news 2017

Following years of research, AI is starting to have an impact on the way science is done, as these five Imperial studies from 2017 show. Barely a week has gone by in 2017 without warnings in the media about how Artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics is threatening to make all human workers redundant.

ANN ARBOR-An international research team has assembled the first complete list of all known vascular plant species in the Americas. The searchable database contains nearly 125,000 species representing one-third of all known vascular plants worldwide. Vascular plants are land plants with specialized internal-transport and vertical-support tissues.

ANN ARBOR-A new type of neural network made with memristors can dramatically improve the efficiency of teaching machines to think like humans. The network, called a reservoir computing system, could predict words before they are said during conversation, and help predict future outcomes based on the present.

For the very first time, the "Innovation Lab", a special exhibition for digital transformations in the construction industry, will be held at Swissbau 2018 from 16 to 20 January. NEST, the modular research and demonstration platform from Empa and Eawag, will be presenting with its partners (in hall 1.1, booth L88) how digital construction is implemented in reality and exactly what kind of potential for digital innovation is offered by the set of demonstrators on the Empa campus in Dübendorf.

Josh Tenenbaum, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, directs research on the development of intelligence at the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, a multiuniversity, multidisciplinary project based at MIT that seeks to explain and replicate human intelligence.

Neural networks , which learn to perform computational tasks by analyzing huge sets of training data, have been responsible for the most impressive recent advances in artificial intelligence, including speech-recognition and automatic-translation systems. During training, however, a neural net continually adjusts its internal settings in ways that even its creators can't interpret.

The recommendation systems at websites such as Amazon and Netflix use a technique called "collaborative filtering." To determine what products a given customer might like, they look for other customers who have assigned similar ratings to a similar range of products, and extrapolate from there. The success of this approach depends vitally on the notion of similarity.

Rowhammer attacks make use of hardware vulnerabilities in order to access computer systems. TU Graz researchers have discovered a new type of attack - and raise questions about protective mechanisms. "When a system is regarded as absolutely safe, our curiosity is awakened," explains Daniel Gruss from the Institute of Applied Information Processing and Communication Technology working group, the researcher is occupied with the security of IT systems and in particular rowhammer attacks.

EPFL researchers have shown how human operators can maintain control over a system comprising several agents that are guided by artificial intelligence. In artificial intelligence (AI), machines carry out specific actions, observe the outcome, adapt their behavior accordingly, observe the new outcome, adapt their behavior once again, and so on, learning from this iterative process.

The Computer Scientist Matteo Maffei (TU Wien) is awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant for the project "Browsec: Foundations and Tools for Client-Side Web Security" . He is working on a plugin that will make browsers safe - and is logically impossible to fool. We are hardly aware of the dangers we face when we are browsing the web.

A new project to explore how artificial intelligence (AI) could improve breast screening could potentially lead to more accurate detection of cancers. The project will see a consortium of leading breast cancer experts, clinicians and academics partner with leaders in artificial intelligence (AI) research to explore whether AI could help detect and diagnose breast cancers more effectively.

EPFL researchers have come up with a fact-based system to measure urban cleanliness. Municipal authorities will now be able to draw on objective assessments when planning their street cleaning - a sector with multi-million-franc budgets. The concept is straightforward: on one hand, vehicles equipped with video cameras to record the city streets, and on the other, a computer able to spot waste, identify it and classify it - in the blink of an eye.

How are we affected by other peoples' opinions' To answer this question, scientists 1 at the CNRS, Inra and Université Toulouse 1 Capitole conducted a study in France and Japan, quantifying this impact on our decisions. They identified five behaviors common to both countries: a majority of subjects make a compromise between their opinion and that of others (59% of people in France), some hold to their opinion (29% in France), whereas others follow faithfully, amplify or contradict the information they receive.

Technis, an EPFL spin-off, has developed a system that combines a connected floor surface with artificial intelligence to track people's trajectories as they walk through a shopping mall or convention center, for example.

A materials expert says quantum computers may be able to come out of the cold, thanks to his research breakthrough. Dr Jonathan Breeze is from the Department of Materials at Imperial College London. He says his research breakthrough may help scientists overcome a major obstacle with quantum computers - the fact that they have to operate in conditions that are colder than deep space.

A team of researchers in the GIPSA-Lab (CNRS/Université Grenoble Alpes/Grenoble INP) and at INRIA Grenoble Rhône-Alpes has developed a system that can display the movements of our own tongues in real time.

Artificial intelligence researchers at the University of Bath have been awarded €250,000 to conduct a series of unique experiments on how people interact with humanoid robots. Dr Joanna Bryson and her research group in the Department of Computer Science have received the funding from the AXA Research Fund , which supports scientific discoveries that contribute to societal progress.

New research has shown future wearable devices, such as smartwatches, could use ultrasound imaging to sense hand gestures. The research team led by Professor Mike Fraser, Asier Marzo and Jess McIntosh from the Bristol Interaction Group (BIG) at the University of Bristol, together with University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust (UH Bristol), presented their paper this summer [8-11 May] at one of the world's most important conferences on human-computer interfaces, held in Denver, USA.

Miron Livny, a UW-Madison computer science professor, is pictured near an enclosed bank of distributed computing equipment in the Computer Sciences and Statistics Building. Photo: Jeff Miller Today's announcement of the Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded to researchers Rainer Weiss of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Kip Thorne and Barry Barish of the California Institute of Technology, bears University of Wisconsin System connections.

Tiling the plane with a single pattern is a mathematical problem that has interested humans since Antiquity, notably for the aesthetic quality of tiles in mosaics or tiling. One of the unresolved problems in this field that has been puzzling the scientific community since 1918 has now been definitively resolved thanks to Michaël Rao of the Laboratoire d'informatique du parallélisme (CNRS/Inria/ENS de Lyon/Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1).