News

Why symmetry gets really interesting when it is broken

A hypothetical alien visitor, sent to observe all of human culture – art and architecture, music and medicine, storytelling and science – would quickly conclude that we as a species are obsessed with patterns. The formal gardens of 18th-century England, the folk tales of medieval Germany and the traditional woven fabrics of Mayan civilisation have little in common, but they each owe their aesthetic appeal to being composed of smaller, identical parts arranged into a harmonious whole.

Amazon spent close to $23B on R&D in 2017, outpacing fellow tech giants

This Chinese Facial Recognition Surveillance Company Is Now the World’s Most Valuable AI Startup

Introducing Kayenta: An open automated canary analysis tool from Google and Netflix

Is it Time for Quantum Computing Startups? Maybe

That was the message of the Q Summit, a one-day meeting of quantum computing researchers, investors, and entrepreneurs hosted by IBM in Menlo Park, Calif., last week.

Why SQLite Does Not Use Git

SQLite does not use the Git version control system. SQLite uses Fossil instead. Fossil and Git are both block-chain version-control systems.

This app features super-accurate GPS, and I can’t figure out how it works

The FDA Won’t Let These Farmers Call Their Skim Milk ‘Skim Milk’

Differentiable Plasticity: A New Method Learning to Learn

Neural networks, which underlie many of Uber’s machine learning systems, have proven highly successful in solving complex problems, including image recognition, language understanding, and game-playing. However, these networks are usually trained to a stopping point through gradient descent, which incrementally adjusts the connections of the network based on its performance over many trials. Once the training is complete, the network is fixed and the connections can no longer change; as a result, barring any later re-training (again requiring many examples), the network in effect stops learning at the moment training ends.

NASA X-Plane Construction Begins

To that end, NASA on April 2 awarded a $247.5 million contract to Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company of Palmdale, Calif., to build the X-plane and deliver it to the agency’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in California by the end of 2021.