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The Good Robot podcast: Transhumanist fantasies with Alexander Thomas

AIHub

Hosted by Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney, The Good Robot is a podcast which explores the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology. In this episode, Eleanor talks to Alexander Thomas, a filmmaker and academic who leads the BA in Media Production at the University of East London. They discuss his new book about transhumanism, a philosophical movement that aims to improve human capabilities through technology and whose followers includes Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Larry Page, and also apparently the DJ Steve Aoki. Alex is himself one of the foremost commentators on transhumanism. He explores transhumanist fantasies about the future of the human, is obsessed with the extremes of possibility: they either think that AI will bring us radical abundance or total extinction.


Analysis of Linsker's Simulations of Hebbian Rules

Neural Information Processing Systems

Linsker has reported the development of centre---surround receptive fields and oriented receptive fields in simulations of a Hebb-type equation in a linear network. The dynamics of the learning rule are analysed in terms of the eigenvectors of the covariance matrix of cell activities. Analytic and computational results for Linsker's covariance matrices, and some general theorems, lead to an expla(cid:173) nation of the emergence of centre---surround and certain oriented structures. Linsker [Linsker, 1986, Linsker, 1988] has studied by simulation the evolution of weight vectors under a Hebb-type teacherless learning rule in a feed-forward linear network. The equation for the evolution of the weight vector w of a single neuron, derived by ensemble averaging the Hebbian rule over the statistics of the input patterns, is:!


The Good Robot Podcast: featuring Bridget Boakye

AIHub

Hosted by Eleanor Drage and Kerry Mackereth, The Good Robot is a podcast which explores the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology. Bridget is an expert in how AI is impacting Africa and the major challenges in implementing AI use across the continent. She tells us about what good technology means in the contexts in which she works and the benefits and drawbacks of Google and other Big Tech companies operating in Africa. Bridget Boakye is a Ghanaian entrepreneur, data scientist and writer. She is.the Artificial Intelligence Lead in the Internet Policy Unit of the Tony Blair Institute.


Robot Talk Podcast – November & December episodes ( bonus winter treats)

Robohub

Sarvapali (Gopal) Ramchurn is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence, Turing Fellow, and Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology. He is the Director of the UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems hub and Co-Director of the Shell-Southampton Centre for Maritime Futures. He is also a Co-CEO of Empati Ltd, an AI startup working on decentralised green hydrogen technologies. His research is about the design of Responsible Artificial Intelligence for socio-technical applications including energy systems and disaster management. Ferdinando Rodriguez y Baena is Professor of Medical Robotics in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College, where he leads the Mechatronics in Medicine Laboratory and the Applied Mechanics Division. He has been the Engineering Co-Director of the Hamlyn Centre, which is part of the Institute of Global Health Innovation, since July 2020.


New AI Incubation Hub to Work on Critical Tech for Army; Machine Learning, Robotics, Big Data in Focus

#artificialintelligence

An Artificial Intelligence Incubation Hub (AIIH), set up jointly by the Army and Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) as part of a pact inked earlier this year, will be identifying artificial intelligence projects that may be critical for the Army and coordinate the evaluation of trials in those cases, News18 has learnt. As per defence sources, the AIIH will also be tasked with identifying partners from the industry, academia or start-ups to check the feasibility of ideas related to AI projects for implementation and will be responsible for hiring of resources and necessary hardware for validation of suggested AI projects for the force. Based on BEL's research and development expertise and areas where the Army could use AI, the new hub will be working in major domain areas of machine learning, auto-platforms, AI-based swarm technology, robotics, big data analytics, image processing as well as cyber security and AI-based response mechanism. In March this year, the Army and BEL had inked a pact to collaborate in AI for defence applications. The step was taken after the defence ministry had pushed for fast-tracking incorporation of the new tech for defence applications, as part of which the defence services were asked to collaborate with defence PSUs.


The Good Robot Podcast: featuring Lorraine Daston

AIHub

Hosted by Eleanor Drage and Kerry Mackereth, The Good Robot is a podcast which explores the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology. In this episode, the historian of science Lorraine Daston explains why science has long been allergic to emotion, which is seen to be the enemy of truth. Instead, objective reason is science's virtue. She explores moments where it's very difficult for scientists not to get personally involved, like when you're working on your pet hypothesis or theory, which might lead you to select data that confirms your hypothesis, or when you're confronted with some anomalies in your dataset that threaten a beautiful and otherwise perfect theory. But Lorraine also reminds us that the desire for objectivity can itself be an emotion, as it was when Victorian scientists expressed their heroic masculine self-restraint.


Personalizing Sustainable Agriculture with Causal Machine Learning

Giannarakis, Georgios, Sitokonstantinou, Vasileios, Lorilla, Roxanne Suzette, Kontoes, Charalampos

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

To fight climate change and accommodate the increasing population, global crop production has to be strengthened. To achieve the "sustainable intensification" of agriculture, transforming it from carbon emitter to carbon sink is a priority, and understanding the environmental impact of agricultural management practices is a fundamental prerequisite to that. At the same time, the global agricultural landscape is deeply heterogeneous, with differences in climate, soil, and land use inducing variations in how agricultural systems respond to farmer actions. The "personalization" of sustainable agriculture with the provision of locally adapted management advice is thus a necessary condition for the efficient uplift of green metrics, and an integral development in imminent policies. Here, we formulate personalized sustainable agriculture as a Conditional Average Treatment Effect estimation task and use Causal Machine Learning for tackling it. Leveraging climate data, land use information and employing Double Machine Learning, we estimate the heterogeneous effect of sustainable practices on the field-level Soil Organic Carbon content in Lithuania. We thus provide a data-driven perspective for targeting sustainable practices and effectively expanding the global carbon sink.


AI and Data Science Centers in Top Indian Academic Institutions

Communications of the ACM

Artificial intelligence (AI) and data science (DS) centers are becoming ubiquitous in academic institutions around the globe. These centers serve to focus research efforts and bring together large teams to address important problems. AI centers in more mature research ecosystems tend to be multi-institutional, such as the Alan Turing Institute in the U.K. with 13 academic partners12 and Mila in Montreal with four academic partners and numerous industry partners.8 Often such centers are also focused on a specific theme, such as the 18 AI institutes funded by NSF.10 In contrast, the centers in India tend to be contained in only one institute--this facilitates the institute to identify AI/DS as a growth area and an area of interest to the Institute.


Our Presence at The Neuro, Digital, AI and Innovation Summit - Digital Salutem

#artificialintelligence

This prestigious event took place in Lisbon and was hosted by the Champalimaud Foundation at its world class facilities. The Champalimaud Foundation has the world's first pancreatic cancer research and treatment centre. The Botton-Champalimaud Pancreatic Cancer Centre has the first unit in the world designed and built specifically with the aim of researching and treating pancreatic cancer. This Centre is the result of a partnership between the Champalimaud Foundation and Maurício and Carlotta Botton, who contributed 50 million euros to its construction. Over the past 20 years, the number of people with pancreatic cancer has increased exponentially throughout most of the world, especially in the most industrialised countries.


Centre for AI: Social and Digital Innovation

#artificialintelligence

Bringing together public, private and third sector organisations together with computer scientists, health scientists, engineers and social scientists in a shared physical and virtual space, creating the conditions for innovation.