Welcome to the Spring 2022 Edition of the Modern Data Stack Ecosystem. In this article, we’ll provide an in-depth look at the Modern Data Stack (MDS) ecosystem, updated from our Fall 2021 edition. We also highly recommended our article, The Future of the Modern Data Stack, to anyone who is new to the MDS and wants to learn about its history. Read More
Monthly Archives: June 2022
What will the metaverse actually look like in 5 years? This studio may have cracked it
What is the metaverse? Ask 10 different experts, and you’ll get a slew of different answers. Is it virtual reality? Mixed reality? Will it be a virtual city where we buy digital apartments? Will it just be a bunch of NFT JPEGs and other get-rich schemes before crypto creates so much carbon that our world burns? Or is it just Roblox and Snapchat in a couple of years?
While consensus is hard to find, Argodesign—a design firm that’s spent years consulting for Magic Leap—has put its cards on the table. It has developed a five-year vision for mixed reality, offering a convincing argument for how products like HoloLens and Magic Leap can work in half a decade. This metaverse would function as well for Starbucks as for Apple, with enough value and control for people to actually use.
The secret sauce of it all? Argodesign’s metaverse is basically the internet. But instead of going to websites, you go to real places—where mixed reality glasses reveal otherwise invisible digital layers. Read More
E-skin that can feel pain could create new generation of touch-sensitive robots
An electronic skin which can learn from feeling ‘pain’ could help create a new generation of smart robots with human-like sensitivity.
A team of engineers from the University of Glasgow developed the artificial skin with a new type of processing system based on ‘synaptic transistors, which mimics the brain’s neural pathways in order to learn. A robot hand which uses the smart skin shows a remarkable ability to learn to react to external stimuli.
In a new paper published today in the journal Science Robotics, the researchers describe how they built their prototype computational electronic-skin (e-skin), and how it improves on the current state of the art in touch-sensitive robotics. Read More
What will the metaverse actually look like in 5 years? This studio may have cracked it
What is the metaverse? Ask 10 different experts, and you’ll get a slew of different answers. Is it virtual reality? Mixed reality? Will it be a virtual city where we buy digital apartments? Will it just be a bunch of NFT JPEGs and other get-rich schemes before crypto creates so much carbon that our world burns? Or is it just Roblox and Snapchat in a couple of years?
While consensus is hard to find, Argodesign—a design firm that’s spent years consulting for Magic Leap—has put its cards on the table. It has developed a five-year vision for mixed reality, offering a convincing argument for how products like HoloLens and Magic Leap can work in half a decade. This metaverse would function as well for Starbucks as for Apple, with enough value and control for people to actually use.
The secret sauce of it all? Argodesign’s metaverse is basically the internet. But instead of going to websites, you go to real places—where mixed reality glasses reveal otherwise invisible digital layers. Read More
The Story of the Internet and How it Broke Bad: A Call For Public-Interest Technologists
Pentagon announces new leadership for chief digital, AI office
The Pentagon’s new Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) has hired nearly a dozen senior leaders to serve in its top positions — and met its June 1 deadline to reach full operating capability, FedScoop learned Wednesday.
This news comes nearly six months after the Department of Defense launched a major organizational restructure to place a number of technology-driving components under this newly established office, with the ultimate aim to better scale digital and Al-enabled capabilities across its massive enterprise.
“Following a multi-step process from [initial operating capability] to FOC the CDAO has fully merged and integrated the former component organizations of Advana, Chief Data Officer, Defense Digital Service, and Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. Legacy component names will no longer be recognized or used unless attributed to a product or capability specific to the department,” according to a statement from CDAO’s spokesperson. Read More
The AI that creates any picture you want, explained
The Pivot to Web3 Is Going to Get People Hurt
It can feel as if the entire world is bolting on crypto tokens and NFTs. Many in the industry worry the gold rush is akin to a “collective Theranos” that is warping the economy to the benefit of professional investors.
It can feel at times as if the entire world is pivoting into Web3, and the question is why. There are, suddenly, Web3 media companies, Web3 advertising firms, Web3 studios, Web3 marketing tactics, and Web3 publishing networks. LimeWire and MoviePass have risen from the dead, newly “powered”—as one of their CEOs put it—“by Web3 technology.” Web3 apparently is not only “transforming gaming” and “re-engineering real estate,” but also the future of the internet, and maybe the entire global economy as well.
Never mind that very few people can agree on exactly what Web3 is (and isn’t). What matters to investors is that Web3 is the hot new thing and the entrepreneurs are piling in. Read More
Introducing Google Cloud’s new Assured Open Source Software service
There has been an increasing awareness in the developer community, enterprises, and governments of software supply chain risks. Remediation efforts for vulnerabilities like Log4j and Spring4shell, and a 650% year-over-year increase in cyberattacks aimed at open source suppliers, have sharpened focus on the critical task of bolstering the security of open source software. Governments and regulators have taken notice and action, including the White House’s Executive Order 14028 on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity, followed by other governments and agencies around the world asserting new requirements and standards specifically focused on the software development lifecycle and the software supply chain.
…To further our commitment to help organizations strengthen their OSS software supply chain, we are announcing today a new Google Cloud product: our Assured Open Source Software service. Assured OSS enables enterprise and public sector users of open source software to easily incorporate the same OSS packages that Google uses into their own developer workflows. Read More
VOS: Learning what you don’t know by virtual outlier synthesis
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection has received much attention lately due to its importance in the safe deployment of neural networks. One of the key challenges is that models lack supervision signals from unknown data, and as a result, can produce overconfident predictions on OOD data. Previous approaches rely on real outlier datasets for model regularization, which can be costly and sometimes infeasible to obtain in practice. In this paper, we present VOS, a novel framework for OOD detection by adaptively synthesizing virtual outliers that can meaningfully regularize the model’s decision boundary during training. Specifically, VOS samples virtual outliers from the low-likelihood region of the class-conditional distribution estimated in the feature space. Alongside, we introduce a novel unknown aware training objective, which contrastively shapes the uncertainty space between the ID data and synthesized outlier data. VOS achieves competitive performance on both object detection and image classification models, reducing the FPR95 by up to 9.36% compared to the previous best method on object detectors. Read More
Rick's Cafe AI 