Just months after introducing the world's first AI-powered, electric hydrofoil, Swedish boatbuilder Candela has unveiled its $339,000 sequel, which can go over 56 miles before it needs charging, the longest range of any electric boat ever produced. Released as a hand-crafted limited edition in July 2021, the Candela C-7 proved such a hot commodity that demand outpaced supply, Eletrek reported, and the company has devised a successor that's easier to produce, the C-8. That is a steep bump in price from $240,000 for the C-7, but the new model uses less energy and is far roomier--about 31 inches longer than its predecessor. That leaves room for a cockpit for eight passengers, a large sun bed, a roomy cabin with a four-person sofa, beds for two adults and two children, and a freshwater shower and marine toilet. Candela says the sticker price on the 27.8-foot C-8 is on par with gas-powered premium powerboats in the 28 to 29-foot class. Candela has unveiled its new all-electric hydrofoil speedboat, the C-8, which it says can break the 50 nautical limit of the C-7, already three times longer than other electric boats.

The world's first AI-powered, all-electric hydrofoil boat that automatically stabilises itself for a smoother ride has been demonstrated at the Venice Boat Show. The Candela C-7 craft was presented today at the second iteration of the nautical event, which is being held at the Venetian Arsenal until June 6, 2021. The long-range boat, which has a range of 50 nautical miles, is able to decrease its water friction by up to 80 per cent by rising out of the water up onto its hydrofoils. This makes the £192,000 all-electric craft competitive with its fossil fuel-driven peers, sporting a maximum speed of 30 knots. In fact, the C-7 has three times the range of most electric boats.

The world's first AI-powered, all-electric hydrofoil boat -- which automatically stabilises itself a smoother ride -- has been demonstrated at the Venice Boat Show. The craft -- the Candela C-7 -- was presented today at the second iteration of the nautical event, which is being held at the Venetian Arsenal until June 6, 2021. The long-range boat, which has a range of 50 nautical miles, is able to decrease its water friction by up to 80 per cent by rising out of the water up onto its hydrofoils. This makes the all-electric craft -- which retails for around £192,000 -- competitive with its fossil fuel-driven peers, sporting a maximum speed of 30 knots. In fact, the C-7 has three times the range of most electric boats.

Facebook and the Technical University of Munich are joining forces on the creation of an independent ethics research center for artificial intelligence. The social network will provide $7.5 million in funding over five years for the Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence, with director of applied machine learning Joaquin Quiñonero Candela saying in a Newsroom post that the aim is to advance the growing field of ethical research on new technology and to study the fundamental issues that are specific to the use and impact of AI. Candela called TUM one of the world's top-ranked universities in the AI field, saying that the Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence will tap into the school's work in subjects such as robotics, machine intelligence and the social implications of AI. He added that Germany's creation of government-led ethical guidelines on autonomous driving and its work with European institutions on ethical frameworks for AI will also benefit the center. TUM Prof. Christoph Lütge will lead the Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence, working with "a diverse advisory board of representatives from academia, civil society and industry."

Ever since Facebook finally admitted to having a fake news problem, it's been trying to fix it. It hired thousands of people to help block fake ads, pledged to work with third-party fact-checking organizations and is busy building algorithms to detect fake news. But even as it attempts to fight back against fraudulent ads and made-up facts, another potential fake news threat looms on the horizon: Artificially generated fake video. Motherboard recently uncovered a disturbing new trend on Reddit, where users create AI-generated pornographic clips by swapping other people's faces onto porn stars. The outlet first reported on the phenomenon a month ago when Reddit user "deepfakes" posted a video of Gal Gadot's face swapped onto a porn star's body (he's since created more fake porn with other celebrities).

When asked to head Facebook's Applied Machine Learning group -- to supercharge the world's biggest social network with an AI makeover -- Joaquin Quiñonero Candela hesitated. It was not that the Spanish-born scientist, a self-described "machine learning (ML) person," hadn't already witnessed how AI could help Facebook. Since joining the company in 2012, he had overseen a transformation of the company's ad operation, using an ML approach to make sponsored posts more relevant and effective. Significantly, he did this in a way that empowered engineers in his group to use AI even if they weren't trained to do so, making the ad division richer overall in machine learning skills. But he wasn't sure the same magic would take hold in the larger arena of Facebook, where billions of people-to-people connections depend on fuzzier values than the hard data that measures ads. "I wanted to be convinced that there was going to be value in it," he says of the promotion. Despite his doubts, Candela took the post. And now, after barely two years, his hesitation seems almost absurd.

Facebook will use machine learning to alert users if a photo of them has been uploaded by another user, even if they haven't been tagged in the photo. The new feature was detailed in a blog post by Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, Facebook's director of applied machine learning, on Tuesday. Professional users can leverage the feature to make sure they aren't tagged in any inappropriate or embarrassing pictures. On the other hand, it could also help consumers from unwittingly having their photos used with an advertisement or associated with a specific Facebook page. If this sounds familiar, it's because Facebook has been using the same kind of artificial intelligence (AI) and facial recognition technologies to suggest certain friends for photo tags and more for quite some time.

Within Facebook's cavernous Building 20, about halfway between the lobby (panoramic views of the Ravenswood Slough) and the kitchen (hot breakfast, smoothies, gourmet coffee), in a small conference room called Lollapalooza, Joaquin Candela is trying to explain artificial intelligence to a layperson. Candela -- bald, compact, thoughtful -- runs Facebook's Applied Machine Learning (AML) group, the engine room of AI at Facebook, which increasingly makes it the engine room of Facebook in general. "Look, a machine learning algorithm really is a lookup table, right? Where the key is the input, like an image, and the value is the label for the input, like'a horse.' I have a bunch of examples of something. I give the algorithm as many as I can. And the algorithm keeps those in a table. Then, if a new example comes along -- or if I tell it to watch for new examples -- well, the algorithm just goes and looks at all those examples we fed it. It's trying to decide, 'Is this new thing a horse? If it's right, the image gets put in the'This is a horse' group, and if it's wrong, it gets put in the'This isn't a horse' group. Next time, it has more data to look up. One challenge is how do we decide how similar a new picture is to the ones stored in the table. One aspect of machine learning is to learn similarity functions. Another challenge is, What happens when your table grows really large? For every new image, you would need to make a zillion comparisons…. So another aspect of machine learning is to approximate a large stored table with a function instead of going through every image. The function knows how to roughly estimate what the corresponding value should be. This is what learning is about."

Facebook initially focused on ads. The rationale was that at the time people were typically scrolling through their feeds with the sound off, so for advertisers to get their message across they needed text to run inside their video ads. "We looked for a problem space in the speech recognition area through which we could deliver value to users," said Reena Philip, an engineering manager for Facebook's speech infrastructure group. Joining forces with the ads team, "we collaborated closely on a prototype," she said. The feature launched in the second quarter of 2016.

That's the gist of the advice to students interested in AI from Facebook's Yann LeCun and Joaquin Quiñonero Candela who run the company's Artificial Intelligence Lab and Applied Machine Learning group respectively. Tech companies often advocate STEM (science, technology, engineering and math), but today's tips are particularly pointed. The pair specifically note that students should eat their vegetables take Calc I, Calc II, Calc III, Linear Algebra, Probability and Statistics as early as possible. From this list, probability and statistics are perhaps the most interesting. From what I remember about high-school, those two subjects are regularly dismissed as too-obvious strategies for skirting the informal AP Calculus preference of top colleges and universities (AP Statistics is often thought of as a cop-out by students).