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.
Read moreTRAINING 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. Only a few things can be executed at a time, and shuffling data to memory is a slow process. As a result, neural networks have tended to be both computationally and energy intensive. A few years back, IBM announced a new processor design that was a bit closer to a collection of neurons and could execute neural networks far more efficiently.
Read moreFINALLY, 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.
Read moreCLIMATE CHANGE CAN BE STOPPED BY TURNING AIR INTO GASOLINE
A Harvard professor says his company should be able to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, at industrial scales, by 2021. A team of scientists from Harvard University and the company Carbon Engineering announced on Thursday that they have found a method to cheaply and directly pull carbon-dioxide pollution out of the atmosphere. If their technique is successfully implemented at scale, it could transform how humanity thinks about the problem of climate change.
Read moreLEARN 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?).
Read moreNTSB: AUTOPILOT STEERED TESLA CAR TOWARD TRAFFIC BARRIER BEFORE DEADLY CRASH
The National Transportation Safety Board has released its preliminary report on the March crash that killed driver Walter Huang in Mountain View. The report provides a second-by-second description of the events that preceded Huang’s collision with a concrete lane divider. The report confirms that Autopilot was engaged ahead of the crash, and it appears to confirm that a navigation mistake by Autopilot contributed to Huang’s death.
Read moreMICROSOFT JUST PUT A DATA CENTER ON THE BOTTOM OF THE OCEAN
Microsoft just sent its first self-sufficient, waterproof data center to the bottom of the ocean floor near the Orkney Islands in Scotland, the company announced on Tuesday. About the size of a shipping container, the tubular data center holds 12 racks loaded with 864 servers and is attached to a large triangular weight that anchors it to the seabed over 100 feet beneath the ocean surface. The deployment of the data center represents the culmination of a nearly four year research effort code-named Project Natick, which aimed to develop rapidly deployable data centers that can support cloud computing services near major cities.
Read moreHUMAN 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.
Read moreAN 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. That snippet of code is still very much alive in humans’ brains today, where it does the very viral task of packaging up genetic information and sending it from nerve cells to their neighbors in little capsules that look a whole lot like viruses themselves. And these little packages of information might be critical elements of how nerves communicate and reorganize over time — tasks thought to be necessary for higher-order thinking, the researchers said. That’s because viruses aren’t just critters that try to make a home in a body, the way bacteria do.
Read moreHOROVOD: 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. Source: github.com