Earlier this year, Microsoft announced its supercomputer hosted in Azure Cloud which it developed in collaboration with OpenAI. The company said that the supercomputer could train various artificial intelligence models and comes with more than 2,85,000 CPU cores, 10,000 GPUs, and 400Gbps of network connectivity for each GPU server. Not just this, Hewlett Packard Enterprise recently acquired the supercomputing leader Cray, following which it has introduced the HPE Cray supercomputing line that can perform data-centric AI workloads with exceptionally high speed. It also built the new TX-GAIA (Green AI Accelerator) computing system at the Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center which has been ranked as the most powerful AI supercomputer at any university in the world. With a performance of 100 AI petaflops, it can perform complex deep neural network operations with much ease.

The government will strengthen support for non-Japanese children in need of Japanese-language education with a planned doubling of the budget as part of efforts to ensure they are not missing out on learning opportunities, the education ministry said Thursday. Based on a survey conducted last year, the ministry estimates that more than 19,000 out of the around 124,000 non-Japanese children of elementary or junior high school-age in Japan do not attend school at all. It also found that there is growing demand for Japanese-language education in public elementary and junior high schools. In accounting for the lack of attendance, the ministry said some children and guardians may not possess sufficient command of the Japanese language and support also varies among local governments, with many only sending notices regarding enrollment in Japanese. The ministry allocated a budget of around ¥700 million ($6.6 million) this fiscal year for support measures, which included covering one-third of the labor costs of Japanese-language tutors and assistants to provide advice in children's native tongues.

"We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters" -Peter Thiel The closing quarter of the twentieth century was peak tech innovation in the United States. AT&T's Bell Labs invented the information age with the transistor and data networking, and many transformative technologies tangential to its core business: from solar cells to the Unix operating system to lasers.1 Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) brought about human-computer interaction with the initial computer mouse, as well as laser printing and Ethernet networking.2 In the 80's Pixar was born, creating the first ever computer-animated sequence in a feature film with novel computer-generated imagery (CGI).3,4 At the same time Gates and Allen were hacking at something special that soon revolutionized computing, as were Wozniak and Jobs.5,6 Amidst the heyday of invention in the world of bits, the "space race" brought about massive innovation and accomplishments in the world of atoms: government competition between the US and Russia put humans on the moon for the first time.

The debate over automation has been overshadowed by more immediate economic problems created by the coronavirus crisis. But when things return to some semblance of normality, it's sure to crop up again and may well play a role in how a recovery takes shape. The basic question is whether automation is good or bad for average workers. The latest salvo against the robots comes from economists Daron Acemoglu, Andrea Manera, and Pascual Restrepo. In a recent National Bureau of Economic Research paper entitled "Does the US Tax Code Favor Automation?," they argue that taxes are higher on labor than on capital equipment, causing companies to invest too much in machines and not enough in manpower.

If you sit down with pencil, paper, and enough of an aptitude for orbital dynamics you'll soon discover that the easiest, most efficient trajectories to take us from Earth to a place like Mars involve great elliptical arcs around the sun. But these pathways (called Hohmann transfer orbits) require good timing, so that when we arrive at the orbit of Mars the planet is also there at that precise moment and not tens of thousands of miles away. Consequently, there is a season for going to Mars, and this year sees no less than three missions vying for a chance to explore another world, and launching within weeks of each other. The United Arab Emirates Space Agency has its Hope orbiter (aiming to study Mars's atmosphere), China has the Tainwen-1 mission (with no less than an orbiter, a lander, and a rover) and the United States has NASA's Mars 2020, consisting of the rover Perseverance and a helicopter demonstrator called Ingenuity. It begins like a classic romance: Two black holes meet.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said the US government must pour more funding into artificial intelligence (AI) research if it is to avert Chinese dominance in the field. Speaking during an online event hosted by the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) think tank last Tuesday, Schmidt warned that the US is losing the AI race. "China is on its way to surpass [the US] in many, many ways," he said. "We need to take them seriously… they're going to end up with a bigger economy, more R&D investments, better quality research, wider applications of technology, and a stronger computing infrastructure." Schmidt, who is chair of the US defence department's Defense Innovation Advisory Board, described China's potential dominance in AI as a security threat that could lead to "high-tech authoritarianism" worldwide.

Info. Virtual event. Cybersecurity for Artificial Intelligence. Eva Kaili, Member of the European Parliament, S&D, Greece and the European Union …

The goal of this workshop is to discuss and debate on the cybersecurity challenges related to Artificial Intelligence (AI). Whereas undoubtedly beneficial (AI brings numerous benefits to everyday life), one should not sidestep the fact that AI and its application on automated decision making – especially in safety critical deployments such as in autonomous vehicles - might open new avenues in manipulation and attack methods, while creating new privacy challenges. Cybersecurity is therefore of paramount importance for the reliable and trustworthy deployment of AI. The much needed call for ethics in AI relies on solid cybersecurity, since it is cybersecurity that will guarantee and assure the proper implementation of said ethics. Moreover, the need to secure AI so as to be able to trust it, is also prominent in the recently published EC White Paper on AI. In this paper, risk-based approaches are promoted in particular for high criticality sectors.

What was the last thing you heard about Amazon (AMZN)? Or was it the FAA's approval of Amazon's delivery drones? Most of this news about Amazon's store is just noise that distracts investors from Amazon's real force. As I'll show, Amazon is running an "operating system" that powers some of today's most important technologies such as virtual reality, machine learning, and even quantum computing. Behind the scenes, it is utilized by over a million companies--including tech giants Apple AAPL, Netflix NFLX, and Facebook FB .

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has given us a unique opportunity to perfectly understand the modern Democrats' belief in aristocratic superiority. The California Democrat's recent hypocrisy in going to her hair salon, which was supposed to be shut down due to San Francisco's stringent (and Pelosi-supported) COVID-19 rules, is just one more example of Democratic members of the political aristocracy believing they are superior to citizens (the opposite of the founding premise of America). The American people have long resented the hypocrisy and arrogance by which a political aristocracy believes one set of rules applies to the public and a totally different set of rules applies to its interests and its family members. We knew that this double standard deeply offended most Americans in 1994. That is why the first commitment of the Contract with America was to "require all laws that apply to the rest of the country also apply equally to the Congress."