project that requires not only today's best neurotechnology hardware but also powerful machine-learning models."We were on a collision course with what's going on in artificial intelligence," says Chang. "That's what's enabled all of this."
Settles about personalized language learning in this issue [p.28].Bicknell is the head of AI at Duolingo.Settles was formerly the research director and head of AI at Duolingo.Before joining the company, Brust was preparing to visit China
Fifty years ago this month, two people walked on the moon. It was by any measure a high point in human history, an achievement so pure and glorious that for a moment, anyway, it seemed to unite the world's fractious, cacophonous communities into a kind of triumphant awe. Over the next three and a half years, 10 more people had the honor of leaving tracks on another world. And then it all came to a halt. It's time to go back, and this time for a lot more than a series of multibillion-dollar strolls. After decades of scattered objectives and human missions that literally went nowhere (aboard the International Space Station), the world's space agencies are coming into surprising, if delicate, alignment about returning to the moon and building a settlement there. NASA is leading the charge, with new and aggressive backing from the White House. The U.S. space agency has officially declared its intention to return humans to the moon by 2024-although many observers question whether it can adhere to such an ambitious timetable. So far, NASA and its partners have drawn up the most detailed plans and spent the most money. But the enthusiasm goes far beyond the United States. This past April, Zhang Kejian, director of the China National Space Administration, said the country planned to build an inhabited research station near the moon's south pole "in about 10 years." China has the world's second-largest space budget behind the United States, and it has already put two landers and two rovers on the moon.
By 2022, forecasters estimate that sub-Saharan Africa will have nearly 1 billion mobile phones-enough for the vast majority of the projected 1.2 billion people who will live there. What it won't have are the endless streams of telephone poles and wires that cascade across other continents. Development experts call this an example of a "leapfrog technology." By going straight to mobile, many African nations will be able to skip the step of building extensive and expensive landline infrastructure. In fact, "some places will go straight to 5G," says Vincent Kaabunga, chair of the IEEE Ad Hoc Committee on Africa, which has helped craft IEEE's strategy to increase engineering capacity on the continent. With this kind of leapfrogging, African nations can take the lead in certain types of technological development and deployment, he says. Just look at mobile money: Companies such as M-Pesa sprang up to solve a local problem-people's lack of access to brick-and-mortar banks-and became a way for people not only to make payments, but also to get loans and insurance. "We've refined the concept of mobile money over the last 10 or 15 years," says Kaabunga, "while other parts of the world are just now coming around to embracing it." IEEE and its members in Africa are facilitating the application of new technologies by promoting education and access, says Kaabunga, who also works for a technology consulting firm in Kampala, Uganda. The IEEE in Africa Strategy, launched in 2017, calls for IEEE to support engineering education at every level and to advise government policymakers, efforts that Kaabunga and his colleagues in the region have already begun. For example, they're currently working with the Smart Africa alliance, an initiative that aims to create standard policies for information and communications technology to enable a single digital marketplace across the continent.
Advances in medical imaging allow the Human Connectome Project to map neural connections. In early March, an unusual 2 terabytes of data hit the Web: the first batch of images from a massively ambitious brainmapping effort called the Human Connectome Project. Thousands of images showed the brains of 68 healthy volunteers, with different regions glowing in bright jewel tones. These data, freely available for download via the project's website, give neuroscientists unprecedented insights into which parts of the brain act in concert to do something as seemingly simple as recognizing a face.
Just a few years ago, Lockheed Martin was working to build a pilot plant to demonstrate a renewable energy technology called ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) near the Hawaiian island of Oahu.
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