Haiku Tech Center

This is a great talk / demo of Neuralink's implantable brain-machine interface.  Elon Musk gives the initial overview talk (which is a great overview of neural computer interfaces in general), and then Neuralink engineers answer questions from the room and the web.  The Neuralink interface currently is the size of a small coin, and a robot surgeon that Neuralink also manufactures inserts it into your scull.  The robot also inserts the individual electrodes into the brain while monitoring that process to avoid puncturing any blood vessels while doing that.  So for being such an invasive device, it's surprisingly non-invasive.  The current generation of devices is shown working in a cute pig.  Another cute pig who had the device in it's scull and then had it removed is also shown.  Pigs seem happy and healthy.  Neuralink is on fast track with the FDA to get this approved for use in humans.  Otherwise pigs will be the ones talking to our AI overlords via direct neural in

Let's stretch our brains a little bit this week beyond our normal deep learning focus.  This weeks HTC Seminar is a conversation with Richard Dawkins.  Titled Richard Dawkins: Evolution, Intelligence, Simulation, and Memes, this is a podcast in Lex Fridman's Ai Podcast series.  Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, and author of many great books you should really sit down and read, including The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker. You can skip the first 2 minutes of sponsorship ad mentions if you want to jump right to the interview.

"What makes smart fabrics revolutionary is that they have the ability to do many things that traditional fabrics cannot, including communicate, transform, conduct energy and even grow."  This is a quote from Rebeccah Pailes-Friedman, who is a professor at Pratt with a research focus on developing wearable technology and smart textiles. Enhancing textiles can be viewed through different lens.  Enhancements can be aesthetic, or performance boosting, or durability boosting. 

Augmented Startups interviews the CEO of Luxonis Brandon Giles.  Brandon is the head developer of the super cool OAK boards we've been promoting here at HTC. Brandon explains the background behind the whole OAK project. Check out our OAK tag for other posts on the OAK neural net embedded vision system.

Let's take a dive into understanding deep reinforcement learning.  This week's HTC seminar is the first lecture in the 2019 MIT course on deep reinforcement learning course, presented by Lex Fridman. Lex Fridman is an AI researcher at MIT whose research interests include autonomous vehicles, human-robot interaction, and machine learning. This lecture is a good introduction to what deep reinforcement learning is, and why you might want to try and understand how it works.  You can think of deep reinforcement learning as the shotgun marriage of deep learning and reinforcement learning. Reinforcement learning has been around in some form since the very beginning of machine learning and artificial intelligence research.  It also has a long history of being used in the video game industry.  Since it's a war horse of old AI approaches that didn't really pan out in the end, why do we care about it in 2020? Deep learning is the secret sauce that allows reinforcement