Category: Medicine

Artificial intelligence, the quantum internet, and life and/or death

The 2021 Baltimore Science Fiction Convention (Balticon) runs this coming weekend. Virtual but real, if you get my drift. Convention is free; the programming looks very strong. Poke around & check off the interesting ones: I had great trouble keeping my choices down to one per time slot.

And, Balticon has recorded all of the talks: I’ve linked each talk to its video.

For my Balticon talk I’m doing:

Hands as seen by an artificial intelligence.
The Hands of AI

Artificial Intelligence: Past, Present, and Futures: Saturday, 2:30pm

From neural nets and genetic algorithms to facial recognition and deep fakes, artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere today. What exactly do we mean by AI and how did it get where it is today? What are the benefits and risks of AI and how should we manage it going forwards?

Fast moving & fun topic!

Ethics and Robotics: Friday, 4pm

Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws formed one of the earliest ethics systems for robots and artificially-created beings, but aren’t necessarily accurate or complete. A hundred years after Asimov’s birth, what approaches are being taken in the practical development of robots? What is “real AI” and how far away are we from it?

With Anne Gray aka netmouse (moderator), Aaron M. Roth and Marie Vibbert

The Quantum Internet: Hype or the Next Step? Saturday, 7pm

What do we mean by the quantum internet? What are quantum cryptography, quantum key distribution, quantum sensors, and linked quantum computers? What are the advantages and key problems? Who will get to use it? And do we have just a bunch of interesting tech that all have quantum in their name or can the whole be more than the sum of the parts?

I’m moderating this one with Anne Gray and Kevin Roche (who is the quantum computing evangelist at IBM).

From “Mostly Dead” to Alive and Back Again: Sunday, 10pm

How is it that something like the coronavirus can be completely inert one moment and then spawning millions of copies of itself the next? How did intracellular obligate parasites — organisms that can’t survive without a host — manage to evolve into existence in the first place? What of transposons (jumping genes), viroids (the smallest infectious pathogens known), and the dreaded “giant” viruses? Join us as we dart back and forth across the line that separates life & death in biology!

I’m moderating this one as well, with the panelists: Dr. Jim Prego, Doug Dluzen, Anna Kashina, Pam Garrettson.

The Past, Present, and Futures of Artificial Intelligence

Tik-Tok — one of the early visions of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is in the news, no question. The last few science fiction conventions I’ve been at, panels on AI have been getting filled rooms & lots of questions. It’s all over the news as well. And it’s a subject I find interesting: and — being a professional programmer — an area where I may be able to contribute, perhaps looking at the use of AI techniques to generate physics experiments.

What is meant by AI is one problem: is it anything that uses AI techniques, as Neural Nets or Genetic Algorithms? Or do you need to be pointing in the direction of some kind of sentience for it to be true AI? Will it replace us? Should it? The hype/content ratio sometimes hits near Trumpian levels.

So good subject for a talk. But what line of attack to take? Last week I caught a great talk at DataPhilly on the use of AI for sports betting (and other things). The formal title was:

Practical Scaling: How to Use Simple Tools to Create and Implement Complex Modeling SystemsJames Piette

For “complex modeling systems” think practical AI. My personal favorite of his slides cited three principles:

  • Moravec’s Paradox: AI and humans are good at opposite things. So use AI for what it is good at (crunching) and let the humans do what they are good at (intuiting).
  • Pareto’s Principle or the 80/20 rule. 20% of the work gets you 80% of the value, so focus on the high value parts of the problem.
  • The Scientific method: observe, hypothesize, test, repeat. This works for science — and it works for software debugging (another favorite topic of mine), startups, and AI.

And this strikes me as the kind of no-nonsense, practical, even scientific approach that a subject like AI needs. (Thanks James!) So for my 2020 SF Convention talk:

The Past, Present, and Futures of Artificial Intelligence. — From Oz’s Tik-Tok to the Mechanical Turk, from Neural Nets & Genetic Algorithms to Chess & StarCraft, from Medical Diagnosis to Robot Frogs, from Facial Recognition to Fakes, Deep Fakes, & Anti-Fakes, AI is everywhere today. How did it start? What do we mean by AI? What are the basic AI techniques? How is it being used? What are the benefits? risks? and how should we manage AI going forwards?

Be seeing you:

Quantum Dots

Three Quantum Mice

 

Quantum dots (QD) are semiconductors made via several possible routes. John Ashmead and Stephen Granade discuss how they are made, their properties and their applications in research. — from the Balticon 2016 Schedule

This is one of those “I was roped into this, but on the whole, it turned out pretty well” topics.  Miriam Kelly, in charge of science programming at Balticon, asked if Stephen Granade & I would do a panel on quantum dots at the 2016 Balticon.  Stephen had to drop out of the panel at the last minute, so I turned my notes into a full-fledged talk.    Great subject! about which I had known nothing before I got started. 🙂

Quantum dots turn out to be small, useful balls of quantum goodness, much bigger than an atom, but pretty much smaller than just about anything else you can think of which is bigger than an atom.  They are spheres that ring like a bell when hit by light, taking it in briefly, then emitting it again — but at a very specific frequency which depends on the size of the quantum dot and not much else.

It is this that makes them useful. You pepper your sample with quantum dots of different sizes, spray a bit of UltraViolet light over them, & voila! red or green or blue light comes back.  If you have artfully arranged to have the dots of different colors associate with different kinds of interesting chemicals or drugs or cells or whathaveyou, then you can see how things are ambling around down there.  Cute, very cute, there is nothing like a mouse lit up by quantum dots.

They get used a lot in televisions to help out with the colors.  So you can pick up a supply of brightly colored dots at commodity prices.

But the most interesting — at least to the humans who want to live longer & better — are the medical applications.  And the day after my talk, Miriam had scheduled a panel on the very similar topic: Quantum Dots:  Medical Applications.  Turned out perhaps half the audience had been at my talk, survived, recovered, and now were armed with questions which I & the very knowledgeable & capable John Cmar & John Skylar had some quiet & informative fun with.  Yes, there were three Johns on the panel!  And no non-Johns.  Get over it.  After the initial confusion about how to refer to whom, we had a lot of fun with the back & forth, myself from the physics side, Cmar & Skylar from the medical side.

I’ve put the talk up as a pdf on slideshare.  Comments welcome! As always.

WordPress Themes