SP. 114 - Ghost In The Shell (2017)

“Making an AI machine play and be naturally curious is key”

- Mark Sagar, Academy Award-winning AI engineer on the future of AI in animation.

What’s next for AI? We spoke with 30 visionaries in AI to learn where they think the technology is heading.  

See the full interview  →

Death Mask

Programming project from Or Fleisher and Anastasis Germanidis combines Augmented Reality and Machine Learning, using a Neural Net trained for age prediction through mobile camera device:

‘Death-Mask’ predicts how long people have to live and overlays that in the form of a “clock” above they’re heads in augmented reality.  The project uses a machine learning model titled AgeNet for the prediction process. Once predicted it uses the average life expectancy in that location to try and estimate how long one has left.

The aesthetic inspiration derives from the concept of death masks. These are sculptures meant to symbolize the death of a person by casting his face into a sculpture (i.e mask).

The experiment uses ARKit to render the visual content in augmented reality on an iPad and CoreML to run the machine learning model in real-time. The project is by no means an accurate representation of one’s life expectancy and is more oriented towards the examination of public information in augmented reality in the age of deep learning.

Link

Augmented reality sandbox - move the land around and it shows off the topography and sea/water level.

Mario Kart 64 with Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT)

Project from NIck Nelson applies Neural Network learning to playing Mario Kart 64 with successful results:

This is NOT a human playing the game, it is in fact the program I wrote. It is a special kind of machine learning that models biological evolution to evolve “species” to find the optimal solution to the problem. In this case the problem is Mario Kart 64! This run is the result of about two days of training. 

Code for the project can be found here

The Genius of Marie Curie

Growing up in Warsaw in Russian-occupied Poland, the young Marie Curie, originally named Maria Sklodowska, was a brilliant student, but she faced some challenging barriers. As a woman, she was barred from pursuing higher education, so in an act of defiance, Marie enrolled in the Floating University, a secret institution that provided clandestine education to Polish youth. By saving money and working as a governess and tutor, she eventually was able to move to Paris to study at the reputed Sorbonne. here, Marie earned both a physics and mathematics degree surviving largely on bread and tea, and sometimes fainting from near starvation. 

In 1896, Henri Becquerel discovered that uranium spontaneously emitted a mysterious X-ray-like radiation that could interact with photographic film. Curie soon found that the element thorium emitted similar radiation. Most importantly, the strength of the radiation depended solely on the element’s quantity, and was not affected by physical or chemical changes. This led her to conclude that radiation was coming from something fundamental within the atoms of each element. The idea was radical and helped to disprove the long-standing model of atoms as indivisible objects. Next, by focusing on a super radioactive ore called pitchblende, the Curies realized that uranium alone couldn’t be creating all the radiation. So, were there other radioactive elements that might be responsible?

In 1898, they reported two new elements, polonium, named for Marie’s native Poland, and radium, the Latin word for ray. They also coined the term radioactivity along the way. By 1902, the Curies had extracted a tenth of a gram of pure radium chloride salt from several tons of pitchblende, an incredible feat at the time. Later that year, Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel were nominated for the Nobel Prize in physics, but Marie was overlooked. Pierre took a stand in support of his wife’s well-earned recognition. And so both of the Curies and Becquerel shared the 1903 Nobel Prize, making Marie Curie the first female Nobel Laureate.

In 1911, she won yet another Nobel, this time in chemistry for her earlier discovery of radium and polonium, and her extraction and analysis of pure radium and its compounds. This made her the first, and to this date, only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences. Professor Curie put her discoveries to work, changing the landscape of medical research and treatments. She opened mobile radiology units during World War I, and investigated radiation’s effects on tumors.

However, these benefits to humanity may have come at a high personal cost. Curie died in 1934 of a bone marrow disease, which many today think was caused by her radiation exposure. Marie Curie’s revolutionary research laid the groundwork for our understanding of physics and chemistry, blazing trails in oncology, technology, medicine, and nuclear physics, to name a few. For good or ill, her discoveries in radiation launched a new era, unearthing some of science’s greatest secrets.

From the TED-Ed Lesson The genius of Marie Curie - Shohini Ghose

Animation by Anna Nowakowska

give em the ol’ razzle dazzle

Artificial Intelligence learns to beat Mario like crazy.

Street Fighter II in the real world

Proof of concept experience by Abhishek Singh makes classic game Street Fighter II playable in the real world using iOS ARKit and Unity, and can be played via two iPhones:

Remember the classic arcade game Street Fighter 2? I rebuilt it as a multiplayer AR game to actually take it into the streets. I’m calling it the Real World Warrior edition.

Link

Solar System: 10 Things to Know

Movie Night

Summer break is just around the corner. Hang a sheet from the clothesline in the backyard and fire up the projector for a NASA movie night.

1. Mars in a Minute

Back in the day, movies started with a cartoon. Learn the secrets of the Red Planet in these animated 60 second chunks.

2. Crash of the Titans

Watch two galaxies collide billions of years from now in this high-definition visualization.

3. Tour the Moon in 4K

Wait for the dark of the waning Moon next weekend to take in this 4K tour of our constant celestial companion.

4. Seven Years of the Sun

Watch graceful dances in the Sun’s atmosphere in this series of videos created by our 24/7 Sun-sentinel, the Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO).

5. Light ‘Em Up

Crank up the volume and learn about NASA science for this short video about some of our science missions, featuring a track by Fall Out Boy.

6. Bennu’s Journey

Follow an asteroid from its humble origins to its upcoming encounter with our spacecraft in this stunning visualization.

7. Lunar Landing Practice

Join Apollo mission pilots as they fly—and even crash—during daring practice runs for landing on the Moon.

8. Earthrise

Join the crew of Apollo 8 as they become the first human beings to see the Earth rise over the surface of the Moon.

9. Musical Descent to Titan

Watch a musical, whimsical recreation of the 2005 Huygens probe descent to Titan, Saturn’s giant moon.

10. More Movies

Our Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio provides a steady stream of fresh videos for your summer viewing pleasure. Come back often and enjoy.

Read the full version of this article on the web HERE. 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.  

Bitcoin and Ether mining in Guizhou, China