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-Stormä 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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 24, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- MICRON INSIGHT -- Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: MU), today announced a powerful new set of high-performance hardware and software tools for deep learning applications with the acquisition of FWDNXT, a software and hardware startup. When combined with advanced Micron memory, FWDNXT's (pronounced "forward next") artificial intelligence (AI) hardware and software technology enables Micron to explore deep learning solutions required for data analytics, particularly in IoT and edge computing. With this acquisition, Micron is integrating compute, memory, tools and software into a comprehensive AI development platform. This platform in turn provides the key building blocks required to explore innovative memory optimized for AI workloads. "FWDNXT is an architecture designed to create fast-time-to-market edge AI solutions through an extremely easy to use software framework with broad modeling support and flexibility," said Micron Executive Vice President and Chief Business Officer Sumit Sadana.

The "basic level", according to experiments in cognitive psychology, is the level of abstraction in a hierarchy of concepts at which humans perform tasks quicker and with greater accuracy than at other levels. We argue that applications that use concept hierarchies - such as knowledge graphs, ontologies or taxonomies - could significantly improve their user interfaces if they `knew' which concepts are the basic level concepts. This paper examines to what extent the basic level can be learned from data. We test the utility of three types of concept features, that were inspired by the basic level theory: lexical features, structural features and frequency features. We evaluate our approach on WordNet, and create a training set of manually labelled examples that includes concepts from different domains. Our findings include that the basic level concepts can be accurately identified within one domain. Concepts that are difficult to label for humans are also harder to classify automatically. Our experiments provide insight into how classification performance across domains could be improved, which is necessary for identification of basic level concepts on a larger scale.

In April 2019, following the Easter Sunday bomb attacks, the Government of Sri Lanka had to shut down Facebook and YouTube for nine days to stop the spreading of hate speech and false news, posted mainly in the local languages Sinhala and Tamil. This came about simply because these social media platforms did not have the capability to detect and warn about the provocative content. India's Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) wants lectures on Swayama and NPTELb--the online teaching platforms--to be translated into all Indian languages. Approximately 2.5 million students use the Swayam lectures on computer science alone. The lectures are in English, which students find difficult to understand.