News

Chicago Times and LA Times Block EU Users

Some high-profile US news websites are temporarily unavailable in Europe after new EU data protection rules came into effect. The Chicago Tribune and LA Times were among those saying they were currently unavailable in most European countries. Meanwhile complaints were filed against US tech giants within hours of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) taking effect.

Muons: the little-known particles helping to probe the impenetrable

The muon is going mainstream. The particle, a heavy version of the electron that rains down on every square centimetre of Earth, is little known outside particle physics — and last year it helped archaeologists to make a stunning discovery of a previously unknown chamber in Egypt’s Great Pyramid1. Volcanologists and nuclear engineers are also finding new uses for the same technique, called muography, which harnesses muons to probe the innards of dense structures.

MIT’s Interesting Proposal for a More Stable Financial System

On the 16th of January 2018, three diamond firms approached Punjab National Bank requesting LOUs. (Letter of Understanding is a form of bank guarantee under which its customers can raise money from any other Indian bank’s foreign branch in the form of a short-term credit). Punjab National Bank demanded 100% cash margins (profitability) as a common requirement to issue LOUs.

Intel AI Lab open-sources library for deep learning-driven NLP

The Intel AI Lab has open-sourced a library for natural language processing to help researchers and developers give conversational agents like chatbots and virtual assistants the smarts necessary to function, such as name entity recognition, intent extraction, and semantic parsing to identify the action a person wants to take from their words. The first-ever conference by Intel for AI developers is being held Wednesday and Thursday, May 23 and 24, at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. The Intel AI Lab now employs about 40 data scientists and researchers and works with divisions of the company developing products like the nGraph framework and hardware like Nervana Neural Network chips, Liu said.

Amazon confirms that Echo device secretly shared user’s private audio

Kubernetes 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.

3D 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.

NASA 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.

Mean differences in men’s and women’s brains are very large

Deep 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.