At least three smart June Ovens have turned on in the middle of the night and heated up to 400 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. The ovens’ owners aren’t sure why this happened, and June tells The Verge that user error is at fault. The company is planning an update that’ll hopefully remedy the situation and prevent it from happening again, but that change isn’t coming until next month.
One owner’s oven turned on around 2:30AM and broiled at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for hours while he slept, and he only noticed when he woke up four hours later. Nest cam footage captured the exact moment it turned on: the oven illuminates his dark, empty kitchen in a truly Black Mirror-like recording. This owner says his wife baked a pie around 11:30PM the night of the preheating incident, but she turned the oven off once she took the pie out.
The June Oven debuted in 2015 as a $1,495 countertop oven that uses a camera and computer vision to identify food that’s been placed inside.
Community science groups have an inclusive, open-door ethos that makes them a natural place to learn informally about scientific careers. Members explore, create, and problem-solve as they work together on do-it-yourself projects in conservation, synthetic biology, and more. If you join a community science lab, don’t expect a straightforward path to a job. But do expect to meet potential mentors and advisors, make local connections, and gain skills to support your professional development.
Deep learning has emerged as the most important computational workload of our generation. Tasks that historically were the sole domain of humans are now routinely performed by computers at human or superhuman levels.
Deep learning is also profoundly computationally intensive. A recent report by OpenAI showed that, between 2012 and 2018, the compute used to train the largest models increased by 300,000X. In other words, AI computing is growing 25,000X faster than Moore’s law at its peak.
To meet the growing computational requirements of AI, Cerebras has designed and manufactured the largest chip ever built. The Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine (WSE) is 46,225 millimeters square, contains more than 1.2 trillion transistors, and is entirely optimized for deep learning workloads.
This year, Foursquare’s revenue will surpass $100 million, a critical mile marker for any company on its way to a public offering. In fact its story of success is a perfect tech-industry parable: A charming, rickety, vintage-2000s social app that’s survived the last decade by evolving into a powerhouse enterprise data-extraction business. In 2014, Foursquare made a decision to shift its attention from its consumer apps to a growing business-to-business operation; five years later, 99 percent of Foursquare’s business comes from its software and data products. Its clients include Uber, Twitter, Apple, Snapchat, and Microsoft. The company is still shining brightly, not because location-based social networks or New York’s start-up scene have finally reached escape velocity, but because Foursquare had something that other start-ups didn’t: location technology rivaled by only Google and Facebook.
When it comes to gender, science suffers from what has been called a “leaky pipeline.” In some fields, like biology, women make up the majority of the individuals entering graduate school in the field. But at each successive career stage—post-doctoral fellowships, junior faculty, tenured faculty—the percentage of women drops. The situation is even worse in fields where women are in the minority at the graduate level.
It’s difficult to figure out why so many women drop out of the career pipeline. Progressing through a research career is a struggle for everyone, and it can be tough to suss out subtle sources of bias that can make it harder for women to push through. It’s possible to do statistical analyses of outcomes—say, how many women received a particular type of grant—but then it becomes hard to determine whether they were all equally qualified. It’s possible to set up artificial test situations that are better controlled, but people’s behavior changes when they know they’re being tested.
That is precisely the message that’s driven home by a new paper that looks at gender bias in the awarding of research positions in France.
Google and the University of Chicago Medical Center have filed motions to dismiss a class action lawsuit that alleges patients’ electronic health records were not properly de-identified by the hospital before they were shared with Google to support the company’s predictive medical data analytics technology development efforts.
The hospital and Google argue that they used a secure process in compliance with HIPAA and that the plaintiff has shown no evidence of harm caused by the data sharing.
Joanne Pransky, associate editor for Industrial Robot Journal, recently spoke with Matric about the goals of socially assistive robots, the issues around consumer robots like Jibo and Kuri, and why we might need more imperfect robots.
Thousands of years before humans began burning fossil fuels, they had indelibly altered the natural world through foraging, herding animals, and farming, according to a new study by an international consortium of archaeologists.
The study, published Aug. 30 in the journal Science, synthesizes data from 255 archaeologists to provide the first global survey of the Earth’s transformation through human land use over the past 10,000 years. The findings challenge the commonly held view that large-scale, human-caused environmental change is a relatively recent phenomenon. It also shows how the overall impact of human behavior has been growing exponentially since the end of the last Ice Age.
“The industrial revolution and large-scale agriculture often spring to mind when people think about human impact on the environment, but these findings show that humans have been transforming the landscape going back at least 10,000 years,” said Yale anthropologist Jessica Thompson, a co-author of the study. “The line that separates the ‘pristine’ natural world from one transformed by people is blurrier and goes further back in time than what is commonly believed.”
Microsoft Corp. today announced IoT Signals, a new research report designed to provide a global overview of the IoT landscape. Microsoft surveyed over 3,000 IoT decision-makers in enterprise organizations in order to give the industry a holistic, market-level view of the IoT ecosystem, including adoption rates, related technology trends, challenges, and benefits of IoT. The report indicates that IoT adoption is growing rapidly, and respondents believe 30% of their company’s revenue two years from now will be due to IoT. Yet, the industry faces a significant IoT skills gap, as well as complexity and security challenges that may compromise business benefits to IoT if not addressed.
“IoT is transforming businesses in every industry and is powering breakthrough innovations,” said Sam George, head of Azure IoT. “Our research shows that unlocking IoT’s full potential requires the industry to address key challenges like the skills shortage, security concerns and solution complexity. Microsoft is leading the way on simplifying and securing IoT so that every business on the planet can benefit.”
Survey finds many organizations are still approaching data modernization as a tactical project rather than as a strategic initiative.
A report published this week by Deloitte suggests that while there are a lot of data modernization efforts underway most of those efforts are occurring on an ad hoc basis rather than as part of a strategic initiative.
San Jose, CA September 11, starting at 11:45 a.m. “If you’d like to connect with fellow attendees and hear ideas for supporting diversity in the tech community, join us for a networking luncheon on Wednesday. This event is open to attendees with a Platinum, Gold, Silver, or Bronze pass, and there’s no need to RSVP!”
Edinburgh, Scotland October 15-17. “The FORCE2019 program includes a wide range of talks covering the future of research communication and e-Scholarship, with over fifty sessions and tracks on infrastructure for scholarly communication, promoting open research, developing new skills, and trail-blazing new initiatives.” [$$$]
Instead of covering most of what I saw, I’m going to only pick some highlights here. If you want to see a more complete picture, James Scott-Brown has put together a page of links to papers available outside the Eurographics Digital Library.
The SAGE Ocean Speaker Series moves to Washington DC. At our first event Jon Schwabish guides us through some insights on animation in data visualization. [video, 24:49]