A LOOK BACK AT THE 1960S PLATO COMPUTING SYSTEM
In the 1960s, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana—Champaign developed a computer system that they hoped would expand access to education. They envisioned instructors usingthe system to build lessons, and students stationing themselves at machines—whose touchscreen plasma displays had a distinct orange glow—to complete coursework. Source: ieee.org
SLEEPING IN ROOMS WITH EVEN A LITTLE LIGHT CAN INCREASE RISK OF DEPRESSION, STUDY FINDS
The reason behind this link is unclear, but the researchers believe it might be to do with the human circadian rhythm, the 24-hour cycle that tells us when to sleepand wake up, among other things, that is “programmed” by environmental factors. In the case of humans and many other creatures, light influences how much of the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin is pumped into our bodies, meaning we feel awake when the Sun rises and get sleepy when the Sun sets.
Read moreWHY DOING GOOD MAKES IT EASIER TO BE BAD
In a recent paper, economists at the University of Chicago reported that working for a socially responsible company motivated employees to act immorally. In one experiment, people were hired to transcribe images of short German texts and paid 10 percent upfront, with the remaining payment being delivered if they completed the transcriptions, or if they declared the documents too illegible to transcribe. When they were told that, for every job completed or marked illegible, 5 percent of their wages would be donated to Unicef’s educational programs, the instances of cheating rose by 25 percent, compared to where no charitable donation was offered.
Read more3 REASONS TO QUESTION THE USE OF EMOTION-TRACKING AI IN RECRUITING
Unsurprisingly, recruiters who are keen to circumvent human prejudices with regards to factors like race and gender are slowly utilizing this software. But is it really the case that smart AI like this can be ethically neutral? Source: venturebeat.com
THE AUTONOMOUS “SELFIE DRONE”
Skydio, founded by three MIT alumni, is commercializing an autonomous video-capturing camera drone, called R1 and dubbed the “selfie drone,” that tracks and films a subject, while freely navigating any environment. Source: mit.edu
LARRY PAGE’S AUTONOMOUS AIR TAXI ‘CORA’ FLIES IN NEW ZEALAND
Reports surfaced in 2016 that Google co-founder (and now Alphabet CEO) Larry Page had two ‘flying car’ projects in the works, and while we saw the Flyer recreational vehicle unveiled last year, today it’s time to meet Cora. An ‘air taxi’ developed by Page’s Kitty Hawk company, the electric aircraft is intended for use as part of a transportation service instead of sale to individual users.
Read morePYTORCH – INTERNAL ARCHITECTURE TOUR
This post is a tour around the PyTorch codebase, it is meant to be a guide for the architectural design of PyTorch and its internals. My main goal is to provide something useful for those who are interested in understanding what happens beyond the user-facing API and show something new beyond what was already covered in other tutorials. Source: christianperone.com
BUILDING WINDOWS: 4 MILLION COMMITS, 10 MILLION WORK ITEMS
Microsoft’s switch to using Git as the version control system for Windows’ development has resulted in many challenges. Git wasn’t really built for a 300GB repository with 3.5 million files, and the engineering effort to make Git scale in this way continues. Source: arstechnica.com
SEMANTIC IMAGE SEGMENTATION WITH DEEPLAB IN TENSORFLOW
Today, we are excited to announce the open source release of our latest and best performing semantic image segmentation model, DeepLab-v3+ [1], implemented in Tensorflow. This release includes DeepLab-v3+ models built on top of a powerful convolutional neural network (CNN) backbone architecture [2, 3] for the most accurate results, intended for server-side deployment. As part of this release, we are additionally sharing our Tensorflow model training and evaluation code, as well as models already pre-trained on the Pascal VOC 2012 and Cityscapes benchmark semantic segmentation tasks.
Read moreWHY THE TINY WEIGHT OF EMPTY SPACE IS SUCH A MYSTERY
The controversial idea that our universe is just a random bubble in an endless, frothing multiverse arises logically from nature’s most innocuous-seeming feature: empty space. Specifically, the seed of the multiverse hypothesis is the inexplicably tiny amount of energy infused in empty space — energy known as the vacuum energy, dark energy or the cosmological constant. Each cubic meter of empty space contains only enough of this energy to light a lightbulb for 11-trillionths of a second.
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