Toyota joined the modern era when it started adding CarPlay to its vehicles early in 2018, but that hasn’t done you much good if you’re an Android user. You might get some relief soon, though. Bloomberg sources said that Toyota has agreed to put direct Android Auto support in its cars, with an announcement as […]
Category: Technology
Android at 10: Google’s mobile OS has come a long way
The mobile world is celebrating a momentous anniversary today: Android is ten years old. The T-Mobile G1 (and Android 1.0) made its debut on September 23rd, 2008, launching both a new operating system and a new era. It didn’t look like much in those early days, but it eventually became the dominant mobile platform and […]
Scientists Say They’ve Come Up With a Way to Test Once And For All Whether The Big Bang Actually Happened
According to the Big Bang cosmological model, our Universe began 13.8 billion years ago when all the matter and energy in the cosmos began expanding. This period of “cosmic inflation” is believed to be what accounts for the large-scale structure of the Universe and why space and the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) appear to be […]
AI learns to decipher images based on spoken words—almost like a toddler
Babies learn words by matching images to sounds. A mother says “dog” and points to a dog. She says “tree” and points to a tree. After repeating this process thousands of times, babies learn to recognize both common objects and the words associated with them. Researchers at MIT have developed software with the same ability […]
First detection of matter falling into a black hole at 30 percent of the speed of light
A UK team of astronomers report the first detection of matter falling into a black hole at 30 percent of the speed of light, located in the centre of the billion-light year distant galaxy PG211+143. The team, led by Professor Ken Pounds of the University of Leicester, used data from the European Space Agency’s X-ray […]
Machine Learning Confronts the Elephant in the Room
Score one for the human brain. In a new study, computer scientists found that artificial intelligence systems fail a vision test a child could accomplish with ease. “It’s a clever and important study that reminds us that ‘deep learning’ isn’t really that deep,” said Gary Marcus, a neuroscientist at New York University who was not […]
Hulu launches a new website specifically designed for watching shows on your computer
Hulu is rolling out an updated web interface today for its users that’s based on the updated UI it introduced last year for its live TV service subscribers. According to the company’s blog post announcing the new design, the interface has been built specifically for the “wide range of motion you have with your mouse […]
Dark matter vibes
A dark matter experiment scheduled to go online at the Canadian underground laboratory SNOLAB in the early 2020s will conduct one of the most sensitive searches ever for hypothetical particles known as weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. Scientists consider WIMPs strong dark matter candidates. But what if dark matter turns out to be something […]
Amazon launches Scout, a machine learning-powered visual shopping tool
Amazon is experimenting with a new tool called Scout designed to help shoppers better figure out what they want to buy in a more visual fashion, according to a report from CNBC, which first spotted Scout live on Amazon’s site. Using a combination of imagery, a thumbs up and down voting mechanism, and machine learning […]
IBM launches cloud tool to detect AI bias and explain automated decisions
IBM has launched a software service that scans AI systems as they work in order to detect bias and provide explanations for the automated decisions being made — a degree of transparency that may be necessary for compliance purposes not just a company’s own due diligence. The new trust and transparency system runs on the […]
Thinking Like a Human: What It Means to Give AI a Theory of Mind
Last month, a team of self-taught AI gamers lost spectacularly against human professionals in a highly-anticipated galactic melee. Taking place as part of the International Dota 2 Championships in Vancouver, Canada, the game showed that in broader strategic thinking and collaboration, humans still remain on top. The AI was a series of algorithms developed by […]
New physics AI could be the key to a quantum computing revolution
Quantum computing is one of the most exciting technologies there is, but its basis in quantum physics makes it a pain in the ass to understand and even harder to do anything with. A recent breakthrough in physics research, however, might change all of that and start a computing revolution. It wouldn’t be the first […]