Tag: Artificial Intelligence

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Fiction Science Club

How to track untrue tales in the disinformation war

Illustration: A stream of words relating to disinformation superimposed on a hand holding a mobile device
Online tools fuel an arms race between purveyors of disinformation and those who defend against it. (Credit: Skorzewiak / Bigstock.com)

Artificial intelligence is fueling an arms race between the purveyors of disinformation and those who are fighting it in this year’s high-stakes political campaign, but the best tool to defend against fake news is honest-to-goodness human intelligence.

That’s how two expert observers size up the escalating information war in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast.

“As a longtime AI researcher, I’ve become a huge fan of human intelligence,” says Oren Etzioni, the founder of Seattle-based TrueMedia.org, which uses AI to distinguish between genuine and faked photos and videos. “So, the first, second and third defense has to be media literacy and appropriate skepticism about what you see.”

Annalee Newitz, the author of “Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind,” agrees that humans are “the most important part of the loop” in the fight against disinformation..

“We need technical tools. We need things like TrueMedia. We need access to APIs for social media platforms so that researchers can provide tools like TrueMedia for text and for posts that are mostly text-based,” Newitz says. “But ultimately, it is about people being wary of what they read that’s passed to them by any platform that they’re on, even if it’s something they hear from their neighbors.”

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Scientists turn to the cloud for computational chemistry

Illustration: Fanciful view of cloud containing molecular structures, circuitry and test tubes
Researchers are finding ways to speed up computational chemistry through cloud computing. (Illustration by Nathan Johnson / PNNL)

A team led by researchers from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is finding new ways to accelerate the pace of computational chemistry, by making tools for quantum computing and AI-assisted data analysis available via the cloud.

Their effort to make supercomputer-scale resources more widely available through cloud computing could aid in the search for methods to break down toxic “forever chemicals” that are currently hard to get rid of. And that’s just one example.

The researchers describe their progress on the project — known as Transferring Exascale Computational Chemistry to Cloud Computing Environment and Emerging Hardware Technologies, or TEC4 — in a study published today in the Journal of Chemical Physics.

“This is an entirely new paradigm for scientific computing,” PNNL computational chemist Karol Kowalski, who led the cross-disciplinary effort, said in a news release. “We have shown that it’s possible to bundle software as a service with cloud computing resources. The initial proof of concept shows that cloud computing can provide a menu of options to complement and supplement high-performance computing for solving complex scientific problems.”

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AI goes full circle from fiction to science and back again

Illustration: Paz on Mars in a spacesuit with a spider-bot on helmet
A teenager is left in charge of a Mars base in one of "The Year's Top Hard Science Fiction Stories." (Illustration by Maurizio Manzieri / Infinivox)

Artificial intelligence has had an effect on nearly every facet of modern life — ranging from diagnosing diseases, to applying for a job, to deciding which movie to watch. Now it’s reaching back into the realm where our notions about AI were born decades ago: science fiction.

“AI is just becoming more and more prominent in science fiction, which I think is a just a reflection of the times we’re in right now,” says Allan Kaster, who has been editing annual collections of sci-fi stories for 15 years. “It’s getting harder and harder to see a story that doesn’t include some sort of AI.”

Kaster, who heads up a sci-fi publishing house called Infinivox, discusses the connections between real-world science and fiction in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast.

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AI experts look ahead to artificial general intelligence

Sophia the Robot
A robot named Sophia can carry on a conversation and make facial expressions. (Hanson Robotics Photo)

There’s no question that artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming more intelligent, thanks to software platforms including ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Grok. But does that mean AI agents will one day outdo the generalized smarts that distinguish human intelligence? And if so, is that good or bad for humanity? Those were just a couple of the questions raised during this week’s AGI-24 conference in Seattle.

Conference sessions at the University of Washington centered on a concept known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI. Artificial intelligence can already outperform humans on a growing list of specialized tasks, ranging from playing the game of Go to diagnosing some forms of cancer. But humans are still more intelligent than AI agents when it comes to dealing with a wider range of tasks, including tasks they haven’t been trained to do. That’s what AGI is all about.

David Hanson, a roboticist and artist who’s best known for creating a humanoid robot named Sophia, said the questions surrounding human-level intelligence and consciousness are a high priority for his team at Hanson Robotics.

“The goal really is continuously to explore what it means to be intelligent,” he said during an Aug. 16 session. “How can we achieve consciousness? How can we make machines that co-evolve with humans? All of these efforts, while they’re really cool, and I’m very proud of them, they’re all just trying to get the engine to start on this kind of conscious machine that can co-evolve with humans.”

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Mars Society is gaining a foothold in AI and biotech

NASA engineer working on construction robot
NASA engineer Christine Gregg inspects an experimental construction robot. (NASA Photo / Dominic Hart)

The Mars Society says it’s making progress on launching a startup incubator in the Seattle area, with artificial intelligence and biotech as its first targets. Its long-term goal? To make a profit, yes, but also to support the development of technologies needed to sustain settlements on the Red Planet.

“A successful Mars colony will need to be highly innovative, and it will have the chance to be highly innovative — and because of those facts, it will make inventions that will meet its own needs but also be licensable on Earth,” Mars Society President Robert Zubrin said last week at the nonprofit group’s annual conference at the University of Washington.

“Those inventions — as it were, IP as exports from Mars — will be one of the main economic supports of the Mars city-state,” Zubrin said. “So, people sometimes ask me, ‘Well, if you think that a Mars inventors colony could actually be profitable, why not create it here on Earth first?’”

That’s the idea behind the Mars Technology Institute. James Burk, the Mars Society’s Seattle-based executive director, said the institute would be modeled on the tech industry’s Y Combinator, a California-based startup accelerator that provides seed money and guidance for promising ventures in return for a share of their equity.

Burk said he’s been talking government officials and representatives of other organizations in the Seattle area — including Bellevue College — about setting up a home base for the institute. Those talks could bear fruit in the months ahead.

In the meantime, the Mars Society is moving ahead with initiatives in AI, biotech for food production, and robotics. In addition to those target areas, Zubrin would also like to get involved in advanced nuclear fission and fusion technologies — another tech frontier that the Pacific Northwest is known for. “But the entry point for getting involved with those [technologies] is high, and so we chose to defer that,” he said.

Get a status report on the Mars Society’s startup efforts…

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Alitheon makes headway with ID system aided by AI

Roei Ganzarski at Alitheon HQ
Roei Ganzarski became Alitheon’s CEO in 2022. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

BELLEVUE, Wash. — Seven years after it came onto the Seattle area’s tech scene, a startup called Alitheon is making headway with a product identification system that can make sure a high-priced purse — or a high-performance airplane part — is the real deal rather than a counterfeit.

The system, known as FeaturePrint, doesn’t use barcodes or blockchain. Instead, Alitheon’s AI-enhanced software analyzes ever-so-slight irregularities in the surface of a manufactured item.

“We are able to see all of the features, flaws, aspects of the manufacturing process, however you want to define them,” Alitheon CEO Roei Ganzarski explained at Alitheon’s Bellevue headquarters. “Because they’re random and chaotic by nature, because they’re not there by design, they constitute a digital fingerprint.”

Sorting out what’s real and what’s fake is a challenge for supply chains, and finding solutions would be worth a lot of money. Experts estimate the market in counterfeit goods at more than $1 trillion per year and say that figure is steadily rising.

Ganzarski noted that the idea of tracking variations in manufacturing tolerances isn’t new. “What’s really new is the intellectual property that we’ve developed which allows us to do this with standard, off-the-shelf cameras,” he said. “So, no need for spectral imaging, no infrared, none of that nonsense. Just a standard camera. In fact, we can do it with a cellphone.” And he proceeded to demonstrate …

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How artificial intelligence is taking over the final frontier

Photoillustration: Robonaut 2 and spacesuit for human astronaut
Robonaut 2 (at left) was one of NASA’s early forays into the world of robotics and AI. (NASA Photo)

Will intelligent AI agents take on the job of capsule communicator in future missions to the moon, Mars and other space destinations?

It could happen, says James Burk, the executive director of the Mars Society.

“One of our advisers did a really deep dive on how the Apollo astronauts interacted with each other and with the CapCom back on Earth, and he came to the insight that the Apollo 17 astronauts were using CapCom almost like an AI bot — because the CapCom knew everything,” Burk said during a panel discussion focusing on the intersection of artificial intelligence and space ventures.

“You can imagine having an AI edge device which could be like a rover following the crew around, walking around the moon or Mars,” he said. “It’s watching them and taking stock of how everyone’s doing.”

This week’s panel was a crossover session presented at Madrona Venture Labs by the Washington Technology Industry Association for Seattle AI Week, and by Space Northwest for Seattle Space Week. “When you think about the kinds of megatrends of our time, two of the big ones are space and AI,” said Mike Doyle, Space Northwest’s president and co-founder.

Putting AI into space adventures isn’t exactly a new idea: The best-known sci-fi example is HAL, the AI who goes psycho in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” There’s also the no-nonsense computer voice in the Star Trek saga, or Marvin the Paranoid Android in “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

But the real world isn’t science fiction. Yet.

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Scientists harness generative AI for cancer diagnosis

Illustration: Visualization of microchip with the look of a whole-slide image
Prov-GigaPath harnesses AI for digital pathology. (Ella Maru Studio via Providence / Microsoft)

Researchers at Microsoft, Providence Health System and the University of Washington say they’ve developed a new artificial intelligence model for diagnosing cancer, based on an analysis of more than a billion images of tissue samples from more than 30,000 patients.

The open-access model, known as Prov-GigaPath, is described in research published today by the journal Nature and is already being used in clinical applications.

“The rich data in pathology slides can, through AI tools like Prov-GigaPath, uncover novel relationships and insights that go beyond what the human eye can discern,” study co-author Carlo Bifulco, chief medical officer of Providence Genomics, said in a news release. “Recognizing the potential of this model to significantly advance cancer research and diagnostics, we felt strongly about making it widely available to benefit patients globally. It’s an honor to be part of this groundbreaking work.”

The effort to develop Prov-GigaPath used AI tools to identify patterns in 1.3 billion pathology image tiles obtained from 171,189 digital whole-slides provided by Providence. The researchers say this was the largest pre-training effort to date with whole-slide modeling — drawing upon a database five to 10 times larger than datasets such as the The Cancer Genome Atlas.

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Scientists back AI principles for biomolecular design

Visualization of protein molecule
AI technologies now allow scientists to generate biomolecules unlike any seen in nature. (Illustration by Ian C. Haydon / UW IPD)

More than 90 researchers — including a Nobel laureate — have signed on to a call for the scientific community to follow a set of safety and security standards when using artificial intelligence to design synthetic proteins.

The community statement on the responsible development of AI for protein design is being unveiled today in Boston at Winter RosettaCon 2024, a conference focusing on biomolecular engineering. The statement follows up on an AI safety summit that was convened last October by the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

“I view this as a crucial step for the scientific community,” the institute’s director, David Baker, said in a news release. “The responsible use of AI for protein design will unlock new vaccines, medicines and sustainable materials that benefit the world. As scientists, we must ensure this happens while also minimizing the chance that our tools could ever be misused to cause harm.”

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Quindar raises $6M to automate satellite management

Screenshots of Quindar's satellite control dashboard
Screenshots show Quindar’s spacecraft management platform at work. (Image via Quindar)

A space-centric startup called Quindar says it has successfully closed an oversubscribed $6 million funding round that will give a boost to its cloud-hosted, AI-supported software platform for satellite management.

The seed extension round was led by the Seattle-area venture capital firm Fuse, with continuing investment from Y Combinator and Funders Club. The round builds upon last year’s initial seed round and brings total funding to date to $8.5 million, Quindar CEO and co-founder Nate Hamet told GeekWire in an email.

“The infusion of funding will propel our mission to manage satellites as efficiently as servers by utilizing AI-driven insights and operations to revolutionize the industry’s approach to spacecraft management,” Quindar said today in an announcement about the investment round.

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