WebProNews

Tag: Peter Norvig

  • BrainQ Developed Unique AI-Powered Brain-Computer Medical Device, Says CEO

    BrainQ Developed Unique AI-Powered Brain-Computer Medical Device, Says CEO

    Working with the Google Developers Launchpad, BrainQ has developed a unique AI-powered brain-computer medical device, says their CEO, Yotam Drechsler. “It takes patients’ brainwaves as an input with a set of metadata and runs machine learning algorithms in the cloud and translates them into a tailored electromagnetic treatment aimed at facilitating their central nerve system recovery process,” says Drechsler.

    Yotam Drechsler, CEO of BrainQ, discussed the companies unique AI-powered technology in a video for Google Developers Launchpad:

    AI-Based Medical Device to Treat Neural Disorders

    BrainQ is developing an AI-based medical device aimed at getting powerless people following neural disorders, like stroke or spinal cord injury, back on their feet. Every single year, hundreds of millions of people around the world suffer from neural disorders. Stroke alone accounts for 15 million people every single year. And the entire neural disorders cost to the US economy is $1.5 trillion every single year.

    My grandfather had a stroke several years ago. From being the center of the family, all of a sudden, he became paralyzed in half of his body. That means he can longer do simple things like grabbing a glass of water or dressing alone. That’s the reality for many people out there.

    Using AI to Model Physical Therapy

    The common treatment is what’s called physical therapy. It’s essentially exercising the hand or the leg back and forth. What BrainQ essentially does is modeling physical therapy and applying it directly to the brain. In a sense, we ask what happens for a patient or for a healthy person when he does a hand movement, like reaching his hand to grab a glass of water.

    We are getting a lot of people to do these kinds of movements and then we learn the patterns. We take these patterns that we have learned and identified and reapply it back to him as a personalized treatment.

    Developed Unique Brain-Computer Medical Device

    We have developed a unique brain-computer interface-based medical device. It takes patients’ brainwaves as an input with a set of metadata and runs machine learning algorithms in the cloud and translates them into a tailored electromagnetic treatment aimed at facilitating their central nerve system recovery process.

    We were very fortunate to have Google share this vision with us. We worked very closely with the GCP team on making this vision come true. We were fortunate to be on this program, and it really puts us on a fast track. And in all four fronts, we have developed the next generation of technology with precision medicine base, with the studio team, Peter Norvig, and the rest of the Googlers that were very, very keen in helping us.

    We had a large funding round in the past couple of months and we have several collaborations in the pipeline. We are hoping to continue on this promising track and really bring cure to millions of people around the world. And we are fortunate to have Google with us on this journey.

  • Matt Cutts: Google Probably Won’t Call PageRank Something Else

    Update: Matt Cutts says they probably won’t rename PageRank. However, he agrees with Peter Norvig that people obsess about it too much.

    Original article: Last year, Google quietly got rid of PageRank in Webmaster Tools. Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa had said, "We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it."

    Note: Watch our exclusive interview with Google’s Matt Cutts at 1pm Pacific/4pm Eastern at live.dev.webpronews.com.

    A lot of people wondered why Google would keep PageRank in the Google Toolbar, where it still sits to this day. Search enthusiast Barry Schwartz of Rusty Brick speculated that Google would not want to remove it because PageRank is "too much of their branding." After some words from Google’s Director of Research, Peter Norvig today, however, I’m not so sure that’s the case.

    Note: Watch Norvig’s keynote address here (or view our liveblog of the event), and our exclusive interviw with him here:

    Norvig said at SMX today that PageRank is still one thing that is "overhyped," and that Google never felt that it was such a big factor. They have always looked at all available data, combining every available signal and tiring to figure out the best way to combine them.

    Norvig also said that it may be time for some re-branding with regard to PageRank. There may be a different term in the pipeline. "There’s a technical formula that’s PageRank, which is the way of judging the links between pages, and that’s just one component of how we rank the pages and you get your final search results. There’s all these other things that come in, but they don’t have a catchy name. So some people apply PageRank to mean all the components that give you the final ranking, and that’s where we get confused. So probably we need some other term for that…We’ll get some marketing guys on it."

    I don’t know how seriously the company is considering this, as Norvig seems to simply be speaking off the cuff, but given the company’s repeated emphasis on a lack of emphasis on PageRank, it would not be surprising to see them change the name. However, the problem with that could be, that these same PR-obsessed webmasters would just become obsessed with the re-branded term.

    WebProNews will be doing a live interview with Google’s Matt Cutts today at 1pm Pacific/4pm Eastern at live.dev.webpronews.com. Perhaps he will offer his thoughts on the subject.

    Do you think PageRank needs a different name? What would you call it? Give your suggestions here.