Google has finally released the technical details of its its Tensor Process Unit (TPU) ASIC. Surprisingly, at its core, you find something that sounds like its inspired by the heart and not the brain. It’s called a “Systolic Array” and this computational device contains 256 x 256 8bit multiply-add computational units. That’s a grand total of 65,536 processors capable of cranking out 92 trillion operations per second! A systolic array is not a new thing, it was described way back in 1982 by Kung from CMU in “Why Systolic Architectures?” Just to get myself dated, I still recall a time when Systolic machines were all the rage. Read More
Monthly Archives: June 2019
U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid
The United States is stepping up digital incursions into Russia’s electric power grid in a warning to President Vladimir V. Putin and a demonstration of how the Trump administration is using new authorities to deploy cybertools more aggressively, current and former government officials said.
In interviews over the past three months, the officials described the previously unreported deployment of American computer code inside Russia’s grid and other targets as a classified companion to more publicly discussed action directed at Moscow’s disinformation and hacking units around the 2018 midterm elections.
Advocates of the more aggressive strategy said it was long overdue, after years of public warnings from the Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I. that Russia has inserted malware that could sabotage American power plants, oil and gas pipelines, or water supplies in any future conflict with the United States.
But it also carries significant risk of escalating the daily digital Cold War between Washington and Moscow. Read More
Deep learning model from Lockheed Martin tackles satellite image analysis
A satellite imagery recognition system designed by Lockheed Martin engineers uses open-source deep learning libraries to quickly identify and classify objects or targets in large areas across the world. Company officials say the tool could potentially saving image analysts many man hours categorizing and labeling items within an image.
The model, Global Automated Target Recognition (GATR), runs in the cloud, using Maxar Technologies’ Geospatial Big Data platform (GBDX) to access Maxar’s 100 petabyte satellite imagery library and millions of curated data labels across dozens of categories that expedite the training of deep learning algorithms. Fast GPUs enable GATR to scan a large area very quickly, while deep learning methods automate object recognition and reduce the need for extensive algorithm training. Read More
Russia Raises $2Bln for Investment in Artificial Intelligence
The Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) has raised $2 billion from foreign investors to support domestic companies developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions, the Vedomosti business daily reported, citing a report the RDIF has prepared for a meeting with President Vladimir Putin on AI advancement in Russia.
Russia is seeking to boost a start-up ecosystem, and the country’s traditional education emphasis on the hard sciences has helped many companies embrace technology. Russia is, for example, already a global force in fintech, and actively supports nano-technology. Read More
AI’s Near Future
For Jürgen Schmidhuber, a recognized pioneer in AI, artificial intelligence is much more than another technological revolution. He sees it as the opportunity to transcend humanity and biology. In this conversation, Jürgen and Azeem Azhar discuss what the next thirty years of AI will look like.
Jürgen and Azeem also discuss:
–The role of Long Short-Term Memory architecture in recent AI breakthroughs.
–Why the next AI wave will see machines actively shaping the data that they perceive.
–The second- and third-order consequences of bringing these more sophisticated artificial neural networks into our world. Read More
Open Hearing on Deepfakes and Artificial Intelligence
The Problem with Quantum Computers
By now, most people have heard that quantum computing is a revolutionary technology that leverages the bizarre characteristics of quantum mechanics to solve certain problems faster than regular computers can. Those problems range from the worlds of mathematics to retail business, and physics to finance. If we get quantum technology right, the benefits should lift the entire economy and enhance U.S. competitiveness.
The promise of quantum computing was first recognized in the 1980s yet remains unfulfilled. Quantum computers are exceedingly difficult to engineer, build, and program. As a result, they are crippled by errors in the form of noise, faults, and loss of quantum coherence, which is crucial to their operation and yet falls apart before any nontrivial program has a chance to run to completion. Read More
The Predator in Your Pocket
Persons who engage in technology-facilitated violence, abuse, and harassment sometimes install spyware on a targeted person’s mobile phone. Spyware has a wide range of capabilities, including pervasive monitoring of text and chat messages, recording phone logs, tracking social media posts, logging website visits, activating a GPS system, registering keystrokes, and even activating phones’ microphones and cameras, as well as sometimes blocking incoming phone calls. These capabilities can afford dramatic powers and control over an individual’s everyday life. And when this software is used abusively, it can operate as a predator in a person’s pocket, magnifying the pervasive surveillance of the spyware operator. Read More
WeChat Is Watching
It’s 9 a.m. on a typical morning in Chengdu and I’m awakened by the sound of my phone alarm. The phone is in my study, connected to my bedroom by sliding doors. I turn off the alarm, pick up my phone, and, like millions of people in China, the first thing I do is check my WeChat. At 9:07, I send my first message of the day.
WeChat, the brainchild of Tencent—one of China’s big three tech giants—is often referred to in the West as a social media app, something equivalent to Facebook or WhatsApp, but that’s to undersell it. WeChat has over 1 billion active users. In China, people don’t refer to it as a social media platform but rather as a social ecosystem. The features are seemingly endless. Beyond the typical social media functions of messaging and a Twitter-style feed called “friend circle,” it can be used to make payments for almost anything. Because developers can slot their apps directly into WeChat and tie them into the social and payment functions, it acts like a very sleek and efficient operating system. If it wasn’t for the fact that I grew up in London and use a VPN to jump the great firewall to keep in touch with my friends at home and use Google, I could go entire days without leaving WeChat. Read More
Why Digital Transformation Won’t Succeed Without Cultural Change
A lot of businesses frequently use the term Digital Transformation, but what does it actually mean?
We have become so accustomed to digital technology, we are no longer able to imagine life without it. And yet, when it comes to the digital transformation of the work environment, we still have a long way to go. The greatest obstacle for digital transformation is simply, people. Read More
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