Year 2017: technological highlights

  1. DeepStack and Libratus become the first computer programs to beat professional poker players.
  2. We are using synthetic cartilage to help people with arthritis.
  3. Stem cells can regrow a whole new tooth.
  4. We have made significant progress in rejuvenating old tissues and organs with senolytics. Senescent cells are believed to be one of the major cause of aging, and we approaching the day when we can clear them from our bodies. Clearing senescent cells is shown to alleviate osteoporosis in mice.
  5. Google has computing pods capable of 11.5 petaflops. It is a lot. By some estimates, it should be sufficient to simulate the human brain.
  6. Intel releases the Core i9 X-series which can produce one teraflop of computing performance for about $2000.
  7. Apple now offers sophisticated augmented reality applications on iPhones and iPads.
  8. The German company DeepL achieves a breakthrough in machine translation. It is reported to be as good as amateur human translators at many tasks.
  9. For 350$, you can buy a 400 GB memory card on Amazon. It is enough to record everything you hear during four years. It fits on the tip of a finger.
  10. Supplementation with osteocalcin, a natural hormone, rejuvenates memory in mice in addition to rejuvenating muscles.
  11. A robot did better than 80% of human students in a Japanese university entrance tests.
  12. Google’s Pixel Buds are headphones that can translate in real time any one of 40 different languages.
  13. A team from Google (Alphabet/DeepMind) has created a computer system (AlphaZero) that can learn games like Go and Chess in a few hours based only the rules.
  14. A woman with a transplanted uterus gives birth.

Published by

Daniel Lemire

A computer science professor at the University of Quebec (TELUQ).

7 thoughts on “Year 2017: technological highlights”

  1. A good recipe for “home brewed” senolytics: fasting for 3 days!
    Works fine on arthritis for a 70 years old, no other measurements available 🙂

    Reply

    1. A good recipe for “home brewed” senolytics: fasting for 3 days! Works fine on arthritis for a 70 years old, no other measurements available

      To my knowledge, we do not have any senolytic therapies yet (for human beings). The fact that it helps your arthritis might be due to factors other the clearance of senescent cells.

      Reply

  2. 1TFP for 2K is an extremely discouraging price tag. Why shouldn’t I buy a Xeon Phi instead? Also for 1.5K I can put two Nvidia cards with a summary processing power of 20 TFP. Of course, it is not easy to load GPUs, but for many interesting tasks, I could get much more than 1TFP anyways.

    Reply

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