INDIA IS LAUNCHING A ROVER TO THE MOON TO LOOK FOR NUCLEAR FUSION FUEL
On Monday, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) announced the Chandrayaan-2 mission, which will send a rover to the south-side of the moon later this year. It will be India’s second lunar mission and the first time any country has visited the moon’s south side. The ISRO’s six-wheeled rover will analyze the lunar crust for traces of water and helium-3, an isotope that is integral to developing fusion energy on Earth.
Read moreTESLA BATTERY CAUGHT FIRE TWICE AFTER FATAL CRASH, INVESTIGATION FINDS
The battery of a Tesla Model S reignited twice after it was involved in a crash that killed an 18-year-old driver and passenger in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, last month, a federal investigation has revealed. The driver was speeding, clocking 116 mph in a 30 mph zone, when he lost control of the vehicle while trying to pass in a curve, according to the US National Transportation Safety Board’s preliminary report released Tuesday. The car jumped the curb and hit a wall twice before erupting in flames.
Read moreDON’T LEARN TENSORFLOW! START WITH KERAS OR PYTORCH INSTEAD
So, you want to learn deep learning? Whether you want to start applying it to your business, base your next side project on it, or simply gain marketable skills – picking the right deep learning framework to learn is the essential first step towards reaching your goal. We strongly recommend that you pick either Keras or PyTorch. These are powerful tools that are enjoyable to learn and experiment with. We know them both from the teacher’s and the student’s perspective. Piotr has delivered corporate workshops on both, while Rafał is currently learning them.
Read moreAMAZON BUYS PILLPACK, AN ONLINE PHARMACY, FOR JUST UNDER $1B
According to PitchBook, PillPack was last valued at $361 million after a round of funding in 2016.This deal is expected to close in the second half of 2018. The move (and that reported valuation hike) signal how heated the e-health market is becoming, and also how Amazon views it as a key frontier in its bid to be the go-to place for anything a consumer (or medical organization) might want or need in the area of healthcare. The might of Amazon in commerce plays a massive role in how the market is poised to develop: it buying the company is not only a signal of how PillPack will likely get scaled out (not least through Amazon’s healthcare JV) but also because of how other pharmacy companies will have to respond.
Read moreKROGER WILL USE AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES TO DELIVER GROCERIES THIS FALL
Most coverage of autonomous vehicles has focused on cars with human passengers in them. But there’s also a big opportunity to use autonomous vehicles to transform the retail sector. And one promising company in that emerging industry is Nuro, a startup founded by two early members of the Google self-driving car team. Now Nuro is announcing its first commercial partnership: with Kroger, one of the nation’s leading grocery chains. Starting this fall, Kroger plans to start delivering groceries to customers using Nuro’s autonomous vehicles. Initially, the partnership will only be active in a single market—the companies haven’t yet said which city that will be.
Read moreHOW BUZZFEED MIGRATED FROM A PERL MONOLITH TO GO AND PYTHON MICROSERVICES
BuzzFeed have recently migrated from a monolithic Perl application to a set of around 500 microservices written in a mixture of Python and Go. Initially their routing logic was implemented in the CDN but that proved difficult to test and maintain. They subsequently switched to using NGINX for routing. The site router service is designed to run on top of BuzzFeed’s own Rig platform, which facilitates easy deployment to each of the services in each Amazon Elastic Container Service environment (ECS) they run (test, stage and production). BuzzFeed have built an abstraction layer that allows configuration of the routing service using YAML.
Read moreNEURAL SCENE REPRESENTATION AND RENDERING
There is more than meets the eye when it comes to how we understand a visual scene: our brains draw on prior knowledge to reason and to make inferences that go far beyond the patterns of light that hit our retinas. For example, when entering a room for the first time, you instantly recognise the items it contains and where they are positioned. If you see three legs of a table, you will infer that there is probably a fourth leg with the same shape and colour hidden from view.
Read moreINTEL’S NEW PATH TO QUANTUM COMPUTING
Intel’s director of quantum hardware, Jim Clarke, explains the company’s two quantum computing technologies The limits of Tangle Lake’s technology Silicon spin qubits and how far away they are The importance of cryogenic control electronics Top quantum computing applications What problems keeps him up at night AI vs. Quantum Computing: which will be more important? IEEE Spectrum: What’s special about Tangle Lake? Jim Clarke:I can’t underscore, for these systems, how important the packaging is. Typically we make our computers to run at room temperature, in our back pocket or on our wrist or slightly higher temperatures, but never at a fraction of a degree above absolute zero [as you need for superconducting qubits]. So these guys developed a package that could withstand the temperatures mechanically and still be relatively clean from a signal perspective.
Read moreAI CHIP STARTUP WAVE TO BUY SILICON VALLEY OLD-TIMER MIPS
Wave Computing has been aiming its AI chips at powerful computers, but acquiring MIPS will let it reach small devices, too. Call it a May-December marriage: A hot new AI chip startup called Wave Computing has acquired a veteran in the processor business, MIPS Technologies, CNET has learned. Wave, founded in 2010, aims to speed up the artificial intelligence technology with its custom processors.
Read moreAI NATIONALISM
The last few years have seen developments in machine learning research and commercialisation that have been pretty astounding. As just a few examples: Image recognition starts to achieve human-level accuracy at complex tasks, for example skin cancer classification. Big steps forward in applying neural networks to machine translation at Baidu, Google, Microsoft etc. Microsoft’s system achieving human-parity on Mandarin-English translation of news stories (when compared with non-expert translators). In March 2016, DeepMind developed AlphaGo–the first computer program to defeat a world champion at Go. This is significant given that machine learning researchers have been trying to develop a system that could defeat a professional player for decades.
Read more