In 2003, CU student Nate Seidle fried a power supply in his dorm room and, in lieu of a way to order easy replacements, decided to start his own company. Since then, SparkFun has been committed to sustainably helping our world achieve electronics literacy from our headquarters in Boulder, Colorado. No matter your vision, SparkFun's products and resources are designed to make the world of electronics more accessible. In addition to over 2,000 open source components and widgets, SparkFun offers curriculum, training and online tutorials designed to help demystify the wonderful world of embedded electronics. We're here to help you start something.

The term "influencer marketing" may call to mind jet-setting travel vloggers on YouTube or cool gamer kids streaming on Twitch. However, there are also many influencers working in the business and marketing realm. Data science influencers educate and inform on the subject of the scientific approach to extracting insights from data for real-world applications. Here are eight of the data science thought leaders topping influencer discovery searches. Andrew Ng's credentials speak for themselves.

Turning a sketch or photo of an object into a fully realized 3D model so that it can be duplicated using a 3D printer, played in a video game, or brought to life in a movie through visual effects, requires the skills of a digital modeler working from a stack of images. But Nvidia has successfully trained a neural network to generate fully-textured 3D models based on just a single photo. We've seen similar approaches to automatically generating 3D models before, but they've either required a series of photos snapped from many different angles for accurate results or input from a human user to help the software figure out the dimensions and shape of a specific object in an image. Neither are wrong approaches to the problem; any improvements made to the task of 3D modeling are welcome as they make such tools available to a wider audience, even those lacking advanced skills. But they also limit the potential uses for such software. At the annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems which is taking place in Vancouver, British Columbia, this week, researchers from Nvidia will be presenting a new paper--"Learning to Predict 3D Objects with an Interpolation-Based Renderer"--that details the creation of a new graphics tool called a differentiable interpolation-based renderer, or DIB-R, for short, which sounds only slightly less intimidating.

Designed to push the frontiers of computing chip and systems performance optimized for AI workloads, an 8 petaflop IBM Power9-based supercomputer has been unveiled in upstate New York that will be used by IBM data and computer scientists, by academic researchers and by industrial and commercial end-users. Installed at the New York State-IBM Research AI Hardware Center in Albany, NY, the system -- called AiMOS (Artificial Intelligence Multiprocessing Optimized System) – was the most powerful to debut on last month's Top500 supercomputer ranking, it's listed as the world's 24th most powerful computer, the most powerful to be housed at a private university and – according to the Green500 listing – the third most energy efficient. It was built using the same IBM Power Systems technology as the Top500's nos. 1 and 2, systems, the US Dept. of Energy's IBM Summit and Sierra supercomputers, based on IBM Power9 CPUs and Nvidia GPUs. AiMOS is the result of a collaboration between IBM, RPI and two New York state programs, Empire State Development (ESD) and NY CREATES. Named for Rensselaer co-founder Amos Eaton, AiMOS will serve as a test bed for computation, modeling and simulation of hardware "designed to push the boundaries of AI performance," IBM said.

On Tuesday, career and job site LinkedIn released its annual "Emerging Jobs" list, which identifies the roles that have seen the largest rate of hiring growth from 2015 through this year. No. 1 on the list: Artificial Intelligence Specialist -- typically an engineer, researcher or other specialty that focuses on machine learning and artificial intelligence, figuring out things like where it makes sense to implement AI or building AI systems. Hiring for this role has been tremendous, growing 74% annually in the past 4 years alone. "AI has infiltrated every industry, and right now the demand for people skilled in AI is outpacing the supply for it," Guy Berger, the principal economist at LinkedIn, tells MarketWatch. "This is the third year in a row a role related to machine learning or artificial intelligence has topped the list, and we can only expect demand to increase."

Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and High Velocity Analytic workloads are going mainstream. Enterprises of all types and sizes want to seize the opportunity their data presents. As these workloads move from development to production, organizations face a significant challenge with the supporting storage architecture. At the heart of the problem is the file system the organization will use to store the information. It needs to be fast, scalable, durable and cloud-ready.

SoftBank Group Corp. founder Masayoshi Son unveiled a $184 million initiative Friday to accelerate artificial intelligence research in Japan, enlisting Alibaba's Jack Ma to expound on his goal of commercializing the technology. Son's company announced a partnership with the University of Tokyo that includes spending 20 billion yen ($184 million) over 10 years by mobile arm SoftBank Corp. to establish the Beyond AI Institute. He roped in the Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. co-founder for an on-campus chat, during which the two billionaires discussed their vision for the future of technology. The institute will support 150 researchers from various disciplines and focus on transitioning AI research from the academic to the commercial using joint ventures between universities and companies. Health-care, city and social infrastructure and manufacturing will be the primary areas of focus, SoftBank Corp. said in a statement.

AI for Longevity has more potential to increase healthy Longevity in the short term than any other sector. The application of AI for Longevity will bring the greatest real-world benefits and will be the main driver of progress in the widespread extension of healthy Longevity. The global spending power of people aged 60 and over is anticipated to reach $15 trillion annually by 2020. The Longevity industry will dwarf all other industries in both size and market capitalization, reshape the global financial system, and disrupt the business models of pension funds, insurance companies, investment banks, and entire national economies. Longevity has become a recurring topic in analytical reports from leading financial institutions such as CitiBank, UBS Group, Julius Baer, and Barclays.

Background: The current gold standard for measuring sleep is polysomnography (PSG), but it can be obtrusive and costly. Actigraphy is a relatively low-cost and unobtrusive alternative to PSG. Of particular interest in measuring sleep from actigraphy is prediction of sleep-wake states. Current literature on prediction of sleep-wake states from actigraphy consists of methods that use population data, which we call generalized models. However, accounting for variability of sleep patterns across individuals calls for personalized models of sleep-wake states prediction that could be potentially better suited to individual-level data and yield more accurate estimation of sleep.

Our Civil Liberties are under threat more than ever before. No longer is the dystopian Orwellian future the topic of conspiracy. Pre crime is about to take front stage. While we are busily involved in fighting one another over the charade of impeachment, silently in the background and without a word from the media, laws are being passed, deals are being made, technological advancements are being feverishly worked on, that will remove our freedoms and infringe upon our civil liberties like never before. If you care about your nation, If you care about the constitution, If you care about your freedoms, you might want to pay attention. This is the most serious topic that I have ever covered. This is something that we as a society must collectively fight against with everything we have. If we silently submit, we will walk into a future that none of us wants to be in. The time to stand against this is now.