When NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick began kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality and racial injustice in 2016, he soon found himself out of a job, eventually moving onto other ventures in media and entertainment. Today, he's entering the AI industry by launching a project he says he hopes will allow others to bypass "gatekeeping:" an artificial intelligence platform called Lumi. The new subscription-based platform aims to provide tools for storytellers to create, illustrate, publish and monetize their ideas. The company has raised 4 million in funding led by Alexis Ohanian's Seven Seven Six, and its product went live today, July 24. In an interview with TIME, Kaepernick says this project can be viewed as an extension of his activism.

This blog post will give a general introduction to the LUMI system, the software system, and what programming models will be supported. We will also try to answer the most burning questions about the system and how you can get your programs running on it. In later posts, we will be doing more deep dives into specific parts of the system and software, how to prepare your codes, and how to port your codes. We will also be doing use case-specific deep dives on, for instance, how to prepare your ML workloads for LUMI. As announced on October 21st, LUMI will be an HPE Cray EX supercomputer consisting of several partitions targeted for different use cases.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your slow-running Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Snake Monster (a hexapod built with snake robot parts) has gotten even more monstrous. A demonstration of mobile manipulation with "Snake Monster," a hexapod robot built with modular actuators in the Biorobotics Lab, at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University.

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