Media
Content Skills in the Automation Era
Questions about the future of work are on the rise, as automation and artificial intelligence become more pervasive in our lives. For example, the newspaper articles you've read this week might have been written by bots. These questions deal with the economic, social, and environmental impact of automation technologies. Whether we consider this impact as positive or negative, the change is deep. It challenges the traditional productivism model that has been so far applied to business but also society and nature, where resources are transformed to create consumable products.
New Cray Supercomputer Brings Advanced AI Capabilities to the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart Cray Inc.
SEATTLE, Oct. 24, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Global supercomputer leader Cray, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company (NYSE: HPE), today announced that the High-Performance Computing Center of the University of Stuttgart (HLRS) in Germany has selected a new Cray CS-Stormรค GPU-accelerated supercomputer to advance its computing infrastructure in response to user demand for processing-intensive applications like machine learning and deep learning. The new Cray system is tailored for artificial intelligence (AI) and includes the Cray Urika -CS AI and Analytics suite, enabling HLRS to accelerate AI workloads, arm users to address complex computing problems and process more data with higher accuracy of AI models in engineering, automotive, energy, and environmental industries and academia. "As we extend our service portfolio with AI, we require an infrastructure that can support the convergence of traditional high-performance computing applications and AI workloads to better support our users and customers," said Prof. Dr. Michael Resch, director at HRLS. "We've found success working with our current Cray Urika-GX system for data analytics, and we are now at a point where AI and deep learning have become even more important as a set of methods and workflows for the HPC community. Our researchers will use the new CS-Storm system to power AI applications to achieve much faster results and gain new insights into traditional types of simulation results." Supercomputer users at HLRS are increasingly asking for access to systems containing AI acceleration capabilities.
Pixelbook Go review: Faltering on Google Assistant and apps
It's kind of incredible that a Google-made laptop runs a hobbled version of Google Assistant. We're referring to the Pixelbook Go, which begins shipping on November 15 as a sibling to the original Pixelbook. It's a performant and sleek machine with an exceptional keyboard and all-day battery life, but there's little to recommend it on the software side. When Google Assistant came to Chrome OS alongside the circa-2017 Pixelbook, the assumption was that it would match or best the robustness of Assistant on smartphones, smart displays, and speakers. Nips and tucks continue to arrive two years later, but Google Assistant on Chrome OS is advancing at a snail's pace relative to its counterparts.
Artificial Intelligence Projects Face Huge Barriers to Success
Earlier this year, Arvind Krishna, IBM's senior vice president of cloud and cognitive software, suggested that such initiatives tend to fail once companies realize the expense and labor involved in collecting and structuring data for analysis. "And so you run out of patience along the way, because you spend your first year just collecting and cleansing the data," he told the audience at The Wall Street Journal's Future of Everything Festival, according to the newspaper. "And you say: 'Hey, wait a moment, where's the A.I.? I'm not getting the benefit.' And you kind of bail on it," he reportedly added. All the hype around A.I. and machine learning might have deluded a number of companies into believing that such initiatives will quickly yield powerful results.
Newsrewired sneak peek podcast: diversity, artificial intelligence, and future-proofing journalism
Our Newsrewired digital journalism conference is fast approaching and we are really excited about the speaker lineup and the topics we have in store. To offer you a taster of what is coming on 27 November, we caught up with four of our panelists on this week's podcast to talk about what delegates will take away from the event. Driving diversity in your newsroom is not just a worthy ideal, businesses also cannot afford to ignore the need to diversify their newsrooms to attract new audiences. Marverine Cole, journalist, broadcaster and academic, Birmingham City University touches on how she is championing diversity in education and the industry, but also why news organisations must focus their efforts on diversity to survive. For local news organisations, resources are spread thinly and it can be difficult to keep up with the workload.
Terminator sends shudder across AI labs
Arnold Schwarzenegger means it when he says: "I'll be back," but not everyone is thrilled there's a new Terminator film out this week. In labs at the University of Cambridge, Facebook and Amazon, researchers fear Terminator: Dark Fate could mislead the public on the actual dangers of artificial intelligence (AI). AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio told BBC News he didn't like the Terminator films for several reasons. "They paint a picture which is really not coherent with the current understanding of how AI systems are built today and in the foreseeable future," says Prof Bengio, who is sometimes called one of the "godfathers of AI" for his work on deep learning in the 1990s and 2000s. "We are very far from super-intelligent AI systems and there may even be fundamental obstacles to get much beyond human intelligence."
Facebook AI researcher slams 'irresponsible' reports about smart bot experiment
Artificial intelligence researchers in recent days have been speaking out against media reports that dramatize AI research that Facebook conducted. An academic paper that Facebook published in June describes a normal scientific experiment in which researchers got two artificial agents to negotiate with each other in chat messages after being shown conversations of humans negotiating. The agents' improvement gradually performed through trial and error. But in the past week or so, some media outlets have published reports on the work that are alarmist in tone. "Facebook shuts down robots after they invent their own language," London's Telegraph newspaper reported.