'As soon as we got Pong to work, people said: 'When are you going to do Doom?' a biological computer playing the 90s video game. 'As soon as we got Pong to work, people said: 'When are you going to do Doom?' a biological computer playing the 90s video game. A petri dish of human brain cells is currently playing Doom. Scientists in the US have uploaded a fruit fly to a computer simulation, while an Australian lab has taught neurons on a glass chip to play a 90s video game. How long before we are all living in a sci-fi movie? I t sounds like the opening of a sci-fi film, but US scientists recently uploaded a copy of the brain of a living fly into a simulation.

At a weekend hackathon in San Francisco, more than 100 coders gathered to test whether they could beat AI--and win a $12,500 cash prize. On a breezy San Francisco afternoon last Saturday, I found myself at a nondescript coworking space filled with shoeless coders. Just over a hundred visitors had crowded into an office building in the Duboce Triangle neighborhood for a showdown that would pit teams armed with AI coding tools against those made up of only humans (all were asked to ditch their shoes at the door). The hackathon was dubbed " Man vs. Machine," and its goal was to test whether AI does help people code faster--and better. Roughly 37 groups were randomly assigned "human" or "AI-supported."

Taipei, Taiwan – China has launched an antitrust investigation into chip giant Nvidia in what appears to be Beijing's latest act of retaliation against Washington's sanctions on Chinese tech companies. Chinese state media said on Monday that the California-based chipmaker was being investigated by the State Administration for Market Regulation for potentially violating China's antimonopoly laws. Regulators will also review the company's 6.9bn acquisition of Mellanox Technologies, an Israeli-American supplier specialising in computer networking products, state media reports said, without providing further details. Chinese regulators approved the deal in 2020 with several restrictive conditions, including a provision that Nvidia would not discriminate against Chinese suppliers. Nvidia, which designs advanced chips used to power artificial intelligence (AI), is one of the world's most valuable companies, with a market capitalisation of more than 3.4 trillion.

When neuroscientists David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel wanted to figure out how the brain parses its visual environment, they went as simple as they could go. In a Harvard lab crammed with electrical equipment, they positioned cats in front of a screen and showed them extremely basic images: dots in particular locations, lines at various angles. At the same time, they used implanted electrodes to, quite literally, "listen" to neurons in the areas of the brain devoted to vision. By observing which neurons fired in response to which shapes, they were able to unlock a part of the brain's "visual code," the way in which it represents visual information about its environment. For their achievement, Hubel and Wiesel won the Nobel Prize in 1981, and their discoveries kick-started the rich, diverse field of visual neuroscience.

There aren't many computer chips that you have to build a life support system for. You actually need to supply everything they would normally get in a fully biological body. As Hon Weng Chong, the CEO of Australia's Cortical Labs explains, it's all about creating computer systems that learn -- and that learn faster with less training data. That requires a different approach than standard Intel, Nvidia, or AMD chips, he says. "What we've actually built is a hybrid chip that is comprised of a CMOS sensor, so it's a silicon chip with a very fine mesh of electrodes. They're about 17 microns in pitch and there are about 22,000 of them," Chong told me on The AI Show recently.

A quick look through the Cars Technica back catalog (the carchive, perhaps?) shows that autonomous driving technology and racing technology are both topics we return to quite often. But it has been a while since we covered their intersection--specifically, what's been going on at Roborace. The series first broke cover at the end of 2015 and then wowed everybody with the Robocar a few months later. It looks outrageous, made possible because it does not need to protect a human driver or generate meaningful downforce, two factors that overwhelmingly influence most race car designs. Initially, the idea was for a driverless support series for Formula E. Roborace would supply teams with identical Robocars, and the teams would try to program a better racing AI.

Sabio, the Leaders in App Science, today announced the appointment of Dr. Jike Chong, Chief Data Scientist at Acorns, to its advisory board. Dr. Chong brings, to Sabio, extensive experience advising companies on how Artificial Intelligence can help solve the problems facing multiple industry verticals. Commenting on the appointment, Aziz Rahim, CEO of Sabio, stated, "Adding someone of Dr. Jike Chong's caliber to our advisory board further validates our business and approach to helping companies exceed their marketing goals through improved data analytics and insights. Dr. Jike Chong's contributions will enable us to continue empowering our clients with predictive business intelligence that gives a competitive advantage to today's mobile savvy marketers. We look forward to the strategic guidance Dr. Chong will provide Sabio's rapidly growing customer base and business."

Once a year, the bucolic grounds of Goodwood House in West Sussex, England, are consumed by the smell of exhaust fumes, the sound of engines revving, and an excited crowd of 100,000 people, all wanting a look at the special cars on show. They gather here because Charles Gordon-Lennox, the 11th Duke of Richmond, likes to occasionally open his home to host the Goodwood Festival of Speed, a celebration of all the history, the heritage, and the future of motor racing. This week, among the supercars, hypercars, and pure racing cars, Goodwood visitors will spot a low, black machine streaking in near silence up the winding driveway to the estate, which for the event is transformed into a 1.16-mile hill climb track. "We're pretty sure when the car appears, people will freak out," says Rod Chong, deputy CEO of Roborace. And it will be the first machine to give the hill climb a try without a human in command, so there are some nerves.

Seattle radiologist Maria Chong, MD, a body imaging specialist for Radia, said in a new interview that artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning will "revolutionize radiology" in the next decade. In the interview, part of an upcoming Seattle Magazine cover story, Chong discussed impact AI will have on patient care when asked about the future of healthcare. "Although still an early technology, computers are beginning to interpret images and assist the radiologist in making a rapid, accurate diagnosis," she said. "Eventually, AI in medicine will improve diagnostic accuracy, lower health care costs and enhance our lives." Chong also discussed misconceptions patients have about radiology, patient behavior and other more.

If you're working in the creative industries and wondering whether artificial intelligence is going to affect your world – even take your job – you could do worse than talk to Chris Chong. He's one of that feted breed, the serial entrepreneur and that of course means failure as well as success. "The creativity of entrepreneurship is always trying to stand on the edge of madness and innovation," he told Spikes Asia 2017. That meant "trying to see where the world will be in two to three years, and trying to position a company so that it takes advantage of those emerging trends." Chong's latest project is SumoStory, built upon the emerging trend of AI capabilities, plus the frustrations that he has personally encountered as an entrepreneur.