For everything from family to computers…
Not much can be said yet of the differences between the identical twins’ genetic makeup
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We’ve seen a few different magic mirror projects using a Raspberry Pi, but in the newest issue of MagPi they’ve put together what might as well be the definitive magic mirror guide as it’s easily the simplest one to make for yourself.
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#DeleteUber is trending on Twitter after the notoriously scummy ride-hailing app broke a strike and undercut taxi drivers’ protest of President Trump’s refugee-detaining executive order. Once more, Uber reminded the country that it’s a scum company.
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To paraphrase Men In Black’s Agent K, a person is smart, but people are dumb, panicky and dangerous animals. Researchers at MIT and Princeton wanted to see if, despite this, they were able to extract better information from crowds. They appear to have succeeded after developing an algorithm that looks at what people answer, but also what they believe other people will answer too.
As the paper’s authors explain, the democratic method of asking people to choose between two (or more) options isn’t perfect. The system often skews heavily in favor of "shallow, lowest common denominator information at the expense of novel or specialized knowledge." Hence the idea, so espoused in the UK’s recent referendum to leave the European Union, that the people had grown tired of experts.
In order to combat this, the pair developed a system that essentially gives extra weight to the answers of better-informed people. In the example, a group was given two questions: "Is Philadelphia the capital of Pennsylvania?" and "Will other people think that Philadelphia is the capital of Pennsylvania?"
Now, Philadelphia isn’t the capital city of Pennsylvania, that honor goes to Harrisburg, but Philadelphia is bigger, more populous and better known. But those people who answered no to the first question said yes to the second, showing that they anticipated being in the minority.
The researchers’ solution to polling data is to only select the answer that is more popular than people predict it to be. As MIT News explains, it’s this smaller group that helps give you the proper weight of the overall answers. Put simply, it’s worth looking at those folks who answer against what they believe everyone else will say, since they may be smarter than everyone else.
There’s a sting in this tale, however, because this newfangled algorithm may not be enough to overcome human biases in some fields. At the same time that news of the research was published, the Washington Post carried out a similar experiment with unfortunate results.
The paper asked people to compare images of the National Mall on Jan 20th, 2009 and Jan 20th, 2017 — inauguration day. They were asked, simply, to choose which image displayed more people, and those with a political slant toward the current administration chose the clearly less populous picture. So, while scientists are still trying to make surveys and voting patterns better, they’re still going to have to contend with people being people.
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The last time we reported on Canadian quantum computing company D-Wave, it’d extended a contract for its 500-qubit D-Wave Two machine. Now, the firm has announced a major step forward: commercial availability of the D-Wave 2000Q, which it says has 2,000 qubits and costs a whopping $15 million. More than that, D-Wave has its first customer lined up for the pricey machine. "Cutting-edge cyber security firm" Temporal Defense Systems. There, the computer will be used for chipping away at problems that are for more complex than previously thought solvable.
"Using benchmark problems that are both challenging and relevant to real-world applications, the D-Wave 2000Q system outperformed highly specialized algorithms run on state-of-the-art classical servers by factors of 1,000 to 10,000 times," the press release says. Said benchmarks even included machine learning applications — which could prove to be the most consumer-facing application for the machines. A group of scientists is also looking at the machine for solving how planetary rovers can manage time and schedules autonomously.
As Nature notes, however, these systems work great with problems designed to run on them. Anything not tailored to the systems’ strengths can be another matter entirely. "So although scientists now agree that D-Wave devices do use quantum phenomena in their calculations," the journal writes, "some doubt that they can ever be used to solve real-world problems exponentially faster than classical computers — however many qubits are clubbed together, and whatever their configuration."
D-Wave isn’t stopping with the D-2000Q, of course, with SVP of Systems Jeremy Hilton saying that the next machine would once again follow the path of doubling performance and making easier-to-use and more efficient software.
Via: ExtremeTech
Source: D-Wave
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Amazon has been working for a while now to build out its shipping and distribution network. Now the online retailer has started coordinating its own shipments from Chinese merchants to its warehouses in the US via ocean freighters. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company doesn’t own any ships, but it’s working as a freight forwarder and logistics provider. These are the companies that reserve space on freighters and handle trucking shipments from port to a warehouse. WSJ says that Amazon has coordinated shipment of 150 containers from China since October.
News of Amazon’s intent to get into shipping freight across the ocean first broke last year when the company gained approval from the Federal Maritime Commission to act as a Ocean Transportation Intermediary. During the 2015 holiday season, the retailer bought extra trailers to beef up its shipping capacity at the busiest time of the year. Earlier in 2015, Amazon began leasing planes for the so-called Prime Air that gave it more control over shipping logistics here in the US.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
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Apple published its first paper on AI last month and now the company is set to join five others in a newly-formed research group. The Partnership on AI announced today that Apple would become its sixth founding member, adding to a lineup that already touts Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM and Microsoft. The group was first formed last September as a means of supporting research, establishing ethical guidelines and promoting both transparency and privacy when it comes to AI studies.
In today’s announcement, the Partnership on AI explained that Apple has already been working with the group before it was made official last fall, but now the company is a full member alongside those other tech titans. Part of today’s news was also that the group selected its board of trustees that will oversee the initiative. In addition to each member company having a seat on the board, the Partnership on AI also included six independent members from other artificial intelligence organizations, universities and the ACLU. The board is scheduled to meet for the first in early February and we expect to bear more details shortly after.
Apple pledged to share some of its AI work in early December before publishing the aforementioned paper a few days later. The typically secretive company showed signs of opening up in the name of improving research efforts around machine learning. That was the latest in a string of recent AI-related moves for Apple as it acquired Seattle-based machine-learning company Turi back in August. In October, it hired Carnegie Mellon computer science professor Russ Salakhutdinov to lead its artificial intelligence research.
Via: Bloomberg
Source: Partnership on AI
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