In a cable car high above Japan, the country’s distinctive architecture unfurls beneath me. I see clay kawara tiles covering rooftops, shimmering as the cable car gently swings. Suddenly everything stops, then goes dim. YouTube is buffering. The implications are real. By making its entire video library workable with Cardboard,
Invite 60 gifted high-schoolers to a week-long supercomputing camp. Train them on how to accelerate applications using GPUs. Organize them into small groups, each with their own stack of Jetson TK1 devkits, and set them loose. What do you get? Packs of teens developing a social networking service to communicate with
An artificial intelligence is incapable of original thought — at least for now. What it can do, however, is collate information in new ways, resulting in a creation that seems original. This is how Scheherazade, an artificial intelligence developed by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, works. Named after
M2M technology is changing what’s possible with farming, so much so that people have coined the Internet of Food to capture all advances in technology under one banner. Farms are starting to connect their crops and livestock to networks using M2M technology. In Napa Valley, wine makers are using sensors powered
VR has made big strides over the past several years. But the basic principle remains the same as when Sir Charles Wheatsone invented the first stereoscopic headset in 1838. Sir Charles put two images of the same scene — drawn from slightly offset angles — inside a box attached to
On April 19, 1965, Electronics magazine published an article that would change the world. It was authored by Fairchild Semiconductor’s R&D director, who made the observation that transistors—the fundamental building blocks of the semiconductor—would decrease in cost and increase in performance at an exponential rate. The article predicted the personal
Punch Buggy. Slug Bug. The names differ, but we’ve all played this game. See a Volkswagen Beetle, punch your sibling. Deep learning works the same way. Just with more math—and fewer bruises. Deep learning refers to algorithms—step-by-step data-crunching recipes—for teaching machines to understand “unstructured data.” That’s another way of saying
Breakfast cereal. Baby shampoo. Cough syrup. Dishwasher detergent. This grocery list is also a list of products that can make you sick. Very sick, in fact, if they aren’t thoroughly tested before hitting supermarket shelves. Some contain a variety of chemical compounds people are exposed to every day, which could
Saipan is a U.S. territory in the Northern Mariana Islands with 40,000 residents and —until recently—a challenging water situation. The island was losing 70% of its potable water due to leaky pipes and theft. Drought and poor quality added to the problem, raising costs past what many people could afford.
