China Life and Baidu (China Search engine company) will set up a US$1 billion investment fund in Artificial Intelligence and Fintech. China Life on Thursday said it had teamed up with internet search company Baidu to form a 7 billion yuan (US $ 1 billion) private equity fund. China Life will invest 5.6 billion yuan …
Peter Thiel is backing the offshore testing of an experimental herpes vaccine. Thiel invested $7 million in the ongoing vaccine research, according to the U.S. company behind it. Southern Illinois University also trumpeted the research and the study’s lead researcher, even though he did not rely on traditional U.S. safety oversight in the first trial, …
Intel today introduced its new Movidius™ Myriad™ X vision processing unit (VPU), advancing Intel’s end-to-end portfolio of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to deliver more autonomous capabilities across a wide range of product categories including drones, robotics, smart cameras and virtual reality. Myriad X is world’s first system-on-chip (SOC) shipping with a dedicated Neural Compute Engine …
Researchers led by Yuan Yang, assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Columbia Engineering, along with colleagues at the Department of Chemistry at Columbia University, and Stanford University have developed a new, scalable, and low-cost “dip and dry” method for fabricating a highly efficient selective solar absorber (SSA) that can harness and convert sunlight …
An Arxiv paper, presents the first, 15-PetaFLOP Deep Learning system for solving scientific pattern classification problems on contemporary HPC architectures. Intel researchers and parters developed supervised convolutional architectures for discriminating signals in high-energy physics data as well as semi-supervised architectures for localizing and classifying extreme weather in climate data. Our Intelcaffe based implementation obtains ∼2TFLOP/s …
Researchers have created a thin film material that allows them to control the size and density of magnetic skyrmions. This is progress towards a skyrmion-based memory device. The potential memory that is smaller by an order of magnitude and uses less power. The next hurdles the researchers must clear is fabricating devices while ensuring consistency …
DigitalGlobe will launch the WorldView Legion constellation of satellites from 2020 to 2021. called Scout—can snap a photo of a high-demand spot (say the Port of Shanghai) 40 times a day. Scott declined to specify how many satellites count as legion, but they will be 30-centimeter- and 50-centimeter-class, meaning they could resolve a laptop or …
The World Bank defines the global middle class within a large income range anywhere between $11 and $110 a day. Homi Kharas, an expert on the global middle class at the Brookings Institute, estimated in a recent study that 3.2 billion people, or 42 percent of the total world population, are now in the global …
The Guardian UK describes how a 16 year old began working at a brothel two years ago to pay for food. She earns 400,000 bolivares a month, around four times the minimum wage, but at a time of hyperinflation that is now worth about $30, barely enough to feed herself, her mother and a new …
Mercedes Benz has new home battery modules. The Mercedes Benz battery modules start with a capacity of 2.5 kWh and up to eight battery modules can be combined for a total energy storage capacity of 20 kWh. Including a required power inverter and installation, the total price for the Mercedes-Benz home battery will range from …
Stanford Linear Accelerator Lab (SLAC) scientists were able to observe “diamond rain” for the first time as it formed in high-pressure conditions. Extremely high pressure squeezes hydrogen and carbon found in the interior of these planets to form solid diamonds that sink slowly down further into the interior. The glittering precipitation has long been hypothesized …