News

Brainless Embryos Suggest Bioelectricity Guides Growth

In recent years, by working on tadpoles and other simple creatures, Levin’s laboratory has amassed evidence that the embryo is molded by bioelectrical signals, particularly ones that emanate from the young brain long before it is even a functional organ. Those results, if replicated in other organisms, may change our understanding of the roles of electrical phenomena and the nervous system in development, and perhaps more widely in biology.

Astronaut’s DNA No Longer Matches His Identical Twin’s After Year Spent in Space

Why Siri is behind the Google Assistant and Alexa

According to the report, after acquiring the original Siri app in 2010 for $200 million, Apple proceeded to quickly integrate the digital assistant into the iPhone 4S in 2011. There was so much potential for Siri, and Apple promised to bring voice controls to the masses just as it did multi-touch on the original iPhone.

False memories, or why we’re so sure of things we’re wrong about

How Leo and Gertrude Stein Revolutionized the Art World

If Picasso and Matisse were rivals from almost the first moment each knew of the other’s existence, the contest was driven as much by those cheering from the sidelines as by their own considerable egos. It was Montmartre versus the Latin Quarter, the bande à Picasso versusthe Fauves, the dark voodoo of the Spaniard versus the Apollonian grace of the Frenchman. For the most part the competition was respectful, but it could occasionally devolve into childish stunts.

How Einstein Lost His Bearings, and with Them, General Relativity

How Amazon Became Corporate America’s Nightmare

It sells soap and produces televised soap operas. It sells complex computing horsepower to the U.S. government and will dispatch a courier to deliver cold medicine on Christmas Eve. It’s the third-most-valuable company on Earth, with smaller annual profits than Southwest Airlines Co., which as of this writing ranks 426th.

Sequence Tagging with Tensorflow

I remember the first time I heard about the magic of Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing (NLP). I was just starting a project with a young French startup Riminder and it was the first time I heard about word embeddings. There are moments in life when the confrontation with a new theory seems to make everything else irrelevant.

Deep Neural Network implemented in pure SQL over BigQuery

In this post, we’ll implement a deep neural network with one hidden layer (and ReLu and softmax activation functions) purely in SQL. The end-to-end steps for neural network training including the forward pass and back-propagation will be implemented as a single SQL query on BigQuery. As it runs on Bigquery, in effect we are performing distributed neural network training on 100s to 1000s of servers.

Using Google Cloud AutoML to Classify Poisonous Australian Spiders

Google’s new Cloud AutoML Vision is a new machine learning service from Google Cloud that aims to make state of the art machine learning techniques accessible to non-machine learning experts. In this post I will show you how I was able, in just a few hours, to create a custom image classifier that is able to distinguish between different types of poisonous Australian spiders. I didn’t have any data when I started and it only required a very basic understanding of machine learning related concepts.