SORRY ELON MUSK, THERE’S NO CLEAR EVIDENCE AUTOPILOT SAVES LIVES
This week, we’ve talked to several automotive safety experts, and none has been able to point us to clear evidence that Autopilot’s semi-autonomous features improve safety. And that’s why news sites like ours haven’t written stories ‘about how autonomous cars are really safe.’ Maybe that will prove true in the future, but right now the data just isn’t there. Musk has promised to publish regular safety reports in the future—perhaps those will give us the data needed to establish whether Autopilot actually improves safety.
Read morePERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF CLOUD APPLICATIONS
Today’s choice gives us an insight into how Google measure and analyse the performance of large user-facing services such as Gmail (from which most of the data in the paper is taken). It’s a paper in two halves. The first part of the paper demonstrates through an analysis of traffic and load patterns why the only real way to analyse production performance is using live production systems.
Read moreBIOLOGY WILL BE THE NEXT GREAT COMPUTING PLATFORM
Crispr, the powerful gene-editing tool, is revolutionizing the speed and scope with which scientists can modify the DNA of organisms, including human cells. So many people want to use it—from academic researchers to agtech companies to biopharma firms—that new companies are popping up to staunch the demand. Companies like Synthego, which is using a combination of software engineering and hardware automation to become the Amazon of genome engineering.
Read moreTECHNIQUE TO MANIPULATE ELECTRONS WITH LIGHT COULD MAKE COMPUTERS MUCH FASTER
A team of researchers in Germany and at the University of Michigan have demonstrated how infrared laser pulses can shift electrons between two different states, the classic 1 and 0, in a thin sheet of semiconductor Source: opli.net
YALE PHYSICISTS FIND SIGNS OF A TIME CRYSTAL
Time crystals, first identified in 2016, are different. Their atoms spin periodically, first in one direction and then in another, as a pulsating force is used to flip them. That’s the “ticking.” In addition, the ticking in a time crystal is locked at a particular frequency, even when the pulse flips are imperfect. Source: yale.edu
EXPERTS SAY TESLA HAS REPEATED CAR INDUSTRY MISTAKES FROM THE 1980S
Musk is discovering that large-scale car manufacturing is really hard, and it’s not easy to improve on the methods of conventional automakers. And while automation obviously plays an important role in car manufacturing, it’s not the magic bullet Musk imagined a couple of years ago. Far from leapfrogging the techniques of conventional automakers, Tesla is now struggling just to match the efficiency of its more established rivals.
Read moreMINING IN SPACE COULD LEAD TO CONFLICTS ON EARTH
Space mining is no longer science fiction. By the 2020s, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries—for-profit space-mining companies cooperating with NASA—will be sending out swarms of tiny satellites to assess the composition of hurtling hunks of cosmic debris, identify the most lucrative ones, and harvest them. They’ve already developed prototype spacecraft to do the job. Some people—like Massachusetts Institute of Technology planetary scientist Sara Seager, former NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver, and science writer Phil Plait—argue that, to continue advancing as a space-faring species, we need to embrace this commercial space mining industry, and perhaps even facilitate it, too. But should we?
Read moreANNOUNCING PYTORCH 1.0 FOR BOTH RESEARCH AND PRODUCTION
PyTorch 1.0 takes the modular, production-oriented capabilities from Caffe2 and ONNX and combines them with PyTorch’s existing flexible, research-focused design to provide a fast, seamless path from research prototyping to production deployment for a broad range of AI projects. With PyTorch 1.0, AI developers can both experiment rapidly and optimize performance through a hybrid front end that seamlessly transitions between imperative and declarative execution modes. The technology in PyTorch 1.0 has already powered many Facebook products and services at scale, including performing 6 billion text translations per day.
Read moreADVANCING STATE-OF-THE-ART IMAGE RECOGNITION WITH DEEP LEARNING ON HASHTAGS
Image recognition is one of the pillars of AI research and an area of focus for Facebook. Our researchers and engineers aim to push the boundaries of computer vision and then apply that work to benefit people in the real world — for example, using AI to generate audio captions of photos for visually impaired users. In order to improve these computer vision systems and train them to consistently recognize and classify a wide range of objects, we need data sets with billions of images instead of just millions, as is common today.
Read moreSAPIENZ: INTELLIGENT AUTOMATED SOFTWARE TESTING AT SCALE
Shipping code updates to the Facebook app, which is used every day by hundreds of millions of people, requires extensive testing to ensure stability and performance. At Facebook’s scale, this process requires checking hundreds of important interactions across numerous types of devices and operating systems for both correctness and speed. Traditionally, this has largely been a manual test design process, during which engineers devote time and resources to designing test cases.
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