Hey everyone,

Welcome back to a week of updates and insights 🤖

Here’s what we’ll learn about today:

• Surgeons successfully restore touch and movement in quadriplegic man using AI brain implants 🦾

• IBM and Nasa launch carbon emissions tracking AI model to monitor climate change 🧭

• Tinder testing a new AI-powered tool for photo selection 📸📸

Reading time: 4 minutes

News Reel:

Highlight 1: Surgeons successfully restore touch and movement in quadriplegic man using AI brain implants

In a groundbreaking medical achievement, a quadriplegic man, Keith Thomas, in the United States has regained touch and movement through the successful implantation of microchips in his brain, coupled with AI technology to interpret his thoughts and translate them into actions. 🫂Here are the bits:

• The surgery was performed by Dr. Ashesh Mehta at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in New York.

• Thomas underwent a 15-hour open-brain surgery during which the surgical team rewired the pathways responsible for arm movement and touch sensation.

• The procedure called a "double neural bypass," involved using AI to read and translate Thomas' thoughts into actions, stimulating his hand so he could move it 👋

• Tiny sensors were implanted in his fingertips and palm to send touch and pressure information back to the brain implant, restoring sensation through a computer instead of the damaged spinal cord.

• The technology, developed by Chad Bouton, aims to retrain the spinal cord and strengthen connections within it to allow for gradual improvement in movement and sensation.

• Thomas experienced a natural recovery from his injuries after the successful surgery, and the doctors hope the new pathways formed at the injury site will lead to further improvement.

Amazing, isn’t it? 🤍

Here’s the whole article.

Highlight 2: IBM and Nasa launch carbon emissions tracking AI model to monitor climate change

IBM and NASA have joined forces to develop a geospatial foundation AI model aimed at enhancing carbon emission tracking and monitoring the effects of climate change. 💚The bits:

• The model was trained on images from Nasa's Sentinel-2 satellite data over the course of a year.

• It has been fine-tuned using labelled data for flood and burn scar mapping, enabling applications such as tracking deforestation, predicting crop yields, and monitoring greenhouse gases. 🌳

• The lack of labelled data in climate science and businesses is a significant challenge, and AI can help simplify the analysis process.

• The geospatial model will be published on the Hugging Face platform, with a commercial version available on IBM's Watsonx later this year.

• The fine-tuned model has shown promising results in burn scar analysis, requiring 75% less labelled data than the current state-of-the-art model.

Foundation models have the potential to revolutionize observational data analysis and open-sourcing the model will amplify its impact.

Read another article on this topic from Tech Monitor.

Highlight 3: Tinder testing a new AI-powered tool for photo selection

Match Group, the parent company of Tinder, is testing an AI-powered tool designed to assist users in selecting the most suitable photos for their dating profiles, aiming to improve the overall user experience and increase the likelihood of finding suitable matches. 💎The bits:

• The tool evaluates a user's photo album and recommends five pictures that represent them most accurately. 🤳

• Match Group aims to alleviate users' concerns about choosing the right photos and provide a more personalized selection process.

• Additionally, Match Group is testing features to enhance content recommendations on the platform and improve the overall user experience.

• AI integration in dating apps is becoming more common, with apps using AI for various purposes, such as generating conversation starters and providing profile feedback.

• Tinder is implementing AI carefully to ensure authenticity and address privacy concerns, including an AI-powered verification tool introduced earlier to identify catfishers and bots.🛡️

• Competitor Bumble also uses image-recognition AI to detect and prevent the sharing of explicit photos in chats.

Read the detailed article here.

AI Showcase: Decktopus AI

Decktopus AI makes it really easy to make presentations for a project or otherwise. Simply put in some basic information and watch the AI software create a detailed outline of the presentation for you. Here’s how it works:

1. Type what you want to make your presentation about

2. Login and describe your target audience or simply choose one from the options given

3. Choose how long you want to make the presentation

4. Choose the template you'd like to use

5. Click on Generate Presentation

6. Edit the Design

7. Or simply regenerate. That's it!

Now don’t expect all the visuals etc. to be made - none of the softwares can currently do that but Decktopus does create great outlines to build a presentation. It even made a list with each Haikyuu!! character and brief description for them! Check out the slides below:

Hope you like it!

AI Art of the Week:

In today’s newsletter, we have some very expressive work from GildShen (Discord GildShen). 🤩 

These “explosive“ coffee cups made us think about a tumultuous Monday morning getting ready for the week ahead. 📆 

Check out the full collection on our LinkedIn page here.

GildShen is just an AI designer hobbyist but if they decided to expand to social media we will keep you posted!

Have a good one!

-AI Bits