Ford is investing $1 billion in a secretive artificial intelligence startup headed by former Google and Uber execs to advance its self-driving car efforts.
The startup, Argo AI, was founded by Bryan Salesky, the former director of hardware for Google’s self-driving-car efforts, and Peter Rander, Uber’s engineering lead at its autonomous cars center.
The $1 billion investment will be spread out over five years as Ford looks to commercialize its self-driving technology by 2021.
Google and Kaggle today announced a new machine learning challenge that asks developers to find the best way to automatically tag videos.
The challenge, which comes with a $30,000 prize for the first-place finisher (and $25,000, $20,000, $15,000 and $10,000 for the next four teams), asks developers to classify and tag videos from Google’s updated YouTube-8M V2 data set. This data set features a total of 7 million YouTube videos that add up to 450,000 hours of video. YouTube-8M already includes labels, too, and developers can use this as their training data. The challenge then is to tag 700,000 previously unseen videos.
Wide models are great for memorization, deep models are great for generalization — why not combine them to create even better models? In this talk, Heng-Tze Cheng explains Wide and Deep networks and gives examples of how they can be used.
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Black holes are among the most fascinating objects in the known Universe. But despite the fact that they’re suspected to lurk at the centre of most galaxies, the reality is that no one has ever been able to actually photograph one.
That’s because black holes, as their name implies, are very, very dark. They’re so massive that they irreversibly consume everything that crosses their event horizon, including light, making them impossible to photograph. But that could be about to change, when a new telescope network switches on in April this year.
Called the Event Horizon Telescope, the new device is made up of a network of radio receivers located across the planet, including at the South Pole, in the US, Chile, and the French alps.
The old joke in the US Natl. Labs is if you worked at ORNL, you glowed at night. Looks like DARPA has found a safer way to do it.
Timothy Blake, a postdoctoral fellow in the Waymouth lab, was hard at work on a fantastical interdisciplinary experiment. He and his fellow researchers were refining compounds that would carry instructions for assembling the protein that makes fireflies light up and deliver them into the cells of an anesthetized mouse. If their technique worked, the mouse would glow in the dark.
Not only did the mouse glow, but it also later woke up and ran around, completely unaware of the complex series of events that had just taken place within its body. Blake said it was the most exciting day of his life.
This success, the topic of a recent paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could mark a significant step forward for gene therapy. It’s hard enough getting these protein instructions, called messenger RNA (mRNA), physically into a cell. It’s another hurdle altogether for the cell to actually use them to make a protein. If the technique works in people, it could provide a new way of inserting therapeutic proteins into diseased cells.
More on the new bio-robots.
SCIENTISTS have created flesh-like mini-robots that can move when they detect light.
The fleet of walking “bio-bots” are powered using muscle cells and controlled using electrical and optical pulses.
The Sun reports the sinewy robots are less than half an inch long and are made from 3D-printed hydrogens and living cells.
