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Bounds on the computational complexity of neurons due to dendritic morphology

Neural Information Processing Systems

The simple linear threshold units used in many artificial neural networks have a limited computational capacity. Famously, a single unit cannot handle nonlinearly separable problems like XOR. In contrast, real neurons exhibit complex morphologies as well as active dendritic integration, suggesting that their computational capacities outperform those of simple linear units. Considering specific families of Boolean functions, we empirically examine the computational limits of single units that incorporate more complex dendritic structures. For random Boolean functions, we show that there is a phase transition in learnability as a function of the input dimension, with most random functions below a certain critical dimension being learnable and those above not.


Amazon is investigating three employees who spoke out against building more AI data centers

Engadget

They were testifying at a Seattle city council meeting. Five members of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ) previously testified at Seattle city council meetings about AI data centers . Now, three of them are apparently under investigation by the company. The AECJ has filed a civil rights complaint against the company on behalf of the three engineers, according to CNBC and GeekWire, accusing Amazon of violating a Seattle law that prohibits companies from discriminating against employees based on their political ideology, race, religion and age. The engineers spoke at Seattle city council hearings over whether to put a pause on AI data center buildouts.


3 Amazon Workers Say They're Under Investigation for Speaking Out About Data Centers

WIRED

The software engineers filed a complaint with Seattle's civil rights office accusing Amazon of illegally retaliating against them for expressing their personal political beliefs. Earlier this month, five current Amazon employees publicly urged Seattle City Council to regulate data centers . It was an unprecedented act of advocacy by tech workers, and now three of the staffers say they are under internal investigation for what they understand to be allegedly representing themselves as spokespeople for the company without prior approval. "It's a totally ridiculous claim," says one of the affected employees, Patrick Schloesser. The three software engineers, who work in different divisions of Amazon and all live in Seattle, believe they are being unfairly targeted for expressing their political beliefs.


Seattle enacts year-long ban on new AI datacenters

The Guardian

Seattle has passed a year-long moratorium on the construction of new datacenters. The city council voted unanimously in favor of the temporary ban on Tuesday. A major tech hub whose metro area is home to Amazon and Microsoft, Seattle is the largest US city to have passed such a moratorium as the backlash against AI infrastructure grows across the country. Lawmakers have framed the pause as an opportunity to draft regulations specifically targeting the electricity-hungry datacenters being built nationwide to serve the AI sector, and to protect local residents from environmental risks and rising electricity bills. According to Seattle's mayor, Katie Wilson, the moratorium will also let city officials determine whether datacenters are a "good use of urban land", and potentially impose new stipulations on their approval, such as requiring developers to invest in local transit and housing initiatives in exchange for construction permits.


5 new mules set to patrol Olympic National Park

Popular Science

Murl, Cutti, Pip, Checkers, and Gopher will monitor trails, haul supplies, and help with search and rescue efforts. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Mules have been helping maintain various national parks for over 100 years. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Five new mules at Olympic National Park in Washington State are ready for the busy tourist season.


Underwater robotics expert reveals 'shipwreck city' hiding beneath major urban lake

FOX News

ROV specialist Phil Parisi is documenting nearly 100 underwater targets in Seattle's Lake Union, calling the urban lake a "shipwreck city" hiding a century of maritime history.


Seattle AI founder looks to leave as taxes rise, 'Everybody that I know… is in the process of leaving'

FOX News

This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. Market data provided by Factset . Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions . Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by LSEG .


Two freak plays in one MLB night leaves announcers, fans stunned

FOX News

Edward Cabrera's strikeout prop is the play as struggling Phillies face surging Cubs today Nuggets vs Timberwolves Game 3 pick hinges on Jaden McDaniels calling out Denver's entire defense Charles Barkley was disgusted by Magic's highly questionable pregame handshake ChatGPT predicted the first round of the NFL Draft and here's what it said Curt Cignetti was so focused this offseason, he turned down all external requests: 'I'm 95% football' Former MLB owner claims'despicable' San Francisco Giants are the reason the A's left Oakland Longtime NASCAR crew chief tells wild story about one of the sport's biggest characters WNBA finally embraces Caitlin Clark's stardom with unprecedented national TV schedule Why are the Mets so bad? Flyers mascot Gritty pens letter to fans ahead of first playoff game... eight years after he debuted Hasan Piker justifies'social murder' of CEO Fox News celebrates'Bring Your Kids to Work Day' Trump says there's'no time frame' to secure Iran deal Iranian activist praises Trump's intervention after female protesters saved from execution Steve Hilton praised for'offering solutions' in CA gubernatorial debate Middle East tensions escalate over US blockade, Iran's actions We had a homer land on top of the foul pole, and a line drive land in a pitcher's shirt Jo Adell just pulled off something you may NEVER see again -- robbing THREE home runs in a single game vs the Mariners. Is this the greatest defensive performance in MLB history? Ricky Cobb reacts like only the Super 70s Sports Guy can .... All eyes are on today's NFL Draft, but I doubt it'll produce anything like what Major League Baseball gave us Wednesday night.


Palantir Employees Are Starting to Wonder if They're the Bad Guys

WIRED

Palantir Employees Are Starting to Wonder if They're the Bad Guys Interviews with current and former Palantir employees, along with internal Slack messages obtained by WIRED, suggest a workforce in turmoil. It took just a few months of President Donald Trump's second term for Palantir employees to question their company's commitments to civil liberties . Last fall, Palantir seemed to become the technological backbone of Trump's immigration enforcement machinery, providing software identifying, tracking, and helping deport immigrants on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), when current and former employees started ringing the alarm. Right as they picked up the call, one of them asked, "Are you tracking Palantir's descent into fascism?" "That was their greeting," the other former employee says.


Decentralized Machine Learning with Centralized Performance Guarantees via Gibbs Algorithms

arXiv.org Machine Learning

In this paper, it is shown, for the first time, that centralized performance is achievable in decentralized learning without sharing the local datasets. Specifically, when clients adopt an empirical risk minimization with relative-entropy regularization (ERM-RER) learning framework and a forward-backward communication between clients is established, it suffices to share the locally obtained Gibbs measures to achieve the same performance as that of a centralized ERM-RER with access to all the datasets. The core idea is that the Gibbs measure produced by client~$k$ is used, as reference measure, by client~$k+1$. This effectively establishes a principled way to encode prior information through a reference measure. In particular, achieving centralized performance in the decentralized setting requires a specific scaling of the regularization factors with the local sample sizes. Overall, this result opens the door to novel decentralized learning paradigms that shift the collaboration strategy from sharing data to sharing the local inductive bias via the reference measures over the set of models.