AMAZON CONFIRMS THAT ECHO DEVICE SECRETLY SHARED USER’S PRIVATE AUDIO
Amazon confirmed an Echo owner’s privacy-sensitive allegation on Thursday, after Seattle CBS affiliate KIRO-7 reported that an Echo device in Oregon sent private audio to someone on a user’s contact list without permission. Danielle next asked exactly why the device sent recorded audio to a contact: ‘He said the device guessed what we were saying. ’Danielle didn’t explain exactly how much time passed between the incident, which happened ‘two weeks ago,’ and this customer service response.
Read moreKUBERNETES CONTAINERD INTEGRATION GOES GA
Containerd 1.1 works with Kubernetes 1.10 and above, and supports all Kubernetes features. The test coverage of containerd integration on Google Cloud Platform in Kubernetes test infrastructure is now equivalent to the Docker integration (See: test dashboard). We’re very glad to see containerd rapidly grow to this big milestone. Alibaba Cloud started to use containerd actively since its first day, and thanks to the simplicity and robustness emphasise, make it a perfect container engine running in our Serverless Kubernetes product, which has high qualification on performance and stability. No doubt, containerd will be a core engine of container era, and continue to driving innovation forward. In containerd 1.1, the cri-containerd daemon is now refactored to be a containerd CRI plugin.
Read more3D FACE RECONSTRUCTION WITH POSITION MAP REGRESSION NETWORKS
Position Map Regression Networks (PRN) is a method to jointly regress dense alignment and 3D face shape in an end-to-end manner. In this article, I’ll provide a short explanation and discuss its applications in computer vision. In the last few decades, a lot of important research groups in computer vision have made amazing advances in 3D face reconstruction and face alignment. Primarily, these groups have used CNNs as the de facto ANN for this task. However, the performance of these methods is restricted because of the limitations of 3D space defined by face model templates used for mapping. In a recent paper, Yao Feng and others proposed an end-to-end method called Position Map Regression Networks (PRN) to jointly predict dense alignment and reconstruct 3D face shape.
Read moreNASA IS BRINGING CRYOSLEEP CHAMBERS OUT OF FICTION
NASA and SpaceWorks Enterprises are currently developing a stasis chamber (as opposed to individual pods like those in the movie) that could induce an extended state of torpor, or metabolic inactivity medically brought on by lowering body temperature to the point of mild hypothermia, that could allow astronauts to snooze for at least two weeks on end during longer missions. Also unlike Alien, in which everyone is temporarily in freeze-frame until the ship arrives at its destination, the crew would rotate cryosleep shifts so there is always someone conscious in case something goes awry where no one can here you scream. SpaceWorks’ objective is to “place crew and passengers in a prolonged hypothermic state during space-mission transit phases (outbound and Earth-return) to significantly reduce the system mass, power, habitable volume, and medical challenges associated with long-duration space exploration,” as explained on their website.
Read moreMEAN DIFFERENCES IN MEN’S AND WOMEN’S BRAINS ARE VERY LARGE
It is of particular importance to gain a more detailed picture of how the brains of males and females differ, because several psychiatric disorders and conditions differ in their prevalence between the sexes. For instance, rates of Alzheimer’s disease are higher in females than males, prompting a recent call for the prioritization of biomedical research into sex differences in measures relevant to this disorder (Mazure and Swendsen 2016). Females also show a higher prevalence of major depressive disorder (Rutter et al.
Read moreDEEP LEARNING RESEARCH: CREATING ADAPTABLE META-LEARNING MODELS
Adaptability is one of the key cognitive abilities that defined us as humans. Even as babies, we can intuitively shift between similar tasks even if we don’t have prior training on them. This contrasts with the traditional train-and-test approach of most artificial intelligence(AI) systems which require an agent to go through massive amounts of training before it can master a specific task. By definition, train-and-test systems are not very adaptable and, consequently, they are not very applicable to scenarios that operate in real word environments. Improving the adaptability of AI systems has been one of the core areas of research of an increasingly popular discipline known as meta-learning that focuses on improving the learning abilities of AI agents. In neuroscience literature, cognitive flexibility or adaptability is commonly ascribed to prefrontal cortex (PFC) and working memory in the brain.
Read moreAPPLE, VW SIGN DRIVERLESS CAR DEAL FOR APPLE CAMPUS SHUTTLES, NY TIMES SOURCES SAY
The New York Timesreported this evening that Apple entered into a partnership with Volkswagen Group to pair a number of electric T6 Transporter vanswith Apple’s proprietary autonomous vehicle software. The vans will reportedly be used to shuttle employees around Apple’s company campus, and it’s not clear whether the deal will extend from there. TheTimes says that this deal only comes after Apple tried to find a partner in BMW and Mercedes-Benz.
Read moreHOW GUT MICROBES ARE JOINING THE FIGHT AGAINST CANCER
Cancer has been a late bloomer in the microbiome revolution that has surged through biomedicine. Over the past few decades, scientists have linked the gut’s composition of microbes to dozens of seemingly unrelated conditions — from depression to obesity. Cancer has some provocative connections as well: inflammation is a contributing factor to some tumours and a few types of cancer have infectious origins.
Read moreWHY CHINA’S PAYMENT APPS GIVE U.S. BANKERS NIGHTMARES
Wandering the streets of Shanghai to admire the architecture, the head of one of the largest U.S. consumer banks recently found himself surrounded by a gaggle of teenagers. Entranced by their phones, they hardly made way for the banker. The teens were messaging, shopping and sending money back and forth, all without cash. Instead, they were using Alipay and WeChat. The scary thing for the American: Banks never got a cut. The future of consumer payments may not be designed in New York or London but in China.
Read moreUS EMPLOYEE IN CHINA SUFFERS BRAIN INJURY IN CASE RECALLING CUBA
A U.S. government employee in China reported abnormal sensations of sound and pressure ahead of being diagnosed with a mild brain injury, in a case reminiscent of diplomats who fell ill in Cuba last year. The employee experienced the symptoms from late 2017 through April 2018 while on assignment in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, where a U.S. consulate is located, according to Jinnie Lee, a spokeswoman at the U.S. embassy in Beijing. After being sent to the U.S., a clinical evaluation determined the employee had a “mild traumatic brain injury,” she said.
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