Teams of volunteers now hunt Asian hornets landing on British soil, but detection is only the tip of the iceberg, says Elmes. The true challenge is tracing the hornet back to its nest, to destroy the colony. “If something can automate and help us, it will shave off time,” he says. This is the rationale […]
Read MoreThe original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Two years ago, in a project called the Beyond the Imitation Game benchmark, or BIG-bench, 450 researchers compiled a list of 204 tasks designed to test the capabilities of large language models, which power chatbots like ChatGPT. On most tasks, performance improved predictably and smoothly […]
Read MoreWorking with player-tracking data from 7,176 corners taken in the Premier League during 2020 and 2021, the researchers began by representing the arrangement of players as a graph, with the players’ position, movement, height, and weight encoded as nodes on the graph, and relationships between players as the lines between them. Then they used an […]
Read MoreThe original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. A team of computer scientists has created a nimbler, more flexible type of machine learning model. The trick: It must periodically forget what it knows. And while this new approach won’t displace the huge models that undergird the biggest apps, it could reveal more about […]
Read MoreIt’s a perennial question at WIRED: Tech got us into this mess, can it get us out? That’s particularly true when it comes to climate change. As the weather becomes more extreme and unpredictable, there are hopes that artificial intelligence—that other existential threat—might be part of the solution. DeepMind, the Google-owned artificial intelligence lab, has […]
Read MoreIngenuity, NASA’s autonomous Mars helicopter, was only meant to complete five flights. But since its history-making first flight in April 2021, the helicopter has flown 28 times, and preparation is underway for the 29th. Depending on dust levels and the schedule of the rover Perseverance, that flight could take place as soon as later this […]
Read MoreThe way predictions raced ahead of experiments on Omicron’s spike protein reflects a recent sea change in molecular biology brought about by AI. The first software capable of accurately predicting protein structures became widely available only months before Omicron appeared, thanks to competing research teams at Alphabet’s UK-based AI lab DeepMind and at the University […]
Read MoreThe way predictions raced ahead of experiments on Omicron’s spike protein reflects a recent sea change in molecular biology brought about by AI. The first software capable of accurately predicting protein structures became widely available only months before Omicron appeared, thanks to competing research teams at Alphabet’s UK-based AI lab DeepMind and at the University […]
Read MoreMichael Wallace has performed hundreds of colonoscopies in his 20 years as a gastroenterologist. He thinks he’s pretty good at recognizing the growths, or polyps, that can spring up along the ridges of the colon and potentially turn into cancer. But he isn’t always perfect. Sometimes the polyps are flat and hard to see. Other […]
Read MoreDavid Cox, the head of a prestigious artificial intelligence lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was scanning an online computer science bibliography in December when he noticed something odd—his name listed as an author alongside three researchers in China whom he didn’t know on two papers he didn’t recognize. At first, he didn’t think much of it. […]
Read MoreHow high is the fruit? In the next pandemic, will we be able to very quickly develop a vaccine because of AI? Will it take 10 years until we’re there? Well I’m going to be an optimist and say yes, but I really don’t have the solid grounding to prove that. Let’s talk about the […]
Read MoreLate one January afternoon, British pharmacologist Peter Richardson ran out of his home office and told his wife, “Got it!” She asked what he was talking about and offered a cup of tea. Richardson explained that he had identified a drug that might help people infected with a new virus spreading in China. Richardson’s dash […]
Read MoreIn the months since the novel coronavirus emerged in Wuhan, China, last December, almost 2,000 research papers have been published on the health effects of the new virus, possible treatments, and the dynamics of the resulting pandemic. This outpouring of research is a testament to the speed with which science can tackle big problems. But […]
Read MoreComputers can now drive cars, beat world champions at board games like chess and Go, and even write prose. The revolution in artificial intelligence stems in large part from the power of one particular kind of artificial neural network, whose design is inspired by the connected layers of neurons in the mammalian visual cortex. These […]
Read MoreCare for some of the sickest Americans is decided in part by algorithm. New research shows that software guiding care for tens of millions of people systematically privileges white patients over black patients. Analysis of records from a major US hospital revealed that the algorithm used effectively let whites cut in line for special programs […]
Read MoreCare for some of the sickest Americans is decided in part by algorithm. New research shows that software guiding care for tens of millions of people systematically privileges white patients over black patients. Analysis of records from a major US hospital revealed that the algorithm used effectively let whites cut in line for special programs […]
Read MoreYour brain is a lot like your DNA. It is, arguably, everything that makes you uniquely you. Some types of brain scans are a lot like DNA tests. They may reveal what diseases you have (Parkinson’s, certainly; depression-possibly), what happened in your past (drug abuse, probably; trauma, maybe), or even what your future may hold […]
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