News

China’s Silicon Valley Faces Meltdown Fears

Shenzhen is a long way from Silicon Valley. Tech companies are housed in gleaming skyscrapers rather than on rolling campuses; there is scarcely a hoodie to be seen and the Communist Party influence is never far away. Just across the border from Hong Kong and lying in the Pearl River Delta, this metropolis of some 12 million people is home to some of Chinaâs biggest tech players, including the social media giant Tencent valued at over $500 billion and telecom equipment groups ZTE and Huawei.

Training a neural network in phase-change memory beats GPUs

Compared to a typical CPU, a brain is remarkably energy-efficient, in part because it combines memory, communications, and processing in a single execution unit, the neuron. A brain also has lots of them, which lets it handle lots of tasks in parallel. Attempts to run neural networks on traditional CPUs run up against these fundamental mismatches.

Finally, scientists have found intriguing organic molecules on Mars

After more than four decades of searching for organic molecules on the surface of Mars, scientists have conclusively found them in mudstones on the lower slopes of Mount Sharp. A variety of organic compounds were discovered by NASA’s Curiosity rover, which heated the Martian rocks to 500° Celsius to release the chemicals. The finding is significant—for life to have ever existed on Mars there would almost certainly need to be organic molecules to get it started; they’re the basic building blocks of life as we know it.

Climate Change Can Be Stopped by Turning Air into Gasoline

Learn Reinforcement Learning from scratch

Deep RL is a field that has seen vast amounts of research interest, including learning to play Atari games, beating pro players at Dota 2, and defeating Go champions. Contrary to many classical Deep Learning problems that often focus on perception (does this image contain a stop sign?) , Deep RL adds the dimension of actions that influence the environment (what is the goal, and how do I get there?).

NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash

Microsoft Just Put a Data Center on the Bottom of the Ocean

Human blood cells transformed into functional neurons

Human immune cells in blood can be converted directly into functional neurons in the laboratory in about three weeks with the addition of just four proteins, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have found. The conversion occurs with relatively high efficiency — generating as many as 50,000 neurons from 1 milliliter of blood — and it can be achieved with fresh or previously frozen and stored blood samples, which vastly enhances opportunities for the study of neurological disorders such as schizophrenia and autism. A paper describing the findings was published online June 4 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

An Ancient Virus May Be Responsible for Human Consciousness

You’ve got an ancient virus in your brain. In fact, you’ve got an ancient virus at the very root of your conscious thought. According to two papers published in the journal Cell in January, long ago, a virus bound its genetic code to the genome of four-limbed animals.

Horovod: Distributed Training Framework for TensorFlow, Keras, and PyTorch

Horovod is a distributed training framework for TensorFlow, Keras, and PyTorch. The goal of Horovod is to make distributed Deep Learning fast and easy to use.