Month: September 2017

How We Won Gold in the Cyborg Olympics’ Brain Race

In October 2016, inside a sold-out arena in Zurich, a man named Numa Poujouly steered his wheelchair up to the central podium. As the Swiss national anthem played, organizers of the world’s first cyborg Olympics hung a gold medal around Poujouly’s neck. The 30-year-old, who became paralyzed after a bicycle accident in his teens, had triumphed in the tournament’s most futuristic event: a video-game-like race in which the competitors controlled their speeding avatars with just their minds.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/bionics/how-we-won-gold-in-the-cyborg-olympics-brain-race?utm_source=TechAlert&bt_alias=eyJ1c2VySWQiOiAiZjY3YTc2MjEtZTY0MS00N2M3LThmMTgtMzBkNDQ4NjAxMzhmIn0%3D&utm_medium=BTtrigger&utm_campaign=TAWinback&utm_content=blast1

Artificial intelligence pioneer says we need to start over – Axios

In 1986, Geoffrey Hinton co-authored a paper that, four decades later, is central to the explosion of artificial intelligence. But Hinton says his breakthrough method should be dispensed with, and a new path to AI found.

Speaking with Axios on the sidelines of an AI conference in Toronto on Wednesday, Hinton, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto and a Google researcher, said he is now “deeply suspicious” of back-propagation, the workhorse method that underlies most of the advances we are seeing in the AI field today, including the capacity to sort through photos and talk to Siri. “My view is throw it all away and start again,” he said.

https://www.axios.com/ai-pioneer-advocates-starting-over-2485537027.html