One color-blind artist has had an'eyeborg' antenna implanted directly into his skull to enable him to'hear' color - and his friend has had implants in her feet to allow her to'feel' earthquakes. The two are'transhumanists', a growing movement of people who hope to add new abilities to their bodies using technology - with Elon Musk claiming that technology such as his Neuralink implant could enhance human memories or even allow humans to live forever as man-machine hybrids. The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence has sparked a new interest in the idea of surgically modified humans. In a new documentary due out this year, Cyborg, Neil Harbisson, who is the world's first legally recognized cyborg thanks to his color-hearing implant, says, 'This is happening!' and hopes that technology will allow humans to'self-design' their bodies. Neil Harbisson, the world's first legally recognised cyborg thanks to his color-hearing implant (First Born Films) Hrbisson advocates for'non-human' identities (First Born Films) Director Carey Born said that she had heard of a'cyborg' who had been surgically altered to hear color, emailed Harbisson and decided to make a documentary about'transhumanists' - believing it's important that the tech doesn't fall into the wrong hands.

A consortium of Swiss research institutes has begun working on UrbanTwin to make an AI-driven, ecologically-sensitive model of the energy, water and waste systems of the town of Aigle to help boost sustainability. Aigle has been chosen due to its size and because it has an extensive range of water sources and includes very detailed energy monitoring infrastructure previously developed by the Energy Center of EPFL. The UrbanTwin team aims to develop and validate a holistic tool to support decision-makers in achieving environmental goals, such as the Energy Strategy 2050 and the vision of climate-adaptive "sponge cities". The tool will be based on a detailed model of critical urban infrastructure, such as energy, water, buildings, and mobility, accurately simulating the evolution of these interlinked infrastructures under various climate scenarios and assessing the effectiveness of climate-change-related actions. "Urban areas are responsible for 75% of greenhouse gas emissions while rising temperatures significantly impact their liveability. They represent a natural integrator of several systems, including energy, water, buildings, and transport. So, they represent the ideal setting for implementing a coordinated, multi-sectoral response to climate changes leveraging digitalization as a systemic approach."

AI was deployed across multiple areas in health during the pandemic, from analysing the sound of a patient's cough to predicting mortality. More than 4,000 scientific papers have been published on AI and COVID-19 since the pandemic began, Alessandro Blasimme, a senior scientist in the Health Policy Lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, told participants at a recent panel on the future of science and technology in Europe. The ethical quandaries posed by AI in healthcare range from opaque decision-making to biases against certain social groups that get embedded in a technology. For instance, if an algorithm drew on the fact that older people were more likely to die from COVID, it could introduce age-based bias to decisions. And, while the public have accepted border restrictions, "what people might not be used to is, the idea that there is a system that does this screening in the background – something that is not visible, it's not transparent."

Roboticists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne in Switzerland have unveiled a robotic eel that leverages sensory feedback from the water it swims through to coordinate its motion without the need for central control. A robotic eel designed by researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) can swim through water, receiving sensory data while in motion. The AgnathaX robot does not employ centralized programming, relying instead on skin sensors that can detect pressure changes in the surrounding water. The sensors are connected to the robot's motorized segments, enabling AgnathaX to produce swimming motions even if its segments are unconnected. This mechanism supports a peripheral control system for robots, and EPFL's Robin Thandiackal and Kamilo Melo said, "Robots that have our complete control architecture, with both peripheral and central components, are remarkably fault-tolerant and robust against damage in their sensors, communication buses, and control circuits."

Covid-19 has accelerated the transition to online teaching, raising questions about the role of robots in classrooms.

A large class of systems of biological and technological relevance can be described as analog networks, that is, collections of dynamical devices interconnected by links of varying strength. Some examples of analog networks are genetic regulatory networks, metabolic networks, neural networks, analog electronic circuits, and control systems. Analog networks are typically complex systems which include nonlinear feedback loops and possess temporal dynamics at different time scales. Both the synthesis and reverse engineering of analog networks are recognized as knowledge-intensive activities, for which few systematic techniques exist. In this paper we will discuss the general relevance of the analog network concept and describe an evolutionary approach to the automatic synthesis and the reverse engineering of analog networks.

A new study shows that an artificial intelligence (AI) method that fuses medically relevant information enables critical circulatory failure to be predicted in the intensive care unit (ICU) several hours before it occurs. Developed at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH; Zurich, Switzerland) and Bern University Hospital (Inselspital; Switzerland), the early-warning platform integrates measurements from multiple systems using a high-resolution database that holds 240 patient-years of data. For the study, the researchers used anonymized data from 36,000 admissions to ICUs, and were able to show that just 20 of these variables, including blood pressure, pulse, various blood values, the patient's age, and medications administered were sufficient to make accurate predictions. In a trial run of the algorithms developed, they were able to predict 90% of circulatory-failure events, with 82% of them identified more than two hours in advance. On average, the system raised 0.05 alarms per patient and hour.

Global IT giant Microsoft has opened a new laboratory in Zurich, where it will collaborate with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich in the areas of mixed reality and artificial intelligence. Microsoft has opened the Mixed Reality and AI Zurich Lab, where it will collaborate closely with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. According to ETH Zurich, the lab is already home to twelve Microsoft employees, four ETH Zurich doctoral students and one doctoral student from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). ETH professor Marc Pollefeys is the director. The new lab in Zurich is dedicated to researching mixed reality technologies and artificial intelligence.

The need to use wavefunction or density functional theory (DFT) calculations to determine electron densities has been bypassed by a machine learning model. It will allow chemists to quickly determine properties that depend on the electron density of large systems such as van der Waals forces, halogen bonding and C-H–π interactions. These non-covalent interactions can hold insight into the binding of host–guest systems or favoured enantiomers within reaction pathways where intermediates and transition states may be stabilised by subtle attractions. The electron density distribution is one of the most powerful tools at the disposal of a computational chemist. From the electron density, properties such as charges, dipoles and electrostatic interaction energies can be determined.

Have you been worried that robots might one day become smart enough to rebel against humans? If so, you may now have cause for even greater concern. That's because a team of Swiss scientists has been training four-legged robots to be more agile and durable. The robot is called the ANYmal and is being developed by the ANYbotics team at the Zurich-based Swiss Federal Institute of Technology's Robotic Systems Lab. In a paper published in Science Robotics, ANYbotics has outlined exactly what sort of (arguably) ill-advised work it has done on the ANYmal.