Google has detailed its TPU—and the tremendous savings that came with it. The post Building an AI Chip Saved Google From Building a Dozen New Data Centers appeared first on WIRED.
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Google has detailed its TPU—and the tremendous savings that came with it. The post Building an AI Chip Saved Google From Building a Dozen New Data Centers appeared first on WIRED.
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Nearly one billion Hindus worship the Yamuna River as a goddess. They consider it nearly as sacred as the mighty Ganges, and yet it is dying. The stretch that meanders through New Delhi teems with filth and toxins, and its surface bubbles with thick, white foam. “Visually, it’s beautiful, but when you get close to it, it’s just that horrible smell,†says Zacharie Rabehi. “It smells like shit. Toxic shit, chemical sewage—a bit of sulfur, a bit of human excrement.â€
The French photographer never gave the pollution choking New Dehli much thought until last fall, when the smog got so bad the government declared a state of emergency and #MyRightToBreathe trended on Twitter. He spent November biking along the Mahatma Gandhi Road along the Yamuna River, stopping whenever something caught his eye.
It rarely took long. Vast stretches of the Yamuna, which originates high in the Himalayas and flows 855 miles to the Ganges River, are all but dead. Foam covers large swaths of the water, passersby cover their mouths and noses against the stench, yet the river holds a vital place in religious ceremonies. Rabehi saw people bathing near the cremation center Nigambodh Ghat, where mourners scatter their loved ones. “It’s to clean their soul, not their skin,†he says.
The ethereal images in his series Toxic City also document the smog and trash choking the nation’s capital. He found couples snapping “smog selfies†at the airport, and sneaked into the 70-acre Ghazipur landfill aboard a trash truck that trundled up a 100-foot mountain of refuse. But the most striking images are on the Yamuna, a dying river that may have just been granted a reprieve. Last month, the High Court in Uttarakhand granted the Yamuna and Ganges rivers the same status as living humans, which means that harming or polluting the waterways is no different than harming a person.
Rabehi captures this harsh reality with an almost delicate air. In one image, a couple stands on a foamy shoreline praying to a goddess that, as Rabehi says, “is choking to death.†The court’s declaration may not be enough to save her, but it marks a start.
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Hidden inside a busy industrial building in Somerville, Massachusetts, a robot arm spends its day picking up seemingly random objects—bottles of shampoo, onions, cans of shaving foam—from a conveyor belt that goes in a circle about 10 meters in diameter.
The odd-looking setup is a test bed for a system that could take on many of the mundane picking tasks currently done by hand in warehouses and fulfillment centers. And it shows how advances in robotic hardware, computer vision, and teleoperation, along with the ability for machines to learn collaboratively via the cloud, may transform warehouse fulfillment in coming years.
The new robotic picking platform, which uses a combination of a hybrid gripper and machine learning, and which was developed by a startup called RightHand Robotics, can handle a wide variety of objects faster and more reliably than existing systems.
The company launched its platform, called RightPick, at a supply chain industry event earlier this month. It is targeting fulfillment for the pharmaceutical, electronics, grocery, and apparel industries.
When I visited RightHand Robotics early this year, the company’s cofounders, Yaro Tenzer and Leif Jentorf, showed me several prototypes they had developed. Besides the conveyor-belt scenario, these included a setup designed to match that of a company that sends packages of cosmetics tailored to individual customers. The company’s system could pick a customer’s items from several bins attached to a circular carousel. They also showed me a system learning to grasp a particular object by trying, over and over again, to move items piled up in one bin to another bin.
Picking different types of objects piled into a bin may sound simple, but it remains a huge challenge for robots, especially if the objects are unfamiliar. Humans are able to guess how an occluded object looks and feels, and we apply years of grasping experience to the task. Fulfillment centers typically handle a range of products, making them difficult to automate. Amazon, for example, has only been able to automate parts of its centers so far.
RightHand’s system grabs objects using a compliant fingered hand with a suction cup at its center. A camera is embedded in the hand to help figure out which appendage to use and how to grasp the item. The company employs machine learning to refine its control algorithm over time, and the tricks learned by one robot are fed back to a cloud server so that they can be shared with others. It is also possible for RightHand’s engineers to log into a system remotely to solve problems, or to help a company train the robot to pick a new object.
It is difficult to gauge the reliability and speed of such a system, or to tell how it might deal with any number of awkward new objects, but it appeared capable of picking up common objects you might find in a grocery store about as fast as a person could.
Ken Goldberg, a professor at UC Berkeley and an expert on robot vision, manipulation, and learning, says it remains very difficult for robots to rummage for items in a cluttered bin. He says he is impressed by the hybrid gripper and adds that applying machine learning via the cloud, so that every robot deployed by the company gets smarter over time, makes a lot of sense. “This is a clever mechanism,†Goldberg says. “These guys are smart.â€
At the start of this month, RightHand received $8 million in Series A funding. The company’s early investors include Playground Global. This Palo Alto incubator and venture fund was created by Andy Rubin, who led the creation of Google’s Android smartphone operating system and who later managed the company’s foray into robotics with the acquisition of a number of startups working on various robot technologies.Â
Tenzer and Jentorf both studied in Harvard’s Biorobotics Lab, and early company employees come from robotics labs at Yale and MIT.
Over the past year or so, the company has been working with a number of large logistics companies and retailers to prove the reliability of its system. “When we saw the tech and the progress they’ve made on the business side, we got really excited,†says Mark Valdez, a partner at Playground Global. “There’s an opportunity to build a virtuous cycle and a network effect for some of these software-defined hardware products.â€
Besides Amazon, many other companies are trying to develop robots capable of grasping a range of objects from a disordered pile. “This is a major frontier for robotics right now,†says Goldberg of UC Berkeley.
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In the land of no wings, the KFC bucket is king. That’s the theory YouTube supergeek Peter Sripol set out to prove recently by building an RC plane with nothing but greasy KFC buckets for wings. And guess what: it worked.
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It’s been almost a year since the UK’s Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) opened sign-ups for a driverless pod trial in Greenwich. The original plan was to start before Christmas, but given today’s date that obviously didn’t happen. Still, better late than never, eh? Over the next three weeks, roughly 100 people will clamber aboard "Harry," a self-driving shuttle named after clockmaker John Harrison. It will take them around a two-mile course in London’s North Greenwich, near The O2, to demonstrate how the technology could be used for "last mile" trips in urban areas.
The shuttle is a repurposed Ultra Pod, which is already in operation at London’s Heathrow Airport. With a maximum speed of 10MPH (16KPH), it’s not the fastest electric vehicle — you could beat it on a Boosted Board — however it’s hoped the leisurely pace will reassure pedestrians and minimise dangerous incidents. Each pod carries up to four people, including a safety operator who can pepper the breaks in an emergency. It’s able to ‘see’ it’s surroundings using a mixture of cameras and lasers, and use that information to track obstacles and create a collision-free route. Notably, it doesn’t need to rely on GPS for any of these calculations.
The purpose of the trials is to see how the public reacts to self-driving vehicles, and to examine how the technology can best be applied in built-up areas. Each trip will give the research team a wealth of valuable information — four terabytes of data every eight hours, to be precise. It’ll be supplemented with passenger interviews, taken before and after each trip, and written feedback that anyone can submit online through an interactive map. "It is critical that the public is fully involved as these technologies become a reality," Professor Nick Reed, academy director at TRL said.
The "GATEway Project" at Greenwich is one of many research initiatives being funded by the UK government. We’ve already seen the "Lutz Pathfinder" pod, which is being tested in Milton Keynes, and a modified Land Rover that’s serving as a research testbed in Bristol. Plans are also underway for a 41-mile "connected corridor," which will be used to test LTE, local WiFi hotspots and other forms of connectivity in self-driving vehicles. In the private sector, Nissan is testing its electric Leaf cars in the capital, and Roborace is developing a driverless motorsport. It’s an impressive hub of activity, even without Google and Uber’s involvement.
Via: BBC
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So, what does four cameras do for a smartphone. Well for starters, the rear-facing cameras both have 13-megapixel sensors. One is for color while the other is monochromatic. One front-facing camera is eight megapixels, and the second is five megapixels.
The phone runs on Android Marshmallow and has a 5.5-inch 1080p display. There is a Helio X20 processor that powers this 4-camera selfie machine.
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Alcatel |
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Design Support 152.6×75.4×8.7mm Weight: 155g Colours available: Titanium Grey Side keys: Volume +/-, Power Back key: fingerprint scanner 152.6×75.4×8.7mm Weight: 155g  Colours available: Titanium Grey Side keys: Volume +/-, Power Back key: fingerprint scanner  |
Features Android M MTK Helio X20 MT6797 Deca-core processor 2x Cortex-A72 @2.3Ghz 4x Cortex-A53 @1.9Ghz 4x Cortex-A53 @1.4Ghz Fingerprint sensor, Accelerometer (G sensor), Proximity Sensor, Light Sensor, E-Compass, fingerprint sensor Gyro, Hall Switch, Handsfree, vibrator, flight mode, GPS & AGPS Â |
Battery 3100mAh (Typical), non-removable Talk time: 5.3hrs~20hrs(3G) Standby time: 415hrs~466hrs(4G Â |
Memory ROM: 32GB RAM: 3GB End user memory: 24GB MicroSD up to 128GB Â |
Connectivity GPRS/EDGE   850/900/1800/1900 UMTS/HSPA+/DC-HSDPA 850/900/1900/2100/34/39 LTE    FDD: B1/3/5/7/8/20 TDD: 38/39/40/41 Wi-Fi 802.11/b/g/n Wifi direct, Wifi display FM Radio Bluetooth 4.1 USB OTG Type-C GPSwith A-GPS/Glonass/Beidou Dual Nano SIM Dual Standby  |
Camera Dual rear cameras Dual 13MP Mono+RGB, Sony IMX258 1/3.06 sensor size 1.12μm pixel size F2.0(RGB)/F2.0(Mono) aperture size PDAF 0.15s focus speed 6P lens optics with sapphire crystal lens cover Dual color LED Video recording: 4Kx2K@30fps, 1080P@60fps  |
Display 5.5†FHD IPS 1920×1080 pixels Multi-touch display with IPS display Resolution at 401 PPI 160° Viewing Angle Full Lamination Dragontrail Glass Fingerprint-resistant Oleophobic coating  |
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“I f***ing cannot play Halo 2 multiplayer. I cannot do it.” — Bungie Technical Lead Chris Butcher
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Fox News Channel is once more under siege, facing several concurrent scandals and legal challenges scattered across different courtrooms, and casting a pall over the network’s executive suites.
Fresh and harsh scrutiny cast on star host Bill O’Reilly over allegations that he sexually harassed multiple women has given major corporations pause about associating themselves with the top-rated figure in cable news.
In just the past 48 hours, at least 20 advertisers, including prominent automobile manufacturers, announced they would cancel upcoming ads on his prime-time program or avoid placing future commercials there.
The ouster of chairman Roger Ailes last summer during a sexual harassment scandal was supposed to calm the waters. Yet two new lawsuits involving unrelated charges of sexual and racial discrimination raise serious questions about the decisions of Fox News Co-president Bill Shine and general counsel Dianne Brandi, among other executives.
Each was a long-time Ailes lieutenant. Each survived his forced departure.
Together, they’ve kept O’Reilly front and center on the network, despite all the payments that O’Reilly, Fox and parent company 21st Century Fox have made over the past dozen years to quell such accusations.
A history of payouts and settlements
The two executives helped to arrange payments made to privately settle past sexual harassment complaints against Roger Ailes. One former Fox News booker was paid $3 million back in 2011, five years before Gretchen Carlson’s lawsuit against him exploded publicly.
Some of those past payments by Fox News to women are being investigated by federal prosecutors to see if they were structured to avoid disclosing them to investors in 21st Century Fox, as first disclosed by a lawyer to suspended Fox News host Andrea Tantaros, who is currently suing Ailes and the network.
Brandi, the network’s top lawyer, also stands accused of doing nothing after being informed in the fall of 2014 that Judith Slater, then the company’s comptroller, had created a racist work environment in a lawsuit filed by three African-American employees of Fox News.
Fox News, O’Reilly and 21st Century Fox together have paid roughly $13 million to women accusing him of sexual harassment, according to The New York Times. (The lion’s share went to a former Fox News producer who captured his advances on tape more than a decade ago.)
A senior official at 21st Century Fox tells NPR it has spoken to O’Reilly and that the host has given assurances he believes in the company’s commitment to offer a welcoming workplace for all staffers. Corporate executives did not respond to several requests for comment about the status of Shine and Brandi.
Through his lawyer, Susan Estrich, Ailes denies all the allegations made against him, including the newest, this week, by paid Fox News contributor Julie Roginsky. Ailes blames an orchestrated campaign against him.
O’Reilly says he’s victimized by people who target him because he’s successful and wealthy. He says he agreed to settlements to help his children avoid public scorn.
Fox News typically denigrates those who file suit or criticize its stars and executives, but it is currently uncharacteristically subdued, in keeping with a promise made last summer that the culture of the network would change.
Roginsky’s lawsuit against Ailes argues that promise from the Murdoch family, which controls the company, has rung hollow.
In her sexual harassment lawsuit, Roginsky alleges that Shine and Brandi retaliated against her for failing to come to Ailes’ defense and for raising her complaints about Ailes’ conduct internally.
Fox News did fire Slater, the comptroller at the heart of the racial discrimination lawsuit, but as the lawyers for the plaintiffs note, only in late March, several days before the suit was filed.
Fox News and Brandi have not responded to the specific question of whether she was told of Slater’s behavior, in 2014 and 2015, and refused to take action, as alleged in the lawsuit by Monica Douglas, the head of credit and collection in Fox News’ accounting department, and one of the plaintiffs in the new racial bias suit.
Shine and Brandi’s decisions have been challenged previously.
Their continued presence raises the more fundamental question of the judgment of Rupert Murdoch, the family patriarch, who stepped in to oversee Fox News after Ailes was hustled out.
O’Reilly’s continued presence has undercut the Murdochs’ contention of a shift in culture, according to several women who work at the network who spoke to NPR on condition of anonymity.
An audition is followed by an awkward dinner
Not everyone who has made allegations against O’Reilly or Ailes received or even sought money. Wendy Walsh, a California-based psychologist and former television news reporter and anchor, auditioned on the air for a paid slot with a recurring role — “a very big opportunity,” in her words.
Walsh told NPR that just three weeks in, she received a call from an O’Reilly producer saying he wanted to arrange a dinner during an upcoming trip in Los Angeles. Shortly after the outset of the meal at the restaurant Wolfgang Puck at Hotel Bel-Air, O’Reilly promised Walsh the job, she says.
After a cordial dinner, O’Reilly said, “Let’s get out of here,” and according to Walsh’s account to NPR, “a kind of awkward thing happened”: he headed past the hostess stand to the right, toward the elevators to his hotel room. Walsh says she headed left, toward the bar. (A woman answering the phone at Wolfgang Puck at Hotel Bel-Air confirmed the layout.)
Walsh says she declined O’Reilly’s entreaties to come up to his room — and that he turned nasty at the bar, telling her there would be no job. “It was a sad cocktail party story that women tell each other and shrug our shoulders and go, ‘Ugh, another one,’ ” Walsh says. “I can’t believe this is still going on.”
O’Reilly has not directly responded to the substance of Walsh’s depiction of this episode but issued a more general statement saying no women had filed complaints through the network’s human resources department.
O’Reilly’s show is the network’s top revenue-generating program; and the network has proved highly lucrative for 21st Century Fox. But any financial hit from balky advertisers is likely to be limited as Fox News relies more on licensing fees from cable providers than from advertising spots. And most advertisers are placing their commercials on different Fox News programs, not withdrawing altogether.
One which is: SHRM, a leading trade group for the human resources industry.
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