Lifeboat Foundation

It’s been a hot, hot year in the world of data, machine learning, and AI. Just when you thought it couldn’t grow any more explosively, the data/AI landscape just did: the rapid pace of company creation, exciting new product and project launches, a deluge of VC financings, unicorn creation, IPOs, etc.

It has also been a year of multiple threads and stories intertwining.

One story has been the maturation of the ecosystem, with market leaders reaching large scale and ramping up their ambitions for global market domination, in particular through increasingly broad product offerings. Some of those companies, such as Snowflake, have been thriving in public markets (see our MAD Public Company Index), and a number of others (Databricks, Dataiku, DataRobot, etc.) have raised very largely (or in the case of Databricks, gigantic) rounds at multi-billion valuations and are knocking on the IPO door (see our Emerging MAD company Index).

Arm is releasing new chip design offerings in the internet of things (IoT), virtual hardware, and 5G sectors.

Cambridge, United Kingdom-based Arm designs the architecture that other licensed chip makers use to build their chips. Arm likes to make it easier for those licensees to come up with their applications and create a foundation for an IoT economy.

So the company said its Arm Total Solutions for IoT now delivers a full-stack solution to significantly accelerate the development and return-on-investment for IoT chip products. And Arm Virtual Hardware removes the need to develop on physical silicon, enabling software and hardware co-design and accelerating product design by up to two years, the company claimed.

Multidisciplinary team of materials physicists and geophysicists combine theoretical predictions, simulations, and seismic tomography to find spin transition in the Earth’s mantle.

The interior of the Earth is a mystery, especially at greater depths (660 km). Researchers only have seismic tomographic images of this region and, to interpret them, they need to calculate seismic (acoustic) velocities in minerals at high pressures and temperatures. With those calculations, they can create 3D velocity maps and figure out the mineralogy and temperature of the observed regions. When a phase transition occurs in a mineral, such as a crystal structure change under pressure, scientists observe a velocity change, usually a sharp seismic velocity discontinuity.

In 2,003 scientists observed in a lab a novel type of phase change in minerals — a spin change in iron in ferropericlase, the second most abundant component of the Earth’s lower mantle. A spin change, or spin crossover, can happen in minerals like ferropericlase under an external stimulus, such as pressure or temperature. Over the next few years, experimental and theoretical groups confirmed this phase change in both ferropericlase and bridgmanite, the most abundant phase of the lower mantle. But no one was quite sure why or where this was happening.

China has unveiled the crew for its Shenzou 13 mission to the country’s brand new Tiangong space station, including the first female astronaut to venture to the outpost, the South China Morning Post reports.

Wang Yaping will spend six months on board the space station — the country’s longest crewed mission to date — alongside astronauts Zhai Zhigang and Ye Guangfu. She could also become the first female Chinese astronaut to complete a spacewalk.

“After eight years of relentless effort, I am going back to space again,” Wang told reporters on Thursday, as quoted by SCMP. “Students, let me know what you want to learn this time. I will prepare a great lecture for you in orbit.”

Duke professor becomes second recipient of AAAI Squirrel AI Award for pioneering socially responsible AI.

Whether preventing explosions on electrical grids, spotting patterns among past crimes, or optimizing resources in the care of critically ill patients, Duke University computer scientist Cynthia Rudin wants artificial intelligence (AI) to show its work. Especially when it’s making decisions that deeply affect people’s lives.

Continue reading “A ‘New Nobel’ — Computer Scientist Wins $1 Million Artificial Intelligence Prize” »

Asteroids seem to be a treasure trove for future space miners. 😃

Some are full of precious metals worth many trillions of dollars and with more copper, nickel and cobalt than the entirety of our metal reserves.

The two mineral deposits measure over a mile wide and could be targets for future space mining.

Continue reading “Rare asteroids near Earth may contain precious metals worth $11.65 trillion” »

Plus: The biggest Twitch hack, an iOS zero day, and more of the week’s top security news.

Nature waded through the literature on the coronavirus — and summarized key papers as they appeared.

The U.S. Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency (CISA) issues a warning about cyber threats targeting wastewater and water systems.