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One of the roles of science fiction is to provide readers with a glimpse of how the future could be. Ray Bradbury didnt get everything about the future right. We havent yet seen books and reading made illegal (as in his 1953 Fahrenheit 451), just as we havent yet discovered another planet ready for American colonizers (as in his 1950 The Martian Chronicles). And yet, the themes he explored in those booksmass media and censorship, colonization and environmental changeare more relevant than ever. Even in his lesser-known workssuch as the 1951 sci-fi collection, The Illustrated Man, Bradbury tackles a surprising array of issues that feel as if they were ripped from todays headlines.

Readers today will find in The Illustrated Man a fresh perspective that illuminates global issues like artificial intelligence and climate change. Bradbury also engages with the political and cultural challenges of migration: specifically, the crossing of the U.S.Mexico border, which has since received much attention with the dawn of the so-called Trump Era.

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Theres a story in The Illustrated Man called The Highway, where Bradbury tells a tale about the beginning of an atomic war in the US. The war, however, is experienced through the eyes of a Mexican peasant, Hernando, who lives next to a highway in northern Mexico.

One day, Hernando glimpses a procession of hundreds of American tourists driving north to return to the US. They are heading home, that is, to join the fight in an upcoming atomic war. When the last car stops by Hernando, he sees a group of young Americans crying for help: their car needs water to continue their way back home. Right before they leave, the driver tells Hernandowho doesnt know why all the cars are driving so fast or why these young Americans are so desperatethat the end of the world has finally arrived. Hernando doesnt react to the young mans confession. The car leaves. Hernando goes back to his rural routine, but suddenly stops to wonder: What do they mean the World?

Here, Bradbury highlights the generational and cultural gap between the young Americans and the aging Hernando, who lives with his wife and works their land, recycling the automobile waste that travelers from north of the border leave behind. Its a harrowing scene, but also terrifically realistic: it illustrates not only the clashing of multiple incompatible worldviews, but shows how all such worldseven those seemingly distant from the centers of powerare threatened by contemporary global dangers. Its moments like these that ensure Bradburys relevance, even one hundred years after his birth.

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Bradburys eye for contemporary troubles extends beyond the dangers of global disaster. In the prologue to The Illustrated Man, Bradbury introduces a character who has an existential problem: his torso is covered in living tattoos. Having the tattoos becomes a curse because the illustrations on his body acquire life of their own. The living illustrations unveil an ominous, even prophetic future for the person that looks at them. The Illustrated Man describes his curse:

So people fire me when my pictures move. They dont like it when violent things happen in my illustrations. Each illustration is a little story. If you watch them, in a few minutes they tell you a tale. In three hours of looking you could see eighteen or twenty stories acted right on my body, you could hear voices and think thoughts. Its all here, just waiting for you to look.

Unexpectedly, through this illustrated character, Bradbury highlights the possible dangers of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Today, there are fears that AI will permeate and disrupt the political organization of postmodern societies. For instance, AI can predict the affinities and choices of an individual based on the application of algorithms. What The Illustrated Man shows is the consequence of those predictions once revealed to ordinary people. The Illustrated Man, not without melancholy, says:

If Im with a woman, her picture comes there on my back, in an hour, and shows her whole lifehow shell live, how shell die, what shell look like when shes sixty. And if its a man, an hour later his pictures here on my back. It shows him falling off a cliff, or dying under a train. So Im fired again.

In his article If Planet Death Doesnt Get Us, an AI Superintelligence Most Certainly Will, Bryan Walsh suggests that if a super artificial intelligence becomes able to disregard human valueswhile also increasing its intelligencethen humanity might end up controlled by a nonhuman entity with a vision of the future that does not adhere to the crucial ethical issues that societies are facing today.

The Illustrated Man, as Bradbury formulated him, can be read as a metaphor for the intersection between human values (the jobless fate of the Illustrated Man) and a superintelligence that determines human life through visual representations of the future (the living, prophetic tattoos). Most importantly, Bradburys story doesnt prophesize the invention of this particular machine so much as it examines the ways in which humans would react to such an invention.

The fear that individuals will surrender their ethical compasses to technology is a constant specter in Bradburys stories. In The Illustrated Man, this fear is represented by the refusal of the characters to accept the futures that the illustrations predict for them. Bradburys Illustrated Man, and those around him, represent the ways that humans will struggle againstand violently rejectthe enigmatic directives of any intelligence beyond our own, even if (as Bradbury notes) the intelligence is speaking truthfully.

* * *

Where did Bradburys inspiration for these particular stories in The Illustrated Man come from? The clashes he foresaw in the futurequestions of AI and global catastrophe, atomic war and border crossingcame from his own forays into Mexico in 1945.

In fact, Bradbury himself experienced the traumatic effects of crossing the USMexico border. Between October and November of 1945, Bradbury and his friend Grant Beach traveled from Los Angelesacross southern Arizona, New Mexico, and Texasto Mexico City. On their way, they found swarms of locusts and other hardships familiar from news stories today. But what was most shocking and traumatic for Bradbury was that this trip into Mexico surprisingly challenged his own deeply-held, exotic ideas about Mexican people, which he had acquired while growing up in East Los Angeles.

While in Mexico City, Bradbury spent most of his time seeking the murals of Jos Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Diego Rivera. It is possible to suggest that Bradbury found inspiration for The Illustrated Man in these murals. The muralsperhaps what Bradbury saw as informative, or even prophetic, illustrationsrepresent past, present, and future Mexican society from a Marxist perspective, featuring people in motion with plenty of stories, colors, and historical clues (thus bringing to the audience a multilayered experience).

One of the most famous paintings by David Alfaro Siqueiros, Our Present Time, depicts a faceless man reaching with arms wide open to a space ahead of him, embracing an uncertain future. This is the very same fate of the Illustrated Man. Furthermore, many of the catastrophic themes that Bradbury engages with in The Illustrated Man are also present in these Mexican murals.

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What future did Bradbury see for us? And did he embrace it? In The Fox and the Forest, included in The Illustrated Man, Bradbury sets his story explicitly in Mexico. The plot of the story is not complicated: William and Susan Travis are a married couple living in the year 2155.

That year is not a good time to be alive, since there is war, slavery, and a generalized social unhappiness. In order to escape from the apocalyptic 2155, the couple travel in time back to 1938 rural Mexico, where they believe that peace, simplicity, and happiness can be found. When it seems that they have been able to escape from their time, the 2155 police show up to take them back to the future, thus frustrating the couples escapade.

This narrative has a very pessimistic tone, evoking the nostalgia of older and happier times. Those from the future view our present as superior to their own time. Bradburys dark future, it seems, is unavoidableeven in our own present day.

* * *

More than 60 years ago, The Martian Chronicles (1950), Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and The Illustrated Man (1951) fascinated the young members of the generation growing up after the darkness of the Second World War, but before the new kinds of wars known to our own era. Now, as the 21st century unravelswith all of its challenges, technological dilemmas, and even proliferation of tattoosBradbury remains a fundamental figure of the sci-fi genre.

Bradbury had certainly not anticipated that by 2020 (like what Hernando does in The Highway) recycling was going to become a mainstream human endeavor, or that the USMexico border was going to catalyze many of the 21stcentury anxieties about global migration and demographic explosion. And yet, his stories seem to rhyme with our own era. Readers will keep finding in Bradburys tales about the future a contemporary interpretation of our everlasting fears about the end of the world, as well as a whisper of hope.

In the epilogue of The Illustrated Man, the narrator sees his own death in one of the living tattoos: it is the Illustrated Man that chokes him to death. The narrator decides to run away from this terrible fate. In this age of global catastrophe, who doesnt recognize the desire to run from such incontrovertible proofs of the worlds doom?

And yet, just like the world today, Bradbury too oscillated between utopia and dystopia. For as many people shown running from their prophesied demises, Bradbury shows young peoplelike those who Hernando couldnt understandcharging home to meet a near-certain death. Bradburys work, ultimately, is for them: those readers who believe that science fiction is an effective tool to illustrate how the worst consequences of todays global political decisions will be faced by future generations.

Young people are approaching an uncertain globalized future with plenty of possible outcomes, both dystopian and utopian. Nothing is simple: the technology that Walsh decries, the kind that the Illustrated Man fears, is even today becoming an effective tool for social mobilizations (lets think about the protests, from Hong Kong to Chile, organized through social media). Meanwhile, today, we know more than ever that any fight for the future will require the work and sacrifice of the whole world: not just car-driving Americans, but people like Hernando, too. Clearly, even Bradbury cant get everything right.

Perhaps, if Bradbury was alive today, he would ask young people: what role will you play, when my future comes crashing into your present?

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Ray Bradbury on War, Recycling, and Artificial Intelligence - JSTOR Daily

Climate-driven change in the Gulf of Maine is raising new threats that "red tides" will become more frequent and prolonged. But at the same time, powerful new data collection techniques and artificial intelligence are providing more precise ways to predict where and when toxic algae will bloom. One of those new machine learning prediction models has been developed by a former intern at Bigelow Labs in East Boothbay.

In a busy shed on a Portland wharf, workers for Bangs Island Mussels sort and clean shellfish hauled from Casco Bay that morning. Wholesaler George Parr has come to pay a visit.

"I wholesale to restaurants around town, and if there's a lot of mackerel or scallops, I'll ship into Massachusetts," he says.

Butbusiness grinds to a halt, he says, when blooms of toxic algae suddenly emerge in the bay causing the dreaded red tide.

Toxins can build in filter feeders to levels that would cause "Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning" in human consumers. State regulators shut down shellfish harvests long before danger grows acute. But when a red tide swept into Casco Bay last summer, Bangs Island's harvest was shut down for a full 11 weeks.

So when the restaurants can't get Bangs Island they're like 'Why can't we get Bangs Island?' It was really bad this summer. And nobody was happy."

As Parr notes, businesses of any kind hate unpredictability. And being able to forecast the onset or departure of a red tide has been a challenge although that's changing with the help of a type of artificial intelligence called machine learning.

"We're coming up with forecasts on a weekly basis for each site. For me that's really exciting. That's what machine learning is bringing to the table," says Izzi Grasso, a recent Southern Maine Community College student who is now seeking a mathematics degree at Clarkson University.

Last summer Grasso interned at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in East Boothbay. That's where she helped to lead a successful project to use cutting-edge "neural network" technology that is modeled on the human brain to better predict toxic algal blooms in the Gulf of Maine.

"Really high accuracy. Right around 95 percent or higher, depending on the way you split it up," she says.

Here's how the project worked: the researchers accessed a massive amount of data on toxic algal blooms from the state Department of Marine Resources. The data sets detailed the emergence and retreat of varied toxins in shellfish samples from up and down the coast over a three-year period.

The researchers trained the neural network to learn from those thousands of data points. Then it created its own algorithms to describe the complex phenomena that can lead up to a red tide.

Then we tested how it would actually predict on unknown data, says Grasso.

Grasso says they fed in data from early 2017 which the network had never seen and asked it to forecast when and where the toxins would emerge.

"I wasn't surprised that it worked, but I was surprised how well it worked, the level of accuracy and the resolution on specific sites and specific weeks," says Nick Record, Bigelow's big data specialist.

Record says that the network's accuracy, particularly in the week before a bloom emerges, could be a game-changer for the shellfish industry and its regulators.

Once it's ready, that is.

"Basically it works so well that I need to break it as many ways as I can before I really trust it."

Still, the work has already been published in a peer-reviewed journal, and it is getting attention from the scientific community. Don Anderson is a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who is working to expand the scope of data-gathering efforts in the Gulf.

"The world is changing with respect to the threat of algal blooms in the Gulf of Maine," he says. "We used to worry about only one toxic species and human poisoning syndrome. Now we have at least three."

Anderson notes, though, that machine-learning networks are only as good as the data that is fed into them. The Bigelow network, for instance, might not be able to account for singular oceanographic events that are short and sudden or that haven't been captured in previous data-sets such as a surge of toxic cells that his instruments detected off Cutler last summer.

"With an instrument moored in the water there, and we in fact got that information, called up the state of Maine and said you've got to be careful, there's a lot of cells moving down there, and they actually had a meeting, they implemented a provisional closure just on the basis of that information, which was ultimately confirmed with toxicity once they measured it," says Anderson.

Anderson says that novel modeling techniques such as Bigelow's, coupled with an expanded number of high-tech monitoring stations, like Woods Hole is pioneering in the Gulf, could make forecasting toxic blooms as simple as checking the weather report.

"That situational awareness is what everyone's striving to produce in the field of monitoring and management of these toxic algal blooms, and it's going to take a variety of tools, and this type of artificial intelligence is a valuable part of that arsenal." Back at the Portland wharf, shellfish dealer George Parr says the research sounds pretty promising.

"Forewarned is fore-armed, Parr says. If they can figure out how to neutralize the red tide, that'd be even better."

Bigelow scientists and former intern Izzi Grasso are working now to look "under the hood" of the neural network, to figure out how, exactly, it arrives at its conclusions. They say that could provide clues about how not only to predict toxic algal blooms,but even how to prevent them.

This story is a production of New England News Collaborative. A version of this story was originallypublishedby Maine Public Radio.

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Artificial Intelligence Could Help Scientists Predict Where And When Toxic Algae Will Bloom - WBUR

Learning by doing is a great thing unless its costing you money, then it may not seem worth it. In the business world when new technologies come around it may be tempting to take a wait and see approach to them, watching your competitors successes and failures before taking the time to implement new technologies. Unfortunately when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI), the potential payoff is too big to ignore, and waiting to see how your competitors do implementing this technology could leave your business in the dust.

Taking the right steps toward implementing AI is crucial. Some companies know that they need to hire a data scientist but they dont know what they expect the person to do and they will try to hire someone with no framework or plan in place.

The first step toward integrating artificial intelligence into your business strategy is to take it seriously and make a plan for how it will work. Start with an end goal in mind and work your way back from there. Next, figure out exactly what AI application will help you achieve that goal. With that in mind, start a pilot program with a targeted goal, keeping in mind that it could take a year or more to see any results from such a program.

While going through the growing pains of implementing an enterprise-wide system of AI, it may seem as though this technology is a huge waste of time and money. Learning by doing is a valuable way to understand the ins and outs of any new technology, and even if your companys experiment fails you can still gain valuable insights from failures. These insights can help you find a better focus for your next artificial intelligence experiment.

Currently, fewer than a third of AI pilots progress past the exploratory state to be fully implemented. This does not mean failure, though, it simply means the hypothesis needs to be adjusted before the experiment is altered and started again from the beginning. As with any new technology, there are going to be growing pains and opportunities to learn more.

This can translate to many different outcomes. AI algorithms can be used to reduce waste and improve quality by removing unnecessary variables. It can help meet rising demand and cut variable costs through analysis. It can make adjustments and predict when the market will shift. Some examples from real businesses:

Today, more than 60% of business leaders urgently need to find and implement a strategy for using artificial intelligence in their businesses, but less than half of those actually have a plan. Learn more about implementing AI in your business below.

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Implementing Artificial Intelligence In Your Business (infographic) - Digital Information World

The Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport visited the University today to hear how researchers are being trained to deploy artificial intelligence (AI) in the fight against cancer.

Baroness Nicky Morgan met PhD researchers involved increating the next generation of intelligent technology that will revolutionisehealthcare.

The University is one of 16 centres for doctoral training inAI funded by UKResearch and Innovation, the Government agency responsible forfostering research and development.

The focus of the doctoral training at Leedsis to develop researchers who can apply AIto medical diagnosisand care.

Scientists believe intelligent systems and data analyticswill result in quicker and more accurate diagnosis. Early detection is at theheart of the NHS planto transform cancer survival rates by 2028.

Baroness Morgan said: "Weare committed to being a world leader in artificial intelligence technology andthrough our investment in 16new Centres for Doctoral Training we arehelping train the next generation of researchers.

"It was inspirational to meet some of the leading experts from medicineand computer science working in the new centre at Leeds Universitytoday.They are doing fantastic work to diagnose cancer quicker whichcould save millions of lives."

Baroness Morgan spent time talking to the PhD researchers.

Professor Lisa Roberts, Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Research and Innovation with Baroness Nicky Morgan

Anna Linton is a neuroscientist accepted onto the firstcohort of the programme, which started in the autumn.

She said: The healthcare system can generate a vastquantity of information but sometimes it is assessed in isolation.

I am interested in researching AI systems that can analysemedical notes, the results of pathology tests and scans and identify patternsin that disparate information and make order of it, to give a unified pictureof a patients health status.

That information will help the GP or other healthcareprofessional make a more precise diagnosis.

Dr Emily Clarke is a hospital doctor specialising inhistopathology, the changes in tissue caused by disease. She is an associatemember of the doctoral training programme on a research scholarship from the Medical Research Council.

She wants to develop an AI system to improve the diagnosisof melanoma, a type of skin cancer whose incidence, according to CancerResearch UK, has more than doubled since the early 1990s. It has thefastest rising incidence of any cancer.

Melanoma is detected from the visual examination by ahistopathologist of tissue samples taken during a biopsy. But up to one in sixcases is initially misdiagnosed.

Dr Clarke said: I am hoping we can develop an automatedsystem that can help histopathologists identify melanoma. Diagnosing melanomacan be notoriously difficult so it is hoped that in the future AI may helpbuild a knowledge base of the types of cell changes that are suggestive ofmelanoma and provide a more accurate prediction of a patients prognosis."

Dr Emily Clarke discussing her research project

About 10 researchers will be recruited onto the training programmeeach year. When it is fully up and running, there will be 50 people studyingfor a PhD.

We cant be complacent. We need to ensure there are enough talented and creative people with the skills and knowledge to harness and develop this powerful technology.

Professor Lisa Roberts, Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Researchand Innovation, said: The research at Leeds will ensure the UK remains at theforefront of an important emerging technology that will shape healthcare forfuture generations.

There is little doubt that our researchers will becontribute to future academic and industrial breakthroughs in the field of AI,enabling industry in the UK to remain at the heart of innovation in AI.

David Hogg, Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Director of the Leeds Centre forDoctoral Training, said: The UK is a world leader in AI.

But we cant be complacent. We need to ensure there areenough talented and creative people with the skills and knowledge to harnessand develop this powerful technology.

The PhD researchers will be supervised by leading expertsin computer science and medicine from the University and Leeds TeachingHospitals NHS Trust. To harness thetechnology requires researchers with a strong understanding of medicine,biology and computing and we aim to give that to them.

The researchers joining the Leeds training programme come from a range ofbackgrounds: some are computer scientists and others are biologists orhealthcare professionals but all are able to think computationally and are able to express problems and solutions in a form that can be executed by a computer.

The programme is hosted bythe Leeds Institute for Data Analytics (LIDA), establishedwithUniversityinvestmenttosupport innovation in medical bioinformatics, funded by the MedicalResearch Council, andConsumer Data, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

LIDA has now grown to support aportfolio in excess of 45 million of research across the University, bringingtogether over 150 researchers and data scientists. It supports the Universityspartnership withthe Alan Turing Institute, the UKs national institute for data scienceand artificial intelligence.

The University has a strong track record in applyingdigital technologies to healthcare. In partnership with Leeds TeachingHospitals NHS Trust, it is bringing together nine hospitals, seven universitiesand medical technology companies to create a digital pathology network whichwill allow medical staff to collaborate remotely and to conduct AI research. This is known as the Northern Pathology Imaging Co-operative.

Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust is a leader in usingdigital pathology for cancer diagnosis.

Main photo shows some of the PhD researchers with - front, from left - Professor David Hogg, Director of the Leeds Centre for Doctoral Training, Baroness Nicky Morgan, Secretary of State for Digital, Media, Culture and Sport, and Professor Lisa Roberts, Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Research and Innovation.

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Using artificial intelligence to speed up cancer detection - University of Leeds

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Abel Mocln, an archaeologist at the Centro Nacional de Investigacin sobre la Evolucin Humana (CENIEH), has led a study which combines Archaeology and Artificial Intelligence, published in the journalArchaeological and Anthropological Sciences, about the Navalmallo Rock Shelter site, situated in the locality of Pinilla de Valle in Madrid, which shows the activity by Neanderthal groups of breaking the bones of medium-sized animals such as deer, for subsequent consumption of the marrow within.

The particular feature of the study lies in its tremendous statistical potential. For the first time, Artificial Intelligence has been used to determine the agent responsible for breaking the bones at an archaeological site, with highly reliable results, which it will be possible to compare with other sites and experiments in the future.

Credit: CENIEH

We have managed to show that statistical tools based on Artificial Intelligence can be applied to studying the breaking of the fossil remains of animals which appear at sites, states Mocln.

In the work, it is not just this activity carried out by the Neanderthals which is emphasized, but also aspects of the methodology developed by the authors of the study. On this point, Mocln insists on the importance of Artificial Intelligence as this is undoubtedly the perfect line of work for the immediate future of Archaeology in general and Taphonomy in particular.

The largest Neanderthal settlement

The Navalmallo Rock Shelter, about 76,000 years old, offers one of the few large windows into Neanderthal behavior within the Iberian Meseta. With its area of over 300 m2, it may well be the largest Neanderthal camp known in the center of the Iberian Peninsula, and it has been possible to reveal different activities conducted by these hominins here, such as hunting large animals, the manufacture of stone tools and the systematic use of fire.

In this study, part of the Valle de los Neandertales project, which includes other locations in the archaeological site complex of Calvero de la Higuera, the collaborating researchers were Rosa Huguet, of the IPHES in Tarragona, Beln Mrquez and Csar Laplana, of the Museo Arqueolgico Regional in Madrid, as well as the three codirectors of the Pinilla del Valle project: Juan Luis Arsuaga, Enrique Baquedano and Alfredo Prez Gonzlez.

CENIEH

Header Image Abrigode Navalmallo Credit: CENIEH

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Artificial intelligence to study the behavior of Neanderthals - HeritageDaily