THIS STARTUP’S CEO WANTS TO OPEN-SOURCE SELF-DRIVING CAR SAFETY TESTING
Starting today, Voyage will begin to share safety requirements, test scenarios, metrics, tools, and code that it has developed for its own Level 4 self-driving taxis. Five Voyage cars are currently deployed carrying passengers within two retirement communities in California and Florida. Source: arstechnica.com
TSB BANK: BOTCHED UPGRADE HAS LEFT CUSTOMERS UNABLE TO ACCESS THEIR ACCOUNTS
TSB’s botched IT “upgrade” has snowballed into a full-scale crisis that has left up to 1.9 million customers locked out of their accounts for five days, with MPs demanding action and the bank facing a potential multimillion-pound compensation bill and regulatory fines. Source: theguardian.com
GSMA PUTS ESIM WORK ‘ON HOLD’ DUE TO US COLLUSION INVESTIGATION
Don’t expect to see embedded SIM technology in your phone any time soon. The GSMA, which oversees key cellular standards, has placed eSIM spec work ‘on hold’ while the US Department of Justice investigates the possibility of collusion between AT&T, Verizon and the GSMA to stifle the card-free technology. The GSMA didn’t offer an explanation of why it was pausing development, and instead stressed that American eSIM users would need to ‘explicitly consent’ to a carrier-locked eSIM (such buying a phone on contract).
Read moreQUANTUM RADAR WILL EXPOSE STEALTH AIRCRAFT
Researchers at the University of Waterloo are developing a new technology that promises to help radar operators cut through heavy background noise and isolate objects—including stealth aircraft and missiles—with unparalleled accuracy. Source: phys.org
SCIENTISTS PLAN HUGE EUROPEAN AI HUB TO COMPETE WITH US
Named the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems, or Ellis, the proposed AI institute would have major centres in a handful of countries, the UK included, with each employing hundreds of computer engineers, mathematicians and other scientists with the express aim of keeping Europe at the forefront of AI research. Source: theguardian.com
NEW FORM OF DNA DISCOVERED INSIDE LIVING HUMAN CELLS
A newDNAstructure inside human cells known asthe “i-motif”, has been identified by scientists. This form resembles a twisted “knot” of DNA, instead of the well-known double helix first described by James Watson and Francis Crick. Source: co.uk
INTRODUCING JENKINS X: A CI/CD SOLUTION FOR MODERN APPLICATIONS ON KUBERNETES
Kubernetes has become the defacto way of installing, upgrading, operating and managing containers at scale on any public or hybrid cloud 2018 is the year all the major public clouds, operating system vendors and PaaS offerings support Kubernetes natively we now have an open source industry standard for distributing, installing and managing applications on any cloud! Source: jenkins.io
AN INTRODUCTION TO HASHING IN THE ERA OF MACHINE LEARNING
New research is an excellent opportunity to reexamine the fundamentals of a field; and it’s not often that something as fundamental (and well studied) as indexing experiences a breakthrough. This article serves as an introduction to hash tables, an abbreviated examination of what makes them fast and slow, and an intuitive view of the machine learning concepts that are being applied to indexing in the paper.
Read moreHOW MANY GENES DO CELLS NEED? MAYBE ALMOST ALL OF THEM
By knocking out genes three at a time, scientists have painstakingly deduced the web of genetic interactions that keeps a cell alive. Researchers long ago identified essential genes that yeast cells can’t live without, but new work, which appears today in Science, shows that looking only at those gives a skewed picture of what makes cells tick: Many genes that are inessential on their own become crucial as others disappear. The result implies that the true minimum number of genes that yeast — and perhaps, by extension, other complex organisms — need to survive and thrive may be surprisingly large.
Read moreARE WE SURE THERE WASN’T A COAL-BURNING SPECIES 55 MILLION YEARS AGO?
If you’ve ever wished that a new study came packaged with some science fiction exploring the implications, this is your lucky day. Of course, not every research paper lends itself to a short story, but a manuscript by NASA’s Gavin Schmidt and the University of Rochester’s Adam Frank asks a fun question: are we sure that humans built the first industrial civilization in Earth’s history?
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