AI breakthroughs of 2014

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/533686/2014-in-computing-breakthroughs-in-artificial-intelligence/

Google's fact-checking bots build vast knowledge bank

The search giant is automatically building Knowledge Vault, a massive database that could give us unprecedented access to the world's facts

GOOGLE is building the largest store of knowledge in human history – and it's doing so without any human help.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329832.700-googles-factchecking-bots-build-vast-knowledge-bank.html#.U_qVwBkZ7qA

¿La meditación previene el envejecimiento?

http://www.muyinteresante.com.mx/preguntas-y-respuestas/741531/meditacion-previene-envejecimiento/

A Real little Buddha?

Link to Video

Un niño aumenta la eficiencia de las placas solares

http://m.xataka.com/otros/un-nino-de-13-anos-revoluciona-la-tecnologia-solar-dando-un-paseo-por-el-bosque#body

The new age for computers and the end of Von Neumann architecture

NeuroGrid — A Circuit Board Modeled after the Human Brain

Although the basic computer architecture we rely on was designed to handle math and logic problems, it’s done a bang-up job of tackling everything from word processing and socializing to controlling the movements of artificial limbs. But as we demand increasingly human-like work from machines, pressure is mounting to rejigger and expand their basic architecture to better jibe with the brain’s way of doing things.

If we ever want to be able to run a computer that simulates the hundred billion neurons at work in a human brain, though, each of its silicon chips will have to sip, not gulp, energy. And while computers will have to process information through pathways more organic and complex than the classic von Neumann architecture, they will have to keep up a demanding pace.

Eying those problems on the horizon, a team ofStanford University engineers led by Kwabena Boahen has developed a circuit board, and its underlying chips, that simulates the activity of a million neurons 9,000 times faster than a personal computer could and is 100,000 times more energy efficient. They reported the findings in a recent issue of IEEE.

The circuit board, called Neurogrid, consists of 16 custom-designed Neurocore chips. Each chip simulates 65,536 neurons. All told, the board can simulate 1 million neurons and billions of synaptic connections.

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Great!... - We will 3D print our own staff

A Visionary 3-D Printed Chair That You Can Download Now




Joris Laarman doesn’t work out of a studio so much as a laboratory. The Dutch designer, probably best known for his chair that mimics the growth of human bones, has always claimed dual citizenship in the worlds of classic design and science. “I like to take things out of the scientific world and create something beautiful with it,” he says one day walking around the Friedman Benda Gallery in New York City.

Laarman recently opened up a new exhibition at gallery called Bits and Crafts. And much like his Bone Chair, the new works have an interesting, quasi-craftsmanship aesthetic to it, as though they were born from an affair between a carpenter and a computer scientist.

The centerpiece of the show, the Maker Chairs, is one of Laarman’s most ambitious projects yet: A set of algorithmically-designed chairs that can be printed out and constructed like a puzzle. The furniture looks vaguely like Verner Panton’s injection-molded chair from 1960 if it were reimagined by mathematicians.


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