Tag Archives: technology

#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?

Join Me
(1) A360 Executive Mastermind: If you’re an exponentially and abundance-minded entrepreneur who would like coaching directly from me, consider joining my Abundance 360 Mastermind, a highly selective community of 360 CEOs and entrepreneurs who I coach for 3 days every January in Beverly Hills, Ca. Through A360, I provide my members with context and clarity about how converging exponential technologies will transform every industry. I’m committed to running A360 for the course of an ongoing 25-year journey as a “countdown to the Singularity.”

If you’d like to learn more and consider joining our 2021 membership, apply here.

(2) Abundance-Digital Online Community: I’ve also created a Digital/Online community of bold, abundance-minded entrepreneurs called Abundance-Digital. Abundance-Digital is Singularity University’s ‘onramp’ for exponential entrepreneurs—those who want to get involved and play at a higher level. Click here to learn more.

(Both A360 and Abundance-Digital are part of Singularity University—your participation opens you to a global community.)

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

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Posted in Human Robots

#437258 This Startup Is 3D Printing Custom ...

Around 1.9 million people in the US are currently living with limb loss. The trauma of losing a limb is just the beginning of what amputees have to face, with the sky-high cost of prosthetics making their circumstance that much more challenging.

Prosthetics can run over $50,000 for a complex limb (like an arm or a leg) and aren’t always covered by insurance. As if shelling out that sum one time wasn’t costly enough, kids’ prosthetics need to be replaced as they outgrow them, meaning the total expense can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars.

A startup called Unlimited Tomorrow is trying to change this, and using cutting-edge technology to do so. Based in Rhinebeck, New York, a town about two hours north of New York City, the company was founded by 23-year-old Easton LaChappelle. He’d been teaching himself the basics of robotics and building prosthetics since grade school (his 8th grade science fair project was a robotic arm) and launched his company in 2014.

After six years of research and development, the company launched its TrueLimb product last month, describing it as an affordable, next-generation prosthetic arm using a custom remote-fitting process where the user never has to leave home.

The technologies used for TrueLimb’s customization and manufacturing are pretty impressive, in that they both cut costs and make the user’s experience a lot less stressful.

For starters, the entire purchase, sizing, and customization process for the prosthetic can be done remotely. Here’s how it works. First, prospective users fill out an eligibility form and give information about their residual limb. If they’re a qualified candidate for a prosthetic, Unlimited Tomorrow sends them a 3D scanner, which they use to scan their residual limb.

The company uses the scans to design a set of test sockets (the component that connects the residual limb to the prosthetic), which are mailed to the user. The company schedules a video meeting with the user for them to try on and discuss the different sockets, with the goal of finding the one that’s most comfortable; new sockets can be made based on the information collected during the video consultation. The user selects their skin tone from a swatch with 450 options, then Unlimited Tomorrow 3D prints and assembles the custom prosthetic and tests it before shipping it out.

“We print the socket, forearm, palm, and all the fingers out of durable nylon material in full color,” LaChappelle told Singularity Hub in an email. “The only components that aren’t 3D printed are the actuators, tendons, electronics, batteries, sensors, and the nuts and bolts. We are an extreme example of final use 3D printing.”

Unlimited Tomorrow’s website lists TrueLimb’s cost as “as low as $7,995.” When you consider the customization and capabilities of the prosthetic, this is incredibly low. According to LaChappelle, the company created a muscle sensor that picks up muscle movement at a higher resolution than the industry standard electromyography sensors. The sensors read signals from nerves in the residual limb used to control motions like fingers bending. This means that when a user thinks about bending a finger, the nerve fires and the prosthetic’s sensors can detect the signal and translate it into the action.

“Working with children using our device, I’ve witnessed a physical moment where the brain “clicks” and starts moving the hand rather than focusing on moving the muscles,” LaChappelle said.

The cost savings come both from the direct-to-consumer model and the fact that Unlimited Tomorrow doesn’t use any outside suppliers. “We create every piece of our product,” LaChappelle said. “We don’t rely on another prosthetic manufacturer to make expensive sensors or electronics. By going direct to consumer, we cut out all the middlemen that usually drive costs up.” Similar devices on the market can cost up to $100,000.

Unlimited Tomorrow is primarily focused on making prosthetics for kids; when they outgrow their first TrueLimb, they send it back, where the company upcycles the expensive quality components and integrates them into a new customized device.

Unlimited Tomorrow isn’t the first to use 3D printing for prosthetics. Florida-based Limbitless Solutions does so too, and industry experts believe the technology is the future of artificial limbs.

“I am constantly blown away by this tech,” LaChappelle said. “We look at technology as the means to augment the human body and empower people.”

Image Credit: Unlimited Tomorrow Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437236 Why We Need Mass Automation to ...

The scale of goods moving around the planet at any moment is staggering. Raw materials are dug up in one country, spun into parts and pieces in another, and assembled into products in a third. Crossing oceans and continents, they find their way to a local store or direct to your door.

Magically, a roll of toilet paper, power tool, or tube of toothpaste is there just when you need it.

Even more staggering is that this whole system, the global supply chain, works so well that it’s effectively invisible most of the time. Until now, that is. The pandemic has thrown a floodlight on the inner workings of this modern wonder—and it’s exposed massive vulnerabilities.

The e-commerce supply chain is an instructive example. As the world went into lockdown, and everything non-essential went online, demand for digital fulfillment skyrocketed.

Even under “normal” conditions, most e-commerce warehouses were struggling to meet demand. But Covid-19 has further strained the ability to cope with shifting supply, an unprecedented tidal wave of orders, and labor shortages. Local stores are running out of key products. Online grocers and e-commerce platforms are suspending some home deliveries, restricting online purchases of certain items, and limiting new customers. The whole system is being severely tested.

Why? Despite an abundance of 21st century technology, we’re stuck in the 20th century.

Today’s supply chain consists of fleets of ships, trucks, warehouses, and importantly, people scattered around the world. While there are some notable instances of advanced automation, the overwhelming majority of work is still manual, resembling a sort of human-powered bucket brigade, with people wandering around warehouses or standing alongside conveyor belts. Each package of diapers or bottle of detergent ordered by an online customer might be touched dozens of times by warehouse workers before finding its way into a box delivered to a home.

The pandemic has proven the critical need for innovation due to increased demand, concerns about the health and safety of workers, and traceability and safety of products and services.

At the 2020 World Economic Forum, there was much discussion about the ongoing societal transformation in which humans and machines work in tandem, automating and augmenting the way we get things done. At the time, pre-pandemic, debate trended toward skepticism and fear of job losses, with some even questioning the ethics and need for these technologies.

Now, we see things differently. To make the global supply chain more resilient to shocks like Covid-19, we must look to technology.

Perfecting the Global Supply Chain: The Massive ‘Matter Router’
Technology has faced and overcome similar challenges in the past.

World War II, for example, drove innovation in techniques for rapid production of many products on a large scale, including penicillin. We went from the availability of one dose of the drug in 1941, to four million sterile packages of the drug every month four years later.

Similarly, today’s companies, big and small, are looking to automation, robotics, and AI to meet the pandemic head on. These technologies are crucial to scaling the infrastructure that will fulfill most of the world’s e-commerce and food distribution needs.

You can think of this new infrastructure as a rapidly evolving “matter router” that will employ increasingly complex robotic systems to move products more freely and efficiently.

Robots powered by specialized AI software, for example, are already learning to adapt to changes in the environment, using the most recent advances in industrial robotics and machine learning. When customers suddenly need to order dramatically new items, these robots don’t need to stop or be reprogrammed. They can perform new tasks by learning from experience using low-cost camera systems and deep learning for visual and image recognition.

These more flexible robots can work around the clock, helping make facilities less sensitive to sudden changes in workforce and customer demand and strengthening the supply chain.

Today, e-commerce is roughly 12% of retail sales in the US and is expected to rise well beyond 25% within the decade, fueled by changes in buying habits. However, analysts have begun to consider whether the current crisis might cause permanent jumps in those numbers, as it has in the past (for instance with the SARS epidemic in China in 2003). Whatever happens, the larger supply chain will benefit from greater, more flexible automation, especially during global crises.

We must create what Hamza Mudassire of the University of Cambridge calls a “resilient ecosystem that links multiple buyers with multiple vendors, across a mesh of supply chains.” This ecosystem must be backed by robust, efficient, and scalable automation that uses robotics, autonomous vehicles, and the Internet of Things to help track the flow of goods through the supply chain.

The good news? We can accomplish this with technologies we have today.

Image credit: Guillaume Bolduc / Unsplash Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437230 How Drones and Aerial Vehicles Could ...

Drones, personal flying vehicles, and air taxis may be part of our everyday life in the very near future. Drones and air taxis will create new means of mobility and transport routes. Drones will be used for surveillance, delivery, and in the construction sector as it moves towards automation.

The introduction of these aerial craft into cities will require the built environment to change dramatically. Drones and other new aerial vehicles will require landing pads, charging points, and drone ports. They could usher in new styles of building, and lead to more sustainable design.

My research explores the impact of aerial vehicles on urban design, mapping out possible future trajectories.

An Aerial Age
Already, civilian drones can vary widely in size and complexity. They can carry a range of items from high-resolution cameras, delivery mechanisms, and thermal image technology to speakers and scanners. In the public sector, drones are used in disaster response and by the fire service to tackle fires which could endanger firefighters.

During the coronavirus pandemic, drones have been used by the police to enforce lockdown. Drones normally used in agriculture have sprayed disinfectant over cities. In the UK, drone delivery trials are taking place to carry medical items to the Isle of Wight.

Alongside drones, our future cities could also be populated by vertical takeoff and landing craft (VTOL), used as private vehicles and air taxis.

These vehicles are familiar to sci-fi fans. The late Syd Mead’s illustrations of the Spinner VTOL craft in the film Blade Runner captured the popular imagination, and the screens for the Spinners in Blade Runner 2049 created by Territory Studio provided a careful design fiction of the experience of piloting these types of vehicle.

Now, though, these flying vehicles are reality. A number of companies are developing eVTOL with electric multi-rotor jets, and a whole new motorsport is being established around them.

These aircraft have the potential to change our cities. However, they need to be tested extensively in urban airspace. A study conducted by Airbus found that public concerns about VTOL use focused on the safety of those on the ground and noise emissions.

New Cities
The widespread adoption of drones and VTOL will lead to new architecture and infrastructure. Existing buildings will require adaptations: landing pads, solar photovoltaic panels for energy efficiency, charging points for delivery drones, and landscaping to mitigate noise emissions.

A number of companies are already trialing drone delivery services. Existing buildings will need to be adapted to accommodate these new networks, and new design principles will have to be implemented in future ones.

The architect Saúl Ajuria Fernández has developed a design for a delivery drone port hub. This drone port acts like a beehive where drones recharge and collect parcels for distribution. Architectural firm Humphreys & Partners’ Pier 2, a design for a modular apartment building of the future, includes a cantilevered drone port for delivery services.

The Norman Foster Foundation has designed a drone port for delivery of medical supplies and other items for rural communities in Rwanda. The structure is also intended to function as a space for the public to congregate, as well as to receive training in robotics.

Drones may also help the urban environment become more sustainable. Researchers at the University of Stuttgart have developed a re-configurable architectural roof canopy system deployed by drones. By adjusting to follow the direction of the sun, the canopy provides shade and reduces reliance on ventilation systems.

Demand for air taxis and personal flying vehicles will develop where failures in other transport systems take place. The Airbus research found that of the cities surveyed, highest demand for VTOLs was in Los Angeles and Mexico City, urban areas famous for traffic pollution. To accommodate these aerial vehicles, urban space will need to transform to include landing pads, airport-like infrastructure, and recharge points.

Furthermore, this whole logistics system in lower airspace (below 500 feet), or what I term “hover space,” will need an urban traffic management system. One great example of how this hover space could work can be seen in a speculative project from design studio Superflux in their Drone Aviary project. A number of drones with different functions move around an urban area in a network, following different paths at varying heights.

We are at a critical period in urban history, faced by climatic breakdown and pandemic. Drones and aerial vehicles can be part of a profound rethink of the urban environment.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Posted in Human Robots

#437224 This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From ...

VIRTUAL REALITY
How Holographic Tech Is Shrinking VR Displays to the Size of Sunglasses
Kyle Orland | Ars Technica
“…researchers at Facebook Reality Labs are using holographic film to create a prototype VR display that looks less like ski goggles and more like lightweight sunglasses. With a total thickness less than 9mm—and without significant compromises on field of view or resolution—these displays could one day make today’s bulky VR headset designs completely obsolete.”

TRANSPORTATION
Stock Surge Makes Tesla the World’s Most Valuable Automaker
Timothy B. Lee | Ars Technica
“It’s a remarkable milestone for a company that sells far fewer cars than its leading rivals. …But Wall Street is apparently very optimistic about Tesla’s prospects for future growth and profits. Many experts expect a global shift to battery electric vehicles over the next decade or two, and Tesla is leading that revolution.”

FUTURE OF FOOD
These Plant-Based Steaks Come Out of a 3D Printer
Adele Peters | Fast Company
“The startup, launched by cofounders who met while developing digital printers at HP, created custom 3D printers that aim to replicate meat by printing layers of what they call ‘alt-muscle,’ ‘alt-fat,’ and ‘alt-blood,’ forming a complex 3D model.”

AUTOMATION
The US Air Force Is Turning Old F-16s Into AI-Powered Fighters
Amit Katwala | Wired UK
“Maverick’s days are numbered. The long-awaited sequel to Top Gun is due to hit cinemas in December, but the virtuoso fighter pilots at its heart could soon be a thing of the past. The trustworthy wingman will soon be replaced by artificial intelligence, built into a drone, or an existing fighter jet with no one in the cockpit.”

ROBOTICS
NASA Wants to Build a Steam-Powered Hopping Robot to Explore Icy Worlds
Georgina Torbet | Digital Trends
“A bouncing, ball-like robot that’s powered by steam sounds like something out of a steampunk fantasy, but it could be the ideal way to explore some of the distant, icy environments of our solar system. …This round robot would be the size of a soccer ball, with instruments held in the center of a metal cage, and it would use steam-powered thrusters to make jumps from one area of terrain to the next.”

FUTURE
Could Teleporting Ever Work?
Daniel Kolitz | Gizmodo
“Have the major airlines spent decades suppressing teleportation research? Have a number of renowned scientists in the field of teleportation studies disappeared under mysterious circumstances? Is there a cork board at the FBI linking Delta Airlines, shady foreign security firms, and dozens of murdered research professors? …No. None of that is the case. Which begs the question: why doesn’t teleportation exist yet?”

ENERGY
Nuclear ‘Power Balls’ Could Make Meltdowns a Thing of the Past
Daniel Oberhaus | Wired
“Not only will these reactors be smaller and more efficient than current nuclear power plants, but their designers claim they’ll be virtually meltdown-proof. Their secret? Millions of submillimeter-size grains of uranium individually wrapped in protective shells. It’s called triso fuel, and it’s like a radioactive gobstopper.”

TECHNOLOGY
A Plan to Redesign the Internet Could Make Apps That No One Controls
Will Douglas Heaven | MIT Techology Review
“[John Perry] Barlow’s ‘home of Mind’ is ruled today by the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu—a small handful of the biggest companies on earth. Yet listening to the mix of computer scientists and tech investors speak at an online event on June 30 hosted by the Dfinity Foundation…it is clear that a desire for revolution is brewing.”

IMPACT
To Save the World, the UN Is Turning It Into a Computer Simulation
Will Bedingfield | Wired
“The UN has now announced its new secret recipe to achieve [its 17 sustainable development goals or SDGs]: a computer simulation called Policy Priority Inference (PPI). …PPI is a budgeting software—it simulates a government and its bureaucrats as they allocate money on projects that might move a country closer to an SDG.”

Image credit: Benjamin Suter / Unsplash Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots