Day: July 1, 2017

Japan’s space agency JAXA has submitted an ambitious proposal to the country’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology: it wants to fly and put a man on the moon by 2030. The agency is either directly challenging China’s plans to do the same thing by 2036 or is planning to work with China to reach their identical goals at the same time. We offer the latter as a possibility, no matter how small, because a JAXA spokesperson told CNN that the plan is to be part of a multinational manned lunar probe. A Japan-only mission would be a bit too expensive for the agency.

That unnamed multinational mission would apparently start preparations by 2025 — take note that Japan doesn’t have a guaranteed seat yet, but it’s hoping to get one by contributing to the project. JAXA will reveal more details about its space exploration dreams at Japan’s International Space Exploration Forum in March 2018. We’re guessing it has other big missions on the docket, seeing as China and India are already making waves in what’s dubbed as the "Asian space race."

In addition to sending an astronaut to our planet’s natural satellite by 2036, China also intends to explore the dark side of the moon in 2018. India successfully tested its first reusable space shuttle in 2016 and set a record for launching 104 satellites aboard a single rocket earlier this year.

Source: CNN

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When you’re far from a cell tower and need to figure out if that bluebird is Sialia sialis or Sialia mexicana, no cloud server is going to help you. That’s why companies are squeezing AI onto portable devices, and Microsoft has just taken that to a new extreme by putting deep learning algorithms onto a Raspberry Pi. The goals is to get AI onto "dumb" devices like sprinklers, medical implants and soil sensors to make them more useful, even if there’s no supercomputer or internet connection in sight.

The idea came about from Microsoft Labs teams in Redmond and Bangalore, India. Ofer Dekel, who manages an AI optimization group at the Redmond Lab, was trying to figure out a way to stop squirrels from eating flower bulbs and seeds from his bird feeder. As one does, he trained a computer vision system to spot squirrels, and installed the code on a $35 Raspberry Pi 3. Now, it triggers the sprinkler system whenever the rodents pop up, chasing them away.

"Every hobbyist who owns a Raspberry Pi should be able to do that," Dekel said in Microsoft’s blog. "Today, very few of them can." The problems is that it’s too expensive and impractical to install high-powered chips or connected cloud-computing devices on things like squirrel sensors. However, it’s feasible to equip sensors and other devices with a $10 Raspberry Zero or the pepper-flake-sized Cortex M0 chip pictured above.

All the squirrel-spotting power you need (Matt Brian/AOL)

To make it work on systems that often have just a few kilobytes of RAM, the team compressed neural network parameters down to just a few bits instead of the usual 32. Another technique is "sparsification" of algorithms, a way of pruning them down to remove redundancies. By doing that, they were able to make an image detection system run about 20 times faster on a Raspberry Pi 3 without any loss of accuracy.

However, taking it to the next level won’t be quite as easy. "There is just no way to take a deep neural network, have it stay as accurate as it is today, and consume 10,000 times less resources. You can’t do it," said Dekel. For that, they’ll need to invent new types of AI tech tailored for low-powered devices, and that’s tricky, considering researchers still don’t know exactly how deep learning tools work.

Microsoft’s researchers are working on a few projects for folks with impairments, like a walking stick that can detect falls and issue a call for help, and "smart gloves" that can interpret sign language. To get some new ideas and help, they’ve made some of their early training tools and algorithms available to Raspberry Pi hobbyists and other researchers on Github. "Giving these powerful machine-learning tools to everyday people is the democratization of AI," says researcher Saleema Amershi.

Via: Mashable

Source: Microsoft

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In light of the recent WannaCry and "NotPetya" global ransomware attacks, India is looking to strike a deal with Microsoft that would reduce the cost of its Windows 10 operating system by more than 75 percent. The country’s cyber security coordinator, Gulshan Rai, told Reuters that the company has "in principle agreed."

Around 96 percent of the computers used in India run on Windows, but because of the costs of software upgrades, many users stick with older versions or use pirated software that doesn’t receive security patches. This opens the country up to widespread damage with ransomware like WannaCry that take advantage of security weaknesses in older and non-updated Windows systems.

Rai began pushing for the discount after the WannaCry attack in May. His team also worked with banks to make sure that ATMs running on Windows software were upgraded with Microsoft’s security patch. That along with concerted efforts to switch to newer Microsoft software reduced NotPetya’s impact in the country this week.

With 57 million computers in India, the country could save billions of dollars in costs if Microsoft agrees to the steep discount. But the deal could also open Microsoft up to similar requests from other countries.

Rai says they’re expecting details from Microsoft about the price cut in a couple of days.

Source: Reuters

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More than 15 years after a U.S. Predator drone launched its first Hellfire missile, the United States remains reluctant to sell armed drones to even its closest allies. That hesitation in selling armed drones has left the door open for countries such as Israel and China to dominate military drone sales across the world. Now the U.S. government runs the risk of losing influence in a world of drone proliferation unless it reconsiders its policy on sales of military drones, according to a new r

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