Xiaomi’s expansion into Europe continues at speed after the Chinese smartphone maker announced plans to open its first retail store in London. The company is best known for developing quality Android phones at affordable prices and already it has launched devices in Spain, Italy and France. Now, that foray has touched the UK where Xiaomi […]
Category: Technology
Walmart is building an AI lab inside one of its store
Walmart has just announced its plans to launch what it’s calling an Intelligent Retail Lab inside one of its stores in Levittown, New York. The idea is to test both associate and customer experiences. For example, Walmart wants to use artificial intelligence to better identify when items are running low on stock so that it […]
Shadow VR is the latest rival to the Oculus Quest
While we’re all anticipating the launch of the Oculus Quest standalone VR headset in spring 2019, HTC’s been busy pushing its very own Vive Focus into more markets — including the US and Europe as of today — while letting developers toy with its 6DoF controller add-on. Luckily for HTC, it’s not alone in this […]
LHC Is Hinting at a Tantalising New Particle. We May Even Need New Physics to Explain It
There was a huge amount of excitement when the Higgs boson was first spotted back in 2012 – a discovery that bagged the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2013. The particle completed the so-called standard model, our current best theory of understanding nature at the level of particles. Now scientists at the Large Hadron Collider […]
Physicists report electron is round—what does that mean?
Last week, or maybe the week before (the days fly by so fast), reporters were all agape with surprise that the electron was round. Very round. I put it on my list of things to write about, took a deep breath, and dived back into the painful process of grading. Grades are now done, and […]
Facebook starts shipping Portal, clarifies privacy/ad policy
Planning to get in early on the Portal phenomenon? Facebook announced today that it’s starting to ship the video chat device. The company’s first true piece of devoted hardware comes in two configurations: the Echo Show-like Portal and the larger Portal+ . Which run $199 and $349, respectively. There’s also a two-fer $298 bundle on […]
Team breaks world record for fast, accurate AI training
Researchers at Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) have partnered with a team from Tencent Machine Learning to create a new technique for training artificial intelligence (AI) machines faster than ever before while maintaining accuracy. During the experiment, the team trained two popular deep neural networks called AlexNet and ResNet-50 in just four minutes and 6.6 […]
Russia reports computer bug on International Space Station
Russia’s space agency says that one of the International Space Station’s computers has malfunctioned, but the glitch doesn’t pose any risks to the crew. Roscosmos said Tuesday that one of three computers in the station’s Russian module has failed. It said Russian flight controllers plan to reboot it Thursday. The agency emphasized that the computer […]
China Just Revealed a Model of Earth’s First New Modular Space Station in Over 20 Years
The first components of the International Space Station (ISS) launched into space more than 20 years ago, and it’s been continuously occupied for 18. Right now, it’s the only operational space station in orbit – but that’s about to change. China just unveiled a life-size replica of the core module of the country’s new space […]
Microsoft is ramping out its rollout of its Kaizala group-communications app
Microsoft’s “Kaizala” app — which began as a Microsoft Garage incubation project — started out as a productivity tool specifically for the Indian market. Since then, Microsoft has started broadening its distribution and is making the “Pro” version of the app part of the Office 365 commercial plans worldwide for no additional fee. Kaizala is […]
As enterprise computing prepares for a multicloud world, cloud-native startups like Heptio will be attractive targets
“Cloud native” has always had the ring of yet another enterprise computing buzzword, one designed to sound impressive to people with money and a casual grasp of the massive shift brought on by cloud computing. But the surge in interest around multicloud computing has proven that startups born on the cloud really do have a […]
Watch an AI Modeled After a Worm’s Brain Park a Tiny Car Like a Pro
The humble nematode, also known as C. elegans, is the only organism on Earth to have its entire nervous system and brain mapped out like a wiring schematic. We understand this little worm so well, in fact, that scientists are now trying to digitize its peabrain for use in machine learning experiments—in other words, creating […]