Toggle light / dark theme

Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.

Log in for authorized contributors

Ford just invested $1 billion in a secretive AI startup founded by former Google and Uber execs

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 teams up with Kaggle to host $100,000 video classification challenge

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.

kaggle

Wide & Deep Learning: Memorization + Generalization with TensorFlow (TensorFlow Dev Summit 2017)

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.

Check out our blog post, paper, YouTube video, TensorFlow tutorials: https://goo.gl/MwVlVa

Visit the TensorFlow website for all session recordings: https://goo.gl/bsYmza

Scientists Are About to Switch on a Telescope That Could Photograph a Black Hole’s Event Horizon

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.

/* */