MACHINE LEARNING’S ‘AMAZING’ ABILITY TO PREDICT CHAOS
Half a century ago, the pioneers of chaos theory discovered that the “butterfly effect” makes long-term prediction impossible. Even the smallest perturbation to a complex system (like the weather, the economy or just about anything else) can touch off a concatenation of events that leads to a dramatically divergent future. Unable to pin down the state of these systems precisely enough to predict how they’ll play out, we live under a veil of uncertainty.
Read moreWHY NUCLEAR CLOCKS WILL BE THE MOST ACCURATE CLOCKS ON EARTH
Since they were first created in the mid-twentieth century, atomic clocks have been the gold standard of timekeeping. Indeed, the most accurate clock in the world, which is run by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Colorado, is a ytterbium atomic clock. But now researchers around the world are working on building a better model based not on the electrons of an atom, but the nucleus.
Read moreTITUS, THE NETFLIX CONTAINER MANAGEMENT PLATFORM, IS NOW OPEN SOURCE
Titus powers critical aspects of the Netflix business, from video streaming, recommendations and machine learning, big data, content encoding, studio technology, internal engineering tools, and other Netflix workloads. Titus offers a convenient model for managing compute resources, allows developers to maintain just their application artifacts, and provides a consistent developer experience from a developer’s laptop to production by leveraging Netflix container-focused engineering tools.
Read moreZTE EXPORTS BAN MAY MEAN NO GOOGLE APPS, A DEATH SENTENCE FOR ITS SMARTPHONES
Android is free and open source and will probably remain free for ZTE to use without Google’s involvement. Reuters’ source is probably referring to the Google apps, which aren’t sold to device makers but are carefully licensed to them in exchange for other concessions. The Google apps packageincludes popular services like Gmail and Google Maps, and it also unlocks the Play Store, Google Play Services, and the entire Android app ecosystem.
Read moreAUTONOMOUS BOATS WILL BE ON THE MARKET SOONER THAN SELF-DRIVING CARS
In the autonomous revolution that is underway, nearly every transportation machine will eventually be self-driving. For cars, it’s likely going to take decades before we see them operating freely, outside of test conditions. Some unmanned watercraft, on the other hand, may be at sea commercially before 2020. Source: vice.com
THE ARMY WANTS TO USE A THEORETICAL PARTICLE TO MAKE AN UNHACKABLE QUANTUM COMPUTER
Last July, a group of researchers from UC Irvine, UCLA, and Stanford announced they’d found the first strong evidence of the Majorana fermion, an elusive particle first theorised over 80 years ago that acts as its own antiparticle. The evidence of the Majorana fermion was hailed as a major “landmark” in physics, but it didn’t take long for the US Army, which funded the research, to begin considering wartime applications for the particle.
Read moreFDA CLEARS FIRST CONTACT LENS WITH LIGHT-ADAPTIVE TECHNOLOGY
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today cleared the first contact lens to incorporate an additive that automatically darkens the lens when exposed to bright light. The Acuvue Oasys Contact Lenses with Transitions Light Intelligent Technology are soft contact lenses indicated for daily use to correct the vision of people with non-diseased eyes who are nearsighted (myopia) or farsighted (hyperopia). They can be used by people with certain degrees of astigmatism, an abnormal curvature of the eye.
Read moreCHINA’S STRATEGIC AMBIGUITY AND SHIFTING APPROACH TO LETHAL AUTONOMOUS WEAPONS SYSTEMS
On April 13, China’s delegation to United Nations Group of Governmental Experts on lethal autonomous weapons systems announced the “desire to negotiate and conclude” a new protocol for the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons “to ban the use of fully autonomous lethal weapons systems.” According to the aptly named Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, the delegation “stressed that [the ban] is limited to use only.” The same day, the Chinese air force released details on an upcoming challenge intended to evaluate advances in fully autonomous swarms of drones, which will also explore new concepts for future intelligent-swarm combat.
Read moreA STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE TO THE “WORLD MODELS” AI PAPER
Teaching a machine to master car racing and fireball avoidance through “World Models”. Source: applied-data.science
DECADES-OLD GRAPH PROBLEM YIELDS TO AMATEUR MATHEMATICIAN
It is unusual, but not unheard of, for an amateur mathematician to make significant progress on a long-standing open problem. In the 1970s, Marjorie Rice, a homemaker with no mathematical background, ran across a Scientific American column about pentagons that tile the plane. She eventually added four new pentagons to the list. Gil Kalai, a mathematician at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said it is gratifying to see a nonprofessional mathematician make a major breakthrough. “It really adds to the many facets of the mathematical experience,” he said.
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