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World’s Smallest LED Will Convert Your Phone Camera into a Microscope

A research team from Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) has created a silicon LED capable of transforming the camera on a mobile phone into a high-resolution microscope. This LED delivers a light intensity similar to larger silicon LEDs and was used to develop the world’s smallest holographic microscope, which has various potential applications.

The team also devised a neural networking algorithm to reconstruct objects captured by the holographic microscope. These networks, based on the signaling between neurons in the human brain, are a form of machine learning. This development removes the need for traditional, bulky microscopes, making it possible for their all-in-one chip to examine microscopic objects like microorganisms and tissue cells.

Successfully solving a challenge

The innovation paves the way for advancement in photonics – an area of technology that deals with studying and technological harnessing of light. The press release says that the building of a powerful on-chip emitter that is smaller than a micrometer has long been a challenge in the field, which the research team has had a breakthrough in.

Previously, scientists have struggled to place such on-chip emitters into standard complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) platforms, which is the semiconductor technology used in most chips today. In mobile phones, CMOS is used as the ‘eye’ of the camera.

The researchers think that this combination of CMOS micro-LEDs and their newly developed neural network can be applied in other areas as well, such as live-cell tracking or spectroscopic imaging of biological tissues.

“On top of its immense potential in lensless holography, our new LED has a wide range of other possible applications. Because its wavelength is within the minimum absorption window of biological tissues, together with its high intensity and nanoscale emission area, our LED could be ideal for bio-imaging and bio-sensing applications, including near-field microscopy and implantable CMOS devices,” said Rajeev Ram, a co-author of the paper. “Also, it is possible to integrate this LED with on-chip photodetectors, and it could then find further applications in on-chip communication, NIR proximity sensing, and on-wafer testing of photonics.”

Established in 2007, SMART was set up in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and is its largest international research endeavor.

New AI Based Tool Shows Promise in Accurately Identifying Lung Cancer

An artificial intelligence (AI) model that accurately identifies cancer has been developed by a team of scientists, doctors, and researchers from Imperial College London, the Institute of Cancer Research in London, and the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust.

Reportedly, this new AI model uses radiomics, a technique that extracts critical information from medical images that may not be visible to the naked eye. This, in turn, aids in determining whether the abnormal growths detected on CT scans are cancerous.

The effectiveness of the model was measured using a metric called area under the curve (AUC), which showed that the AI model identified each nodule’s cancer risk with an AUC of 0.87.

The Development of The AI Model

The development of the AI algorithm involved utilizing CT scans of roughly 500 patients who had large lung nodules. The next stage of testing involves evaluating the accuracy of the technology on patients with large lung nodules in a clinical setting to predict their risk of lung cancer. 

Additionally, the AI model has the potential to assist doctors in making faster decisions regarding patients with growths that are currently considered medium-risk. When combined with the Herder test, the AI model was capable of identifying high-risk patients within this group.

The AI tool has been found to perform more effectively and efficiently than current cancer diagnosis methods, according to the study published in the Lancet’s eBioMedicine journal. The researchers believe that this AI tool could potentially enhance the early detection of cancer and increase the success of treatment by identifying high-risk patients and fast-tracking them for earlier intervention. 

Potential benefits of the AI tool

Cancer, which is responsible for almost one in six deaths globally, leads to approximately 10 million deaths every year, as per the World Health Organization. Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide and is responsible for one-fifth (21 percent) of cancer fatalities in the UK. Early diagnosis of the disease leads to more effective treatment outcomes, however, recent statistics indicate that over 60 percent of lung cancers in England are diagnosed at stage three or four. Therefore, the experts involved in this study point out that this underscores the urgent need for new initiatives to accelerate the detection of lung cancer.

With the aim of accelerating cancer detection by expediting the treatment process and streamlining CT scan analysis, researchers anticipate that the AI tool will achieve this goal in due course. However, the team emphasized that the study is in its nascent stages and more comprehensive testing will be necessary before implementing the model into healthcare systems.

ChatGPT is Available Again In Italy

San Francisco-based OpenAI, ChatGPT’s maker, announced on Friday that the artificial intelligence chatbot is available again in Italy after it was blocked for nearly a month by regulators who stated privacy concerns.

OpenAI said it now meets all the conditions that the Italian data protection authority wanted satisfied by an April 30 deadline.

“ChatGPT is available again to our users in Italy,” OpenAI told The Globe and Mail over an email. “We are excited to welcome them back, and we remain dedicated to protecting their privacy.”
The rapid development of generative AI systems like ChatGPT has raised fears among officials and even tech leaders about potential ethical and societal risks. 
In April of 2023, the Italian watchdog, known as Garante, ordered OpenAI to temporarily stop processing Italian users’ personal information while it examined a possible data breach that could be violating the EU’s data privacy rules.

OpenAI has now claimed that it has “addressed or clarified the issues” raised by the Garante.

As part of these measures, ChatGPT will now have information on its website about how it collects and uses data, will make available a new form for EU residents to object to having their data used for training, and add a tool to verify users’ ages.

The Garante said in a statement that it “welcomes the measures OpenAI implemented.”

Areas of concern

Last month, the watchdog noticed that some users’ messages and payment information were exposed to others. Other areas of concern were also whether there was a legal basis for OpenAI to collect massive amounts of data used to train ChatGPT’s algorithms and the fact that the system could sometimes generate false information about individuals.

The return of the AI system was well received, with infrastructure Minister Matteo Salvini writing on Instagram that his League party “is committed to help start-ups and development in Italy” through the use of the technology.

But the battle is not over yet, France’s data privacy regulator and Canada’s privacy commissioner are investigating ChatGPT after complaints about the chatbot surfaced.

Meanwhile, last month, the European Data Protection Board (EDPB), the agency that united Europe’s national privacy watchdogs, formed a task force on ChatGPT aimed at developing a common policy on setting privacy rules on artificial intelligence.

Will bans be applied elsewhere, or has OpenAI made enough changes to ensure its program is compatible with all countries’ regulations?

The World’s First Electrical Wooden Transistor Has Finally Been Invented

Researchers at Linköping University and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology have achieved a major breakthrough in the field of efficiency and sustainability with the creation of the world’s first wooden electrical transistor.

According to a press release by the institutions, the team developed an unprecedented principle that enables the transistor to function continuously and regulate electricity flow without deteriorating. The transistor was created using balsa wood, which is a grainless wood that is evenly structured throughout and was filled with a conductive polymer called PEDOT:PSS. This resulted in an electrically conductive wood material that can regulate electricity flow without issues.

Previous attempts at creating wooden transistors only succeeded in regulating ion transport, but this new development has the potential for huge advancements. Isak Engquist, senior associate professor at the Laboratory for Organic Electronics at Linköping University, noted that although the wood transistor is currently slow and bulky, it has significant potential for development.

The researchers achieved this success by removing lignin from the wood, leaving only long cellulose fibers with channels where the lignin had been. The channels were then filled with the conductive polymer to create the new device. With this development, the scientific community has made significant strides in the field of sustainability, creating a more environmentally-friendly option for electronic devices.

Switching the power on and off

These changes led to a wood transistor that is able to regulate electric current and provide continuous function at a selected output level. Better yet, it could even switch the power on and off with an almost insignificant delay.

Switching it off takes about a second while turning it on takes about five seconds.

The final transistor channel is quite large but the researchers stated that this is a benefit as it could potentially tolerate a higher current than regular organic transistors, which could be important for certain future applications. 

“We didn’t create the wood transistor with any specific application in mind. We did it because we could. This is basic research, showing that it’s possible, and we hope it will inspire further research that can lead to applications in the future,” concluded Isak Engquist in the statement.

China’s NetEase Launches ChatGPT Rival that Builds Apps with Text Prompts

One of China’s largest video gaming companies, NetEase, has introduced CodeWave, a “low-code” application development platform powered by its large language model (LLM).

This makes NetEase, the newest major Chinese tech company, to provide such artificial intelligence (AI) service, allowing users “to build apps with text prompts,” according to a new report by South China Morning Post (SCMP) on Wednesday.

“The value of artificial intelligence has been put at the forefront of production in our society,” said Ding Lei, founder, and CEO of NetEase, the Hangzhou-based company. 

“We are entering an era of multiplied productivity.”

CodeWave’s platform generates the code necessary to develop the app from descriptions of the users’ intended app functionality, enabling enterprise customers to create straightforward applications without the need for complex programming abilities. 

The platform is a part of NetEase’s Digital Sail division, which provides conventional sectors with a variety of services, including cloud computing and digitization solutions.

According to NetEase, it wants to use generative artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance its asset management and business intelligence services. 

The company has been working on OpenAI’s GPT family of LLMs since 2018, and as of that time, NetEase has started investigating more than ten pre-training models in fields such as natural language processing, text-to-image conversion, and audio models. 

However, local rivals like Baidu and Alibaba, which have introduced their own ChatGPT-style services, Ernie Bot and Tongyi Qianwen, respectively, pose a severe threat to NetEase, noted SCMP

ChatGPT’s Chinese rivals 

The models from Baidu and Alibaba have already been incorporated into other AI products and services.

While Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen has been embedded in its online collaboration tool DingTalk and is anticipated to be integrated into Tmall Genie, the company’s smart home appliance, after being integrated into DingTalk, Baidu’s rival to ChatGPT, Ernie Bot, has been integrated into the company’s smart cloud product. 

The next-generation high-performance computing cluster was introduced earlier this month by Tencent’s cloud division. It offers computational capability for training LLMs and self-driving technologies with high bandwidth and low latency. 

The cloud-based machine learning platform used by TikTok owner ByteDance, which can assist in training LLMs with exceptionally low latency, was modified last week. 

The rivalry in this sector is expected to increase because so many businesses now provide services similar to ChatGPT.

Meanwhile, OpenAI may have gone a step further in providing “incognito mode,” which offers additional safety and privacy, by allowing ChatGPT users to disable chat history, which the business uses to train its language model.

Pakistani Students Develop Revolutionary ‘Smart Mirror’ for Selfies, Music and Weather Updates

A group of talented Pakistani students have developed an innovative and impressive product that has caught the attention of tech enthusiasts worldwide. The revolutionary “Smart Mirror” is equipped with touch technology, making it incredibly user-friendly and accessible. The mirror offers an array of features that cater to modern-day consumers’ needs, including the ability to take pictures and print them out, play music, and provide weather updates.

One of the most exciting features of the Smart Mirror is its picture-taking capability. Users can easily snap selfies, edit them with filters, and even print them out for instant keepsakes. Additionally, they can access their photos by scanning the mirror’s QR code with their phone, making sharing memories with friends and family an absolute breeze.

The Smart Mirror is a testament to Pakistan’s growing technological capabilities and the potential of its young, innovative minds to make a significant impact on the global tech scene. With their cutting-edge technology and impressive skill set, Pakistani students have created a product that is not only functional but also incredibly fun to use. This impressive feat serves as a reminder of the power of human creativity and innovation, and we can’t wait to see what they’ll come up with next!