Lifeboat Foundation

Labeling data can be a chore. It’s the main source of sustenance for computer-vision models; without it, they’d have a lot of difficulty identifying objects, people, and other important image characteristics. Yet producing just an hour of tagged and labeled data can take a whopping 800 hours of human time. Our high-fidelity understanding of the world develops as machines can better perceive and interact with our surroundings. But they need more help.

Scientists from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Microsoft, and Cornell University have attempted to solve this problem plaguing vision models by creating “STEGO,” an algorithm that can jointly discover and segment objects without any human labels at all, down to the pixel.

Continue reading “Scientists create algorithm to assign a label to every pixel in the world, without human supervision” »

The Aptera solar car is expected to hit roads in 2021, but even if it’s not the next big thing in transportation, its design elements could be.

Imagine growing crops with 95% less water, or producing meat through methods that free up 80% of the world’s agricultural land. And how about eliminating the CO₂ of global supply chains by simply moving production facilities closer to customers and cutting the parts used in the final product a hundredfold? What might sound like crazy ideas are solutions available today through green technologies.

Green tech describes the technology and science-based solutions that mitigate the negative human impact on the environment in a broad range of fields from agriculture to construction. Sixteen per cent of global emissions are caused by transportation, 19% by agriculture, 27% by energy production, 31% by construction and production, with the remaining 7% caused by heating. Green technologies can be applied in all of these CO2-emitting sectors, thus offering broad solutions for sustainable growth.

10 people will take the better part of a year to port a new technology library. Now we can do it with a couple of GPUs running for a few days.

Nvidia has been quick to hop on the artificial intelligence bus一with many of its consumer facing technologies, such as Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) and AI-accelerated denoising exemplifying that. However, it has also found many uses for AI in its silicon development process and, as Nvidia’s chief scientist Bill Dally said in a GTC conference, even designing new hardware.

Dally outlines a few use cases for AI in its own development process of the latest and greatest graphic cards (among other things), as noted by HPC Wire.

Continue reading “Nvidia’s GPU-powered AI is creating chips with ‘better than human design’” »

Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed that the automaker has now more than 100,000 people in its Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta program.

Does it mean that we are going to start seeing an accelerated rate of improvement?

FSD Beta has been a “two steps forward, one step back” type of program.

Designed for personal use, the Hill HX50 chopper starts at roughly $648,000.

Will cargo and people soon be travelling by rocket around the planet? A number of companies and the U.S. Department of Defence are counting on it.

U.S. Department of Defence invests in Rocket Cargo while Toronto-based Digital Habitats is planning a global network for rocket travel.

Countries, especially potential exporters, should improve hydrogen statistics to justify and promote investments in hydrogen. The measures should result from broad cooperation, also intended to standardize and homogenize measurements, said Columbia University‘s Anne-Sophie Corbeau. “Countries could start working together to determine how best to collect hydrogen data, both on the demand and production sides, and include existing consumption as well as potential future consumption in new sectors. Statistics on the demand side need to anticipate new uses in buildings, industry, transport, and power, as well as account for hydrogen’s potential use to produce other energy products such as ammonia and methanol,” the French scholar wrote on Monday.

Vancouver-based First Hydrogen has identified four industrial sites in the United Kingdom and is advancing discussions with landowners to secure land rights to develop green hydrogen production projects. It said it would be working with engineering consultants Ove Arup & Partners Limited (ARUP) for engineering studies and designs. “The sites are all in prime industrial areas spread strategically across the North and South of the United Kingdom and will each accommodate both a large refueling station — for light, medium and heavy commercial vehicles with on-site hydrogen production, to serve the urban areas of Greater Liverpool, Greater Manchester, the London area, and the Thames Estuary — and a larger hydrogen production site of between 20 and 40 MW, for a total for the four sites of between 80 MW and 160 MW,” First Hydrogen wrote on Monday. The Canadian company wants to use the production facilities to serve customers of its automotive division. “First Hydrogen’s green hydrogen van is to begin demonstrator testing in June with final delivery for road use in September 2022.”