Lifeboat Foundation

Summary: The ability to train large scale CNNs directly on your cell phone without sending the data round trip to the cloud is the key to next gen AI applications like real time computer vision and safe self-driving cars. Problem is our current GPU AI chips won’t get us there. But neuromorphic chips look like they will.

Huawei officially launched yesterday the Ascend 910, the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) processor, and an all-scenario AI computing framework called MindSpore.

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“We have been making steady progress since we announced our AI strategy in October last year,” said Eric Xu, Huawei’s Rotating Chairman. “Everything is moving forward according to plan, from R&D to product launch. We promised a full-stack, all-scenario AI portfolio. And today we delivered, with the release of Ascend 910 and MindSpore. This also marks a new stage in Huawei’s AI strategy.”

Physicists have found “electron pairing,” a hallmark feature of superconductivity, at temperatures and energies well above the critical threshold where superconductivity happens.

Rice University’s Doug Natelson, co-corresponding author of a paper about the work in this week’s Nature, said the discovery of Cooper pairs of electrons “a bit above the critical temperature won’t be ‘crazy surprising’ to some people. The thing that’s more weird is that it looks like there are two different energy scales. There’s a higher energy scale where the pairs form, and there’s a lower energy scale where they all decide to join hands and act collectively and coherently, the behavior that actually brings about superconductivity.”

Continue reading “‘Electron pairing’ found well above superconductor’s critical temperature” »

Several companies, like SignAll and Kintrans, have created hand-tracking software that tries, with little success so far, to allow the millions of people that use sign language and an app to easily communicate with anyone.

Now, a new hand-tracking algorithm from Google’s AI labs might be a big step in making this ambitious software everything it originally promised.

RELATED: THIS SMARTPHONE APP CAN SAVE YOUR LIFE WITH JUST 3 WORDS

Excess heat given off by smartphones, laptops and other electronic devices can be annoying, but beyond that it contributes to malfunctions and, in extreme cases, can even cause lithium batteries to explode.

To guard against such ills, engineers often insert glass, plastic or even layers of air as insulation to prevent heat-generating components like microprocessors from causing damage or discomforting users.

Now, Stanford researchers have shown that a few layers of atomically thin materials, stacked like sheets of paper atop hot spots, can provide the same insulation as a sheet of glass 100 times thicker. In the near term, thinner heat shields will enable engineers to make electronic devices even more compact than those we have today, said Eric Pop, professor of electrical engineering and senior author of a paper published Aug. 16 in Science Advances.

Butter-fingered klutz? This virtually indestructible phone is for you.

MIT created this self-assembling chair and cell phone.

This hack lets you play floppy disk games on your smartphone.

The data economy has too often betrayed its customers, whether it’s Facebook sharing data you didn’t even realize it had, or invisible trackers that follow you around the web without your knowledge. But a new app launching in the iOS App Store today wants to help you take back some control—without making your life harder.