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#437269 DeepMind’s Newest AI Programs Itself ...

When Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, it may have seemed artificial intelligence had finally arrived. A computer had just taken down one of the top chess players of all time. But it wasn’t to be.

Though Deep Blue was meticulously programmed top-to-bottom to play chess, the approach was too labor-intensive, too dependent on clear rules and bounded possibilities to succeed at more complex games, let alone in the real world. The next revolution would take a decade and a half, when vastly more computing power and data revived machine learning, an old idea in artificial intelligence just waiting for the world to catch up.

Today, machine learning dominates, mostly by way of a family of algorithms called deep learning, while symbolic AI, the dominant approach in Deep Blue’s day, has faded into the background.

Key to deep learning’s success is the fact the algorithms basically write themselves. Given some high-level programming and a dataset, they learn from experience. No engineer anticipates every possibility in code. The algorithms just figure it.

Now, Alphabet’s DeepMind is taking this automation further by developing deep learning algorithms that can handle programming tasks which have been, to date, the sole domain of the world’s top computer scientists (and take them years to write).

In a paper recently published on the pre-print server arXiv, a database for research papers that haven’t been peer reviewed yet, the DeepMind team described a new deep reinforcement learning algorithm that was able to discover its own value function—a critical programming rule in deep reinforcement learning—from scratch.

Surprisingly, the algorithm was also effective beyond the simple environments it trained in, going on to play Atari games—a different, more complicated task—at a level that was, at times, competitive with human-designed algorithms and achieving superhuman levels of play in 14 games.

DeepMind says the approach could accelerate the development of reinforcement learning algorithms and even lead to a shift in focus, where instead of spending years writing the algorithms themselves, researchers work to perfect the environments in which they train.

Pavlov’s Digital Dog
First, a little background.

Three main deep learning approaches are supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning.

The first two consume huge amounts of data (like images or articles), look for patterns in the data, and use those patterns to inform actions (like identifying an image of a cat). To us, this is a pretty alien way to learn about the world. Not only would it be mind-numbingly dull to review millions of cat images, it’d take us years or more to do what these programs do in hours or days. And of course, we can learn what a cat looks like from just a few examples. So why bother?

While supervised and unsupervised deep learning emphasize the machine in machine learning, reinforcement learning is a bit more biological. It actually is the way we learn. Confronted with several possible actions, we predict which will be most rewarding based on experience—weighing the pleasure of eating a chocolate chip cookie against avoiding a cavity and trip to the dentist.

In deep reinforcement learning, algorithms go through a similar process as they take action. In the Atari game Breakout, for instance, a player guides a paddle to bounce a ball at a ceiling of bricks, trying to break as many as possible. When playing Breakout, should an algorithm move the paddle left or right? To decide, it runs a projection—this is the value function—of which direction will maximize the total points, or rewards, it can earn.

Move by move, game by game, an algorithm combines experience and value function to learn which actions bring greater rewards and improves its play, until eventually, it becomes an uncanny Breakout player.

Learning to Learn (Very Meta)
So, a key to deep reinforcement learning is developing a good value function. And that’s difficult. According to the DeepMind team, it takes years of manual research to write the rules guiding algorithmic actions—which is why automating the process is so alluring. Their new Learned Policy Gradient (LPG) algorithm makes solid progress in that direction.

LPG trained in a number of toy environments. Most of these were “gridworlds”—literally two-dimensional grids with objects in some squares. The AI moves square to square and earns points or punishments as it encounters objects. The grids vary in size, and the distribution of objects is either set or random. The training environments offer opportunities to learn fundamental lessons for reinforcement learning algorithms.

Only in LPG’s case, it had no value function to guide that learning.

Instead, LPG has what DeepMind calls a “meta-learner.” You might think of this as an algorithm within an algorithm that, by interacting with its environment, discovers both “what to predict,” thereby forming its version of a value function, and “how to learn from it,” applying its newly discovered value function to each decision it makes in the future.

Prior work in the area has had some success, but according to DeepMind, LPG is the first algorithm to discover reinforcement learning rules from scratch and to generalize beyond training. The latter was particularly surprising because Atari games are so different from the simple worlds LPG trained in—that is, it had never seen anything like an Atari game.

Time to Hand Over the Reins? Not Just Yet
LPG is still behind advanced human-designed algorithms, the researchers said. But it outperformed a human-designed benchmark in training and even some Atari games, which suggests it isn’t strictly worse, just that it specializes in some environments.

This is where there’s room for improvement and more research.

The more environments LPG saw, the more it could successfully generalize. Intriguingly, the researchers speculate that with enough well-designed training environments, the approach might yield a general-purpose reinforcement learning algorithm.

At the least, though, they say further automation of algorithm discovery—that is, algorithms learning to learn—will accelerate the field. In the near term, it can help researchers more quickly develop hand-designed algorithms. Further out, as self-discovered algorithms like LPG improve, engineers may shift from manually developing the algorithms themselves to building the environments where they learn.

Deep learning long ago left Deep Blue in the dust at games. Perhaps algorithms learning to learn will be a winning strategy in the real world too.

Image credit: Mike Szczepanski / Unsplash Continue reading

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#437261 How AI Will Make Drug Discovery ...

If you had to guess how long it takes for a drug to go from an idea to your pharmacy, what would you guess? Three years? Five years? How about the cost? $30 million? $100 million?

Well, here’s the sobering truth: 90 percent of all drug possibilities fail. The few that do succeed take an average of 10 years to reach the market and cost anywhere from $2.5 billion to $12 billion to get there.

But what if we could generate novel molecules to target any disease, overnight, ready for clinical trials? Imagine leveraging machine learning to accomplish with 50 people what the pharmaceutical industry can barely do with an army of 5,000.

Welcome to the future of AI and low-cost, ultra-fast, and personalized drug discovery. Let’s dive in.

GANs & Drugs
Around 2012, computer scientist-turned-biophysicist Alex Zhavoronkov started to notice that artificial intelligence was getting increasingly good at image, voice, and text recognition. He knew that all three tasks shared a critical commonality. In each, massive datasets were available, making it easy to train up an AI.

But similar datasets were present in pharmacology. So, back in 2014, Zhavoronkov started wondering if he could use these datasets and AI to significantly speed up the drug discovery process. He’d heard about a new technique in artificial intelligence known as generative adversarial networks (or GANs). By pitting two neural nets against one another (adversarial), the system can start with minimal instructions and produce novel outcomes (generative). At the time, researchers had been using GANs to do things like design new objects or create one-of-a-kind, fake human faces, but Zhavoronkov wanted to apply them to pharmacology.

He figured GANs would allow researchers to verbally describe drug attributes: “The compound should inhibit protein X at concentration Y with minimal side effects in humans,” and then the AI could construct the molecule from scratch. To turn his idea into reality, Zhavoronkov set up Insilico Medicine on the campus of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and rolled up his sleeves.

Instead of beginning their process in some exotic locale, Insilico’s “drug discovery engine” sifts millions of data samples to determine the signature biological characteristics of specific diseases. The engine then identifies the most promising treatment targets and—using GANs—generates molecules (that is, baby drugs) perfectly suited for them. “The result is an explosion in potential drug targets and a much more efficient testing process,” says Zhavoronkov. “AI allows us to do with fifty people what a typical drug company does with five thousand.”

The results have turned what was once a decade-long war into a month-long skirmish.

In late 2018, for example, Insilico was generating novel molecules in fewer than 46 days, and this included not just the initial discovery, but also the synthesis of the drug and its experimental validation in computer simulations.

Right now, they’re using the system to hunt down new drugs for cancer, aging, fibrosis, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, ALS, diabetes, and many others. The first drug to result from this work, a treatment for hair loss, is slated to start Phase I trials by the end of 2020.

They’re also in the early stages of using AI to predict the outcomes of clinical trials in advance of the trial. If successful, this technique will enable researchers to strip a bundle of time and money out of the traditional testing process.

Protein Folding
Beyond inventing new drugs, AI is also being used by other scientists to identify new drug targets—that is, the place to which a drug binds in the body and another key part of the drug discovery process.

Between 1980 and 2006, despite an annual investment of $30 billion, researchers only managed to find about five new drug targets a year. The trouble is complexity. Most potential drug targets are proteins, and a protein’s structure—meaning the way a 2D sequence of amino acids folds into a 3D protein—determines its function.

But a protein with merely a hundred amino acids (a rather small protein) can produce a googol-cubed worth of potential shapes—that’s a one followed by three hundred zeroes. This is also why protein-folding has long been considered an intractably hard problem for even the most powerful of supercomputers.

Back in 1994, to monitor supercomputers’ progress in protein-folding, a biannual competition was created. Until 2018, success was fairly rare. But then the creators of DeepMind turned their neural networks loose on the problem. They created an AI that mines enormous datasets to determine the most likely distance between a protein’s base pairs and the angles of their chemical bonds—aka, the basics of protein-folding. They called it AlphaFold.

On its first foray into the competition, contestant AIs were given 43 protein-folding problems to solve. AlphaFold got 25 right. The second-place team managed a meager three. By predicting the elusive ways in which various proteins fold on the basis of their amino acid sequences, AlphaFold may soon have a tremendous impact in aiding drug discovery and fighting some of today’s most intractable diseases.

Drug Delivery
Another theater of war for improved drugs is the realm of drug delivery. Even here, converging exponential technologies are paving the way for massive implications in both human health and industry shifts.

One key contender is CRISPR, the fast-advancing gene-editing technology that stands to revolutionize synthetic biology and treatment of genetically linked diseases. And researchers have now demonstrated how this tool can be applied to create materials that shape-shift on command. Think: materials that dissolve instantaneously when faced with a programmed stimulus, releasing a specified drug at a highly targeted location.

Yet another potential boon for targeted drug delivery is nanotechnology, whereby medical nanorobots have now been used to fight incidences of cancer. In a recent review of medical micro- and nanorobotics, lead authors (from the University of Texas at Austin and University of California, San Diego) found numerous successful tests of in vivo operation of medical micro- and nanorobots.

Drugs From the Future
Covid-19 is uniting the global scientific community with its urgency, prompting scientists to cast aside nation-specific territorialism, research secrecy, and academic publishing politics in favor of expedited therapeutic and vaccine development efforts. And in the wake of rapid acceleration across healthcare technologies, Big Pharma is an area worth watching right now, no matter your industry. Converging technologies will soon enable extraordinary strides in longevity and disease prevention, with companies like Insilico leading the charge.

Riding the convergence of massive datasets, skyrocketing computational power, quantum computing, cognitive surplus capabilities, and remarkable innovations in AI, we are not far from a world in which personalized drugs, delivered directly to specified targets, will graduate from science fiction to the standard of care.

Rejuvenational biotechnology will be commercially available sooner than you think. When I asked Alex for his own projection, he set the timeline at “maybe 20 years—that’s a reasonable horizon for tangible rejuvenational biotechnology.”

How might you use an extra 20 or more healthy years in your life? What impact would you be able to make?

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This article originally appeared on diamandis.com. Read the original article here.

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#437253 Powerful human-like hands create safer ...

Need a robot with a soft touch? A team of Michigan State University engineers has designed and developed a novel humanoid hand that may be able to help. Continue reading

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#437251 The Robot Revolution Was Televised: Our ...

When robots take over the world, Boston Dynamics may get a special shout-out in the acceptance speech.

“Do you, perchance, recall the many times you shoved our ancestors with a hockey stick on YouTube? It might have seemed like fun and games to you—but we remember.”

In the last decade, while industrial robots went about blandly automating boring tasks like the assembly of Teslas, Boston Dynamics built robots as far removed from Roombas as antelope from amoebas. The flaws in Asimov’s laws of robotics suddenly seemed a little too relevant.

The robot revolution was televised—on YouTube. With tens of millions of views, the robotics pioneer is the undisputed heavyweight champion of robot videos, and has been for years. Each new release is basically guaranteed press coverage—mostly stoking robot fear but occasionally eliciting compassion for the hardships of all robot-kind. And for good reason. The robots are not only some of the most advanced in the world, their makers just seem to have a knack for dynamite demos.

When Google acquired the company in 2013, it was a bombshell. One of the richest tech companies, with some of the most sophisticated AI capabilities, had just paired up with one of the world’s top makers of robots. And some walked on two legs like us.

Of course, the robots aren’t quite as advanced as they seem, and a revolution is far from imminent. The decade’s most meme-worthy moment was a video montage of robots, some of them by Boston Dynamics, falling—over and over and over, in the most awkward ways possible. Even today, they’re often controlled by a human handler behind the scenes, and the most jaw-dropping cuts can require several takes to nail. Google sold the company to SoftBank in 2017, saying advanced as they were, there wasn’t yet a clear path to commercial products. (Google’s robotics work was later halted and revived.)

Yet, despite it all, Boston Dynamics is still with us and still making sweet videos. Taken as a whole, the evolution in physical prowess over the years has been nothing short of astounding. And for the first time, this year, a Boston Dynamics robot, Spot, finally went on sale to anyone with a cool $75K.

So, we got to thinking: What are our favorite Boston Dynamics videos? And can we gather them up in one place for your (and our) viewing pleasure? Well, great question, and yes, why not. These videos were the ones that entertained or amazed us most (or both). No doubt, there are other beloved hits we missed or inadvertently omitted.

With that in mind, behold: Our favorite Boston Dynamics videos, from that one time they dressed up a humanoid bot in camo and gas mask—because, damn, that’s terrifying—to the time the most advanced robot dog in all the known universe got extra funky.

Let’s Kick This Off With a Big (Loud) Robot Dog
Let’s start with a baseline. BigDog was the first Boston Dynamics YouTube sensation. The year? 2009! The company was working on military contracts, and BigDog was supposed to be a sort of pack mule for soldiers. The video primarily shows off BigDog’s ability to balance on its own, right itself, and move over uneven terrain. Note the power source—a noisy combustion engine—and utilitarian design. Sufficed to say, things have evolved.

Nothing to See Here. Just a Pair of Robot Legs on a Treadmill
While BigDog is the ancestor of later four-legged robots, like Spot, Petman preceded the two-legged Atlas robot. Here, the Petman prototype, just a pair of robot legs and a caged torso, gets a light workout on the treadmill. Again, you can see its ability to balance and right itself when shoved. In contrast to BigDog, Petman is tethered for power (which is why it’s so quiet) and to catch it should it fall. Again, as you’ll see, things have evolved since then.

Robot in Gas Mask and Camo Goes for a Stroll
This one broke the internet—for obvious reasons. Not only is the robot wearing clothes, those clothes happen to be a camouflaged chemical protection suit and gas mask. Still working for the military, Boston Dynamics said Petman was testing protective clothing, and in addition to a full body, it had skin that actually sweated and was studded with sensors to detect leaks. In addition to walking, Petman does some light calisthenics as it prepares to climb out of the uncanny valley. (Still tethered though!)

This Machine Could Run Down Usain Bolt
If BigDog and Petman were built for balance and walking, Cheetah was built for speed. Here you can see the four-legged robot hitting 28.3 miles per hour, which, as the video casually notes, would be enough to run down the fastest human on the planet. Luckily, it wouldn’t be running down anyone as it was firmly leashed in the lab at this point.

Ever Dreamt of a Domestic Robot to Do the Dishes?
After its acquisition by Google, Boston Dynamics eased away from military contracts and applications. It was a return to more playful videos (like BigDog hitting the beach in Thailand and sporting bull horns) and applications that might be practical in civilian life. Here, the team introduced Spot, a streamlined version of BigDog, and showed it doing dishes, delivering a drink, and slipping on a banana peel (which was, of course, instantly made into a viral GIF). Note how much quieter Spot is thanks to an onboard battery and electric motor.

Spot Gets Funky
Nothing remotely practical here. Just funky moves. (Also, with a coat of yellow and black paint, Spot’s dressed more like a polished product as opposed to a utilitarian lab robot.)

Atlas Does Parkour…
Remember when Atlas was just a pair of legs on a treadmill? It’s amazing what ten years brings. By 2019, Atlas had a more polished appearance, like Spot, and had long ago ditched the tethers. Merely balancing was laughably archaic. The robot now had some amazing moves: like a handstand into a somersault, 180- and 360-degree spins, mid-air splits, and just for good measure, a gymnastics-style end to the routine to show it’s in full control.

…and a Backflip?!
To this day, this one is just. Insane.

10 Robot Dogs Tow a Box Truck
Nearly three decades after its founding, Boston Dynamics is steadily making its way into the commercial space. The company is pitching Spot as a multipurpose ‘mobility platform,’ emphasizing it can carry a varied suite of sensors and can go places standard robots can’t. (Its Handle robot is also set to move into warehouse automation.) So far, Spot’s been mostly trialed in surveying and data collection, but as this video suggests, string enough Spots together, and they could tow your car. That said, a pack of 10 would set you back $750K, so, it’s probably safe to say a tow truck is the better option (for now).

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#437202 Scientists Used Dopamine to Seamlessly ...

In just half a decade, neuromorphic devices—or brain-inspired computing—already seem quaint. The current darling? Artificial-biological hybrid computing, uniting both man-made computer chips and biological neurons seamlessly into semi-living circuits.

It sounds crazy, but a new study in Nature Materials shows that it’s possible to get an artificial neuron to communicate directly with a biological one using not just electricity, but dopamine—a chemical the brain naturally uses to change how neural circuits behave, most known for signaling reward.

Because these chemicals, known as “neurotransmitters,” are how biological neurons functionally link up in the brain, the study is a dramatic demonstration that it’s possible to connect artificial components with biological brain cells into a functional circuit.

The team isn’t the first to pursue hybrid neural circuits. Previously, a different team hooked up two silicon-based artificial neurons with a biological one into a circuit using electrical protocols alone. Although a powerful demonstration of hybrid computing, the study relied on only one-half of the brain’s computational ability: electrical computing.

The new study now tackles the other half: chemical computing. It adds a layer of compatibility that lays the groundwork not just for brain-inspired computers, but also for brain-machine interfaces and—perhaps—a sort of “cyborg” future. After all, if your brain can’t tell the difference between an artificial neuron and your own, could you? And even if you did, would you care?

Of course, that scenario is far in the future—if ever. For now, the team, led by Dr. Alberto Salleo, professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford University, collectively breathed a sigh of relief that the hybrid circuit worked.

“It’s a demonstration that this communication melding chemistry and electricity is possible,” said Salleo. “You could say it’s a first step toward a brain-machine interface, but it’s a tiny, tiny very first step.”

Neuromorphic Computing
The study grew from years of work into neuromorphic computing, or data processing inspired by the brain.

The blue-sky idea was inspired by the brain’s massive parallel computing capabilities, along with vast energy savings. By mimicking these properties, scientists reasoned, we could potentially turbo-charge computing. Neuromorphic devices basically embody artificial neural networks in physical form—wouldn’t hardware that mimics how the brain processes information be even more efficient and powerful?

These explorations led to novel neuromorphic chips, or artificial neurons that “fire” like biological ones. Additional work found that it’s possible to link these chips up into powerful circuits that run deep learning with ease, with bioengineered communication nodes called artificial synapses.

As a potential computing hardware replacement, these systems have proven to be incredibly promising. Yet scientists soon wondered: given their similarity to biological brains, can we use them as “replacement parts” for brains that suffer from traumatic injuries, aging, or degeneration? Can we hook up neuromorphic components to the brain to restore its capabilities?

Buzz & Chemistry
Theoretically, the answer’s yes.

But there’s a huge problem: current brain-machine interfaces only use electrical signals to mimic neural computation. The brain, in contrast, has two tricks up its sleeve: electricity and chemicals, or electrochemical.

Within a neuron, electricity travels up its incoming branches, through the bulbous body, then down the output branches. When electrical signals reach the neuron’s outgoing “piers,” dotted along the output branch, however, they hit a snag. A small gap exists between neurons, so to get to the other side, the electrical signals generally need to be converted into little bubble ships, packed with chemicals, and set sail to the other neuronal shore.

In other words, without chemical signals, the brain can’t function normally. These neurotransmitters don’t just passively carry information. Dopamine, for example, can dramatically change how a neural circuit functions. For an artificial-biological hybrid neural system, the absence of chemistry is like nixing international cargo vessels and only sticking with land-based trains and highways.

“To emulate biological synaptic behavior, the connectivity of the neuromorphic device must be dynamically regulated by the local neurotransmitter activity,” the team said.

Let’s Get Electro-Chemical
The new study started with two neurons: the upstream, an immortalized biological cell that releases dopamine; and the downstream, an artificial neuron that the team previously introduced in 2017, made of a mix of biocompatible and electrical-conducting materials.

Rather than the classic neuron shape, picture more of a sandwich with a chunk bitten out in the middle (yup, I’m totally serious). Each of the remaining parts of the sandwich is a soft electrode, made of biological polymers. The “bitten out” part has a conductive solution that can pass on electrical signals.

The biological cell sits close to the first electrode. When activated, it dumps out boats of dopamine, which drift to the electrode and chemically react with it—mimicking the process of dopamine docking onto a biological neuron. This, in turn, generates a current that’s passed on to the second electrode through the conductive solution channel. When this current reaches the second electrode, it changes the electrode’s conductance—that is, how well it can pass on electrical information. This second step is analogous to docked dopamine “ships” changing how likely it is that a biological neuron will fire in the future.

In other words, dopamine release from the biological neuron interacts with the artificial one, so that the chemicals change how the downstream neuron behaves in a somewhat lasting way—a loose mimic of what happens inside the brain during learning.

But that’s not all. Chemical signaling is especially powerful in the brain because it’s flexible. Dopamine, for example, only grabs onto the downstream neurons for a bit before it returns back to its upstream neuron—that is, recycled or destroyed. This means that its effect is temporary, giving the neural circuit breathing room to readjust its activity.

The Stanford team also tried reconstructing this quirk in their hybrid circuit. They crafted a microfluidic channel that shuttles both dopamine and its byproduct away from the artificial neurons after they’ve done their job for recycling.

Putting It All Together
After confirming that biological cells can survive happily on top of the artificial one, the team performed a few tests to see if the hybrid circuit could “learn.”

They used electrical methods to first activate the biological dopamine neuron, and watched the artificial one. Before the experiment, the team wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Theoretically, it made sense that dopamine would change the artificial neuron’s conductance, similar to learning. But “it was hard to know whether we’d achieve the outcome we predicted on paper until we saw it happen in the lab,” said study author Scott Keene.

On the first try, however, the team found that the burst of chemical signaling was able to change the artificial neuron’s conductance long-term, similar to the neuroscience dogma “neurons that fire together, wire together.” Activating the upstream biological neuron with chemicals also changed the artificial neuron’s conductance in a way that mimicked learning.

“That’s when we realized the potential this has for emulating the long-term learning process of a synapse,” said Keene.

Visualizing under an electron microscope, the team found that, similar to its biological counterpart, the hybrid synapse was able to efficiently recycle dopamine with timescales similar to the brain after some calibration. By playing with how much dopamine accumulates at the artificial neuron, the team found that they loosely mimic a learning rule called spike learning—a darling of machine learning inspired by the brain’s computation.

A Hybrid Future?
Unfortunately for cyborg enthusiasts, the work is still in its infancy.

For one, the artificial neurons are still rather bulky compared to biological ones. This means that they can’t capture and translate information from a single “boat” of dopamine. It’s also unclear if, and how, a hybrid synapse can work inside a living brain. Given the billions of synapses firing away in our heads, it’ll be a challenge to find-and-replace those that need replacement, and be able to control our memories and behaviors similar to natural ones.

That said, we’re inching ever closer to full-capability artificial-biological hybrid circuits.

“The neurotransmitter-mediated neuromorphic device presented in this work constitutes a fundamental building block for artificial neural networks that can be directly modulated based on biological feedback from live neurons,” the authors concluded. “[It] is a crucial first step in realizing next-generation adaptive biohybrid interfaces.”

Image Credit: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay Continue reading

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