Astronomy – Ch. 8: Origin of the Solar System (14 of 19) Early Migration of the Jovian Planets – Video


Astronomy - Ch. 8: Origin of the Solar System (14 of 19) Early Migration of the Jovian Planets
Visit http://ilectureonline.com for more math and science lectures! In this video I will explain Mars is so small and why asteroid belt did not form a planet. Next video in this series can...

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Astronomy - Ch. 8: Origin of the Solar System (14 of 19) Early Migration of the Jovian Planets - Video

Astronomy – Ch. 8: Origin of the Solar System (18 of 19) The Wobble Method – Video


Astronomy - Ch. 8: Origin of the Solar System (18 of 19) The Wobble Method
Visit http://ilectureonline.com for more math and science lectures! In this video I will explain how astronomers detect extra solar planets (method 1). Next video in this series can be seen...

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Astronomy - Ch. 8: Origin of the Solar System (18 of 19) The Wobble Method - Video

Africa: Square Kilometre Array Partner Countries Meet

Ministers from African member countries of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) mega project met in Pretoria on Wednesday to discuss future cooperation in radio astronomy.

The meeting was also an opportunity for South Africa's Science and Technology Minister Naledi Pandor to appraise her counterparts from Mozambique, Madagascar, Zambia, Mauritius, Kenya, Ghana, Namibia and Botswana on the developments of the SKA project, which is co-hosted by South Africa.

Minister Pandor said construction of the world's largest radio telescope will take place in two phases.

In Phase 1, about 200 parabolic antennas will be erected in South Africa, while Australia - the other host country - will have more than 100 000 dipole antennas, which resemble television aerials. A parabolic antenna is an antenna that uses a parabolic reflector, a curved surface with the cross-sectional shape of a parabola to direct radio waves.

In Phase 2, array will extend into other African countries, with the Australian component also being expanded.

"We are confident that the construction of the SKA will start in 2018 and it is predicted that early science observations will be made in 2020," she said.

Minister Pandor congratulated the SKA South Africa team for the on-going construction of the antennas for the MeerKAT telescope, the 64-dish precursor telescope, which will be integrated into the SKA.

Minister Pandor said 32 dishes will be commissioned by 2016, with the full array ready by the middle of 2017.

"We are thrilled that the investment made by the South African government in science is beginning to attract international investment from institutions of the calibre of Germany's Max Planck Society, which has committed 11 million to build S-Band receivers - used primarily for pulsar research - and fund all the necessary ancillary equipment for the MeerKAT.

"We hope that through human capital development, innovation, value addition and industrialisation in alignment with STISA [Science, Technology & Innovation Strategy for Africa], we will be able to uplift large sections of Africa's people," the Minister said.

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Africa: Square Kilometre Array Partner Countries Meet

Searching for the origins of life with the James Webb Space Telescope

Hubble has been a boon to deep space exploration, gifting us iconic pictures of the skies and revealing new insights into the history of the early universe. For the next big step in space astronomy, NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) are raising the stakes even higher with one of their most ambitious projects in decades: building the largest space telescope ever ... the James Webb Space Telescope.

The James Webb Space Telescope, JWST for short, will have seven times the light-collecting capability of Hubble, span the size of a tennis court, and be so sensitive it could spot a single firefly a million kilometers away.

This "absolutely impressive piece of engineering," as NASA administrator Charles Bolden put it, includes technologies that make this spacecraft unlike any other and will allow us to learn about Earth-like exoplanets, help us understand how life began on Earth, and image the cosmos as it was only millions of years after the Big Bang, further back in time than ever before.

The contemplation of celestial things will make a man both speak and think more sublimely and magnificently when he descends to human affairs. Marcus Tullius Cicero, c. 30 BCE

Space telescopes can be extremely expensive. Hubbles total operating costs (including a Shuttle visit to repair its main mirror) have long passed the 10 billion US dollar mark, and similarly the budget for JWST, originally set at $2 billion, is now closer to nine after a bump-up of its mirror size. Projects such as these can not only have a meaningful scientific output, but also produce iconic images that can inspire a generation. But why go through the hassle of operating a telescope in space, when we could build much larger ones on the ground at a fraction of the cost?

One reason why Hubbles images became such a powerful part of the collective imagery is that, during its first years of operation, no telescope on the ground could remotely compete with Hubbles capabilities at imaging faint and distant celestial objects, due to the way our atmosphere distorts incoming light before it reaches the ground. But in recent years, the advent of adaptive optics a technique that can correct for atmospheric distortions in real time has meant ground telescopes have caught up in many respects. With that being the case, is there still a point to space telescopes?

"[Adaptive optics] is pretty good, not perfect," Physics Nobel laureate and JWST senior project scientist John Mather told Gizmag. "Instead of a star looking like a big blur an arcsecond across, it now looks like a smaller blur with a sharp core. We are finally getting some real discoveries made with this technique. It can show fainter stars and galaxies, and it can show better maps of extended objects. But theres still a bit of haze around things."

Space telescopes can image distant celestial objects without the haze typical of ground telescopes (Image: HST/NASA)

Both NASA and ESA already have definite plans for building a series of very large ground telescopes in the near future, including the $1.4 billion aptly-named Thirty Meter Telescope and the $1.3 billion, 42-m (138-ft) European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). The latter would see first light as soon as 2018, the same year the Webb is scheduled to launch.

These and other upcoming ground-based behemoths will employ the latest in adaptive optics to try and image celestial objects as clearly as possible. However, these telescopes were never designed to replace a space telescope. Rather, it is more likely that these giant ground telescopes will be used to find targets for a space telescope to study in more detail. In fact, despite having to make do with a much smaller mirror, space telescopes can often see more clearly than their ground-based counterparts, no matter their size.

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Searching for the origins of life with the James Webb Space Telescope

plAI – IEEE BITS Pilani Apogee 2k15 Artificial Intelligence Event – Video


plAI - IEEE BITS Pilani Apogee 2k15 Artificial Intelligence Event
What you can #39;t, your intelligence can! plAI (pronounced as "play") is a competition based on your artificial intelligence skills. Develop (Code in C++) an AI bot for the provided video-game...

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plAI - IEEE BITS Pilani Apogee 2k15 Artificial Intelligence Event - Video

Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak Warns Artificial Intelligence May Enslave Humans – Video


Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak Warns Artificial Intelligence May Enslave Humans
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Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak Warns Artificial Intelligence May Enslave Humans - Video

Binary Trading – Artificial Intelligence App – Watch Dr. Clark demonstrate his revolutionary App! – Video


Binary Trading - Artificial Intelligence App - Watch Dr. Clark demonstrate his revolutionary App!
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Binary Trading - Artificial Intelligence App - Watch Dr. Clark demonstrate his revolutionary App! - Video

Apple co-founder on artificial intelligence: The future …

The Super Rich Technologists Making Dire Predictions About Artificial Intelligence club gained another fear-mongering member this week: Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

In an interview with the Australian Financial Review, Wozniak joined original club members Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk by making his own casually apocalyptic warning about machines superseding the human race.

"Like people including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have predicted, I agree that the future is scary and very bad for people," Wozniak said. "If we build these devices to take care of everything for us, eventually they'll think faster than us and they'll get rid of the slow humans to run companies more efficiently."

[Bill Gates on dangers of artificial intelligence: I dont understand why some people are not concerned]

Doling out paralyzing chunks of fear like gumdrops to sweet-toothed children on Halloween, Woz continued: "Will we be the gods? Will we be the family pets? Or will we be ants that get stepped on? I don't know about that But when I got that thinking in my head about if I'm going to be treated in the future as a pet to these smart machines well I'm going to treat my own pet dog really nice."

Seriously? Should we even get up tomorrow morning, or just order pizza, log onto Netflix and wait until we find ourselves looking through the bars of a dog crate? Help me out here, man!

Wozniak's warning seemed to follow the exact same story arc as Season 1 Episode 2 of Adult Swim's "Rick and Morty Show."Not accusing him of apocalyptic plagiarism or anything; just noting.

For what it's worth, Wozniak did outline a scenario by which super-machines will be stopped in their human-enslaving tracks. Citing Moore's Law -- "the pattern whereby computer processing speeds double every two years" -- Wozniak pointed out that at some point, the size of silicon transistors, which allow processing speeds to increase as they reduce size, will eventually reach the size of an atom, according to the Financial Review.

"Any smaller than that, and scientists will need to figure out how to manipulate subatomic particles a field commonly referred to asquantum computing which has not yet been cracked," Quartz notes.

Wozniak's predictions represent a bit of a turnaround, the Financial Review pointed out. While he previously rejected the predictions of futurists such asthe pill-popping Ray Kurzweil, who argued that super machines will outpace human intelligence within several decades, Wozniak told the Financial Review that he came around after he realized the prognostication was coming true.

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Apple co-founder on artificial intelligence: The future ...

Facebook And Artificial Intelligence: Company's AI Chief Explains How He Tags Your Photos

Google Inc. announced this month that it had developed the most accurate facial-recognition technology to date called FaceNet, which the company said trumped Facebook Inc.s rival software called DeepFace by almost three percentage points in a test of accuracy. That was a tough truth for Facebook to swallow, because both companies have invested heavily in artificial-intelligence and computer-logic research to fuel the accuracy and speed of their respective systems, and because a billion monthly users alreadyrely on a form of Facebooks version to tag photographs when they log into the site. It appeared Facebook was getting beat at its own game.

Yann LeCun, head of Facebooks Artificial Intelligence Research lab, spoke Tuesday about how Facebook originally built the tools that currently handle the sites many photos and how his team plans to expand on that proficiency to build the next generation of artificial-intelligence software at an event co-sponsored by Facebook, Medidata and New York Universitys Center for Data Science that was held at the formers offices in New York. Its complicated, but its simpler than you might think, LeCun said.He leads a 40-member group of artificial-intelligence experts thatis only a year old, and split between Facebooks offices in New York, the companys headquarters in Menlo Park, California, and the firms new branch in Paris.

That team and Facebooks developers are in a race against other major technological companies, including Google, to create the fastest and most sophisticated systems not only for facial recognition but also for a whole suite of products built on the tenets of artificial intelligence. Along with Facebook and Google, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Amazon.com Inc. also have stated interests in this area,as Bloomberg Business reported. Last year, 16 artificial-intelligence startups were funded, while in 2010 the comparable figure was only two.

Facebook and its competitors believe people will increasingly rely on artificial intelligence to communicate with each other and to interact with the digital world. To stay ahead in this stiff competition, LeCun said his team needs to make breakthroughs in the field of deep learning, or the process by which machines can help humans at tasks that people have always proven best at, including making decisions or reasoning.

A computer capable of the advanced machine logic known as deep learning would require more inputs, outputs, levels and layers than Facebooks facial recognition and photo-tagging software, but LeCun said both projects would rely on many of the same fundamental methods that computers and programmers currently use to organize and prioritize information.

At any given moment, Facebook software is busy tagging and categorizing the 500 million photos that users upload to the site each day, all within two seconds of when the images first appear. At nearly the same time, the systems logic decides which photos to display to which users based not only on permissions but also on their preferences. Although the volume of data that this program processes would be mind-boggling for any human, the methods by which it sorts through those images are crafted by LeCuns team.

Most Facebook users have seen friends names pop up in suggested tags when they upload photos to the site, but the company also uses tags to categorize the objects within images and help its software to decide which photos to display on the site. Although the system could display as many as 1,500 photos a day in a users stream, the average Facebook user will spend only enough time on the site to see between 100 and 150 images a day. A form of artificial intelligence helps Facebook ensure users are seeing the most important ones.

To create a similar system that would fuel the company's foray into deep learning, developers and experts began with a large database of images and tags such as ImageNet, and they built programs that learned to associate characteristics of each tag with specific types of images. For example, differentiating between colors and shapes helps the software pick out a black road versus a gray sidewalk in an image of a city street. The network is able to take advantage of the fact that the world is compositional, LeCun said.

Once the program recognizes features such as streets or sidewalks in a photo, it can draw a box around each object and identify them as separate from each other, or highlight examples of only one or the other. LeCun demonstrated this last concept in a shaky video taken on a walk through Washington Square Park in New York. The software picked out pedestrians as they moved past, drawing a rectangular box around them on the screen.

A sophisticated tagging program should also be able to first distinguish between a black road and a black car, and then assign names and categories to these objects. To do this, experts teach the system to grab contextual clues from the pixels surrounding an unidentified object to determine its most likely identity. So in that photo of a city street, the software may identify and tag a road based on its shape, its color and the presence of a nearby sidewalk. Then, it could surmise that the bulky shape in the center of that road is probably a black car.

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Facebook And Artificial Intelligence: Company's AI Chief Explains How He Tags Your Photos

Elon Musk claims artificial intelligence will treat humans like 'labradors'

Comments made in an interview with scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson Musk said fears are based on something known as 'superintelligence' Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak made similar comments this year He says AI predictions are coming true and it is a dangerous reality Musk also recently said robots could soon replace humans as drivers

By Ellie Zolfagharifard and Victoria Woollaston for MailOnline

Published: 12:00 EST, 25 March 2015 | Updated: 14:12 EST, 25 March 2015

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Robots will use humans as pets once they achieve a subset of artificial intelligence known as 'superintelligence'.

This is according to SpaceX-founder Elon Musk who claims that when computers become smarter than people, they will treat them like 'pet Labradors'.

His comments were made in a recent interview with scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who added that computers could choose to breed docile humans and eradicate the violent ones.

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Elon Musk claims artificial intelligence will treat humans like 'labradors'

RAW: Royal Malaysian Air Force performs at Langkawi International Maritime and Aerospace Exhibition – Video


RAW: Royal Malaysian Air Force performs at Langkawi International Maritime and Aerospace Exhibition
The five-day Langkawi International Maritime and Aerospace (LIMA) exhibition kicked off on Tuesday, with a ceremony flypast by the Royal Malaysian Air Force.

By: New China TV

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RAW: Royal Malaysian Air Force performs at Langkawi International Maritime and Aerospace Exhibition - Video

UTC Aerospace Systems employee changes lives in small Indian village – Video


UTC Aerospace Systems employee changes lives in small Indian village
A UTC Aerospace Systems employee through a sustainability grant from the company believed he could change the lives of villagers in Deriya, India by providing them with a safe and healthy...

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UTC Aerospace Systems employee changes lives in small Indian village - Video