguably has the deepest game analytics out of any major league sport. These insights are only generated during games using expensive, specialized equipment and a team of expert baseball statisticians. It would be impossible to generate similar statistics in real-time for amateur competition or recreational play. However, one avid baseball fan has built two smartphone applications to allow recreational baseball players to generate these statistics as they practice and play. PASoftware Team (from left to right): Andrew White (CIO), Jacob Zarbosky (CTO), Will Bowen (VP), Matt Bowen (Founder & CEO). Matthew Bowen is the founder of PASoftware, a baseball video analytics software startup brings the power and accuracy of multi-million dollar Major League Baseball analytics systems to your smartphone.

Artificial intelligence is hitting universities, but it doesn't mean professors are being replaced by computers. "So when we talk about AI, we imagine robots, we imagine science fiction, we imagine Skynet overthrowing the world. These are the things that we imagine, but the reality is that it's not nearly that sexy," said Kyle Bowen, the educational technology services director at Penn State, during EdSurge Live's town hall on AI. "The reality is that some of the really interesting applications of this are people and computers working together to think about or to explore different problems or ideas," Bowen added. Much like Microsoft's Anthony Salcito, Bowen and other higher education influencers touted AI's ability to make data analytics and student success initiatives even easier by drawing out the most actionable data. Here are some key takeaways from EdSurge Live's two-part video series: Candace Thille, an assistant professor of education at Stanford Graduate School of Education, told EdSurge viewers that data pulled from student work should be used to craft personalized learning experiences.

For the past 30 days in the frigid port city of Duluth, Minnesota, a colony of houseflies has been kept alive by a piece of software. The computer takes care of their needs, giving the insects water and nutrients in the form of powdered milk and sugar. The flies, of course, are unaware that their ultimate fate depends on whether or not a machine correctly identifies blobs of pixels flitting across a camera--if it fails, they die. It's one hell of a metaphor in a time where futurists are considering a world where daily needs are met by computers that track and analyze us. "We should be smart about how we plan for artificial intelligence, because one way or another it's coming," said David Bowen, the 41-year-old artist and professor behind the installation, which he calls FlyAI.

Visitors to Australia's federal parliament are often surprised by the robust verbal confrontation between the government and the opposition – technically known as questions without notice, more commonly as question time. A theatrical highpoint of every sitting day, question time is part intellectual cage fight, part kindergarten spat – and all psychological warfare. Political journalists watch the hour-long question time as drought-stricken farmers view the clouds. They look for signs, they read the climate. But what if you were interested in facts?