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Google Cuts Its Giant Electricity Bill With DeepMind-Powered AI

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Google just paid for part of its acquisition of DeepMind in a surprising way. The internet giant is using technology from the DeepMind artificial intelligence subsidiary for big savings on the power consumed by its data centers, according to DeepMind Co-Founder Demis Hassabis. In recent months, the Alphabet Inc. unit put a DeepMind AI system in control of parts of its data centers to reduce power consumption by manipulating computer servers and related equipment like cooling systems. It uses a similar technique to DeepMind software that taught itself to play Atari video games, Hassabis said in an interview at a recent AI conference in New York. The system cut power usage in the data centers by several percentage points, "which is a huge saving in terms of cost but, also, great for the environment," he said.


The Gigafactory that will make or break Tesla: Elon Musk's megafactory set to open on July 29th and will make 500,000 batteries a year

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Tesla's Gigafactory in the Nevada Desert is finally nearing completion. Set to open on July 29th, it will have the largest footprint of any building in the world. The 5 billion structure will produce 500,000 lithium ion batteries each year to meet demand. When it's complete, Tesla's Gigafactory in the Nevada Desert will have the largest footprint of any building in the world. At the Model 3 launch yesterday, founder Elon Musk said the 5 billion structure will produce 500,000 lithium ion batteries annually to meet demand.


Robots in the Workforce: Automation Is a New Era for Engineers

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Currently, creative engineers are forced to build geometry in CAD systems to assess the viability of design ideas. In the future, their time will be better spent analyzing and constructing the problem statement, so computers can generate new geometric options and help engineers iterate faster. As a result, the scope of problems will increase, creating new challenges and opportunities. An example is SpaceX, which successfully landed two rockets on a boat this year (after five failed attempts). What if, at the beginning of the process, the engineers had fed project parameters into a generative-design tool?


Is the IoT acting in the Right Interest? - Netopia

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A major concern for our rights as consumers is the way that machines direct us according to their interests and not ours. Experts such as Dr Jonathan Cave warn about the growing influence of software machines on our lives. Cave says that software machines will make use of what they know about us to present information to us which may not be to our advantage. Because the search engines that we have used know a certain amount about us and our previous buying decisions, they are keen to exploit that by turning us into a buyer of something, by a process known as'filter bubbles' – a feedback loop where recommendations only reinforce existing patterns. As Dr Rupp states'if you are not paying then you are not the customer'. Thus if you are not paying for an internet technology such as Google or Facebook it is not acting in your interests, but rather in the interests of the customers who are paying to present information to you.


Why Artificial Intelligence Will Never, Ever Destroy The World - Verboten Publishing - Articles

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Why Artificial Intelligence Will Never, Ever Destroy The World Production being based on opportunity relies on external reactions to create a cycle. Even the fastest machine often finds itself waiting. So even if an Artificial Intelligence emerged (which it won't I believe we'll just go straight to producing real digital intelligence), it will be bound by the same self constraining laws of consumption as any other organism. There won't be any doomsday, no sudden explosion of chaos as some malignant digital cancer concludes the pointlessness of man and begins an extermination. Instead the program will co-exist and compete, it will take chances and sometimes lose. Yes, even with perfect memory, trillions of cycles a second, and all available facts the machine will still face limits, because the Universe itself is infinitly more complex and energy intensive than any object granted elevated influence through better intelligence.


On the Application of Support Vector Machines to the Prediction of Propagation Losses at 169 MHz for Smart Metering Applications

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Recently, the need of deploying new wireless networks for smart gas metering has raised the problem of radio planning in the169 MHz band. Unluckily, software tools commonly adopted for radio planning in cellular communication systems cannot be employed to solve this problem because of the substantially lower transmission frequencies characterizing this application. In this manuscript a novel data-centric solution, based on the use of support vector machine techniques for classification and regression, is proposed. Our method requires the availability of a limited set of received signal strength measurements and the knowledge of a three-dimensional map of the propagation environment of interest, and generates both an estimate of the coverage area and a prediction of the field strength within it. Numerical results referring to different Italian villages and cities evidence that our method is able to achieve good accuracy at the price of an acceptable computational cost and of a limited effort for the acquisition of measurements in the considered environments.


Germany Is Using AI to Smooth the Fluctuations in Its Power Grid

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Renewable energy like solar and wind power are changing the way we generate electricity. Our energy production is becoming cleaner and cheaper, and in many countries renewables are starting to overtake fossil fuels as the primary power source. But one of the biggest problems with renewables has yet to be solved: what happens if it's cloudy? More specifically, the problem is that renewable energy sources can never provide a constant source of power. No matter how many solar panels you build, they all provide zero power when the sun goes down.


Japan's ridiculous robot hotel is actually serious business

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The aim of the hotel, as CEO Hideo Sawada puts it, is a serious one: to be the most efficient hotel in the world. He draws on comparisons with low-cost airlines that "changed how we travel." Two years ago, as hotel prices continued to rise, the CEO (who runs the nearby Huis Ten Bosch theme park) began discussions with robotics and engineering experts with the aim of creating an efficient hotel, one that costs (both fiscally and environmentally) less. If you thought Hen-na Hotel was a kitschy gimmick, well, that's partly true. Still, the bigger picture here is that researchers from Japan's largest, most influential university are involving themselves and testing out cutting-edge green technology, as well as trying to create a space where both robots and humans can move around and do what they want (or need) to do.


Artificial intelligence could help warn us of another Dallas

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The Web app, which is powered partly by artificial intelligence, analyzes posts on social media as well as police radio chatter and feeds of the local airspace in virtually any region. The software, which is linked to IBM's Watson artificial intelligence, combs through tweets and images, specific hashtags and phrases, or posts from or about a particular geographic area and then uses computer algorithms to gauge the mood of that swirling digital conversation. The AI aspects of the iAWACS app only monitor the social media posts -- they don't analyze the audio from police scanners nor from the airspace maps. The result, which the Jester said was still a work in progress, was built from the ground up for law enforcement and intelligence officials with real-time information needs.


Low Gasoline Prices, What are Consumers Doing with the Extra Cash? – Data Science Central

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She is currently in the NYC Data Science Academy 12 week full time Data Science Bootcamp program taking place between April 11th to July 1st, 2016. This post is based on her third class project - Web Scraping, due on the 6th week of the program. Oil prices have fallen sharply since the summer of 2014. Prices bottomed in February 2016, since then they have gradually increased. While the breakeven cost is a popular topic among investors, on the consumer side gasoline prices are very cheap.