Yejin Choi, a University of Washington computer science professor and senior research manager at Seattle's Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), won a $800,000 "genius grant" given annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Choi, one of 25 MacArthur Fellows for 2022 revealed Wednesday, is an expert in natural language processing. Her work aims to improve the ability of computers and artificial intelligence systems to perform commonsense reasoning and understand implied meaning in human language. "This is such a great honor because there have been only two other researchers in the natural language processing field who have received this award," Choi told UW News. Choi spoke to GeekWire earlier this year about the debate over a robot's ability to have human-like feelings.

Instead, it was born with an "application-first philosophy," meaning that its exclusive purpose is to dedicate its computational excellence to tackling some of the world's biggest challenges, such as climate change, says Satoshi Matsuoka, 57, the mastermind behind the project. "Benchmark excellence is not our priority," he said in an interview conducted in fluent, near flawless English. Instead, he said, its success is assessed "based on how much we can accelerate the applications that are important in society." As the director of Riken's Center for Computational Science, Matsuoka and his team have set out nine application areas for Fugaku to work on that are of importance to society, such as medicine, pharmacology, disaster prediction and prevention, environmental sustainability and energy. Matsuoka began leading the team developing the next-generation supercomputer in around 2010, just before its predecessor K computer became the world's fastest supercomputer in the Top500 benchmark by conducting more than 10 quadrillion calculations per second.

Japan's arm-based Fugaku supercomputing system has been acknowledged as the world's most powerful supercomputer. In June 2020, the system earned the top spot in the Top500 ranking of the 500 most powerful commercially available computer systems on the planet, for its performance on a longstanding metric for massive scientific computation. Although modern supercomputing tasks often emphasize somewhat different capabilities, Fugaku also outperforms by other measures as well. This architecture just wins big time," said Torsten Hoefler of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich. "It is a super-large step." Hoefler shared the 2019 ACM Gordon Bell Prize with an ETH Zurich team for simulations of heat and quantum electronic flow in nanoscale transistors performed in part on the previous Top500 leader, the Summit System at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee.

Yoky Matsuoka (center), CTO of Nest, speaks at the 2018 Forbes Women Summit. Yoky Matsuoka's passion for smart devices started with a personal need. The semiprofessional tennis player dreamed of becoming pro but was sidelined by injuries. She vowed to keep pushing toward a tennis career by building a tennis robot buddy for herself. Now the CTO of smart home device company Nest, Matsuoka looks fondly on her journey from tennis robot to energy- and money-saving thermostat.

Confirming one of the industry's worst-kept secrets, Google announced today that it finally has a cost-reduced version of its Google Home smart speaker. The $49 Google Home Mini, available for preorder now, will go head to head with the Echo Dot that Amazon introduced way back in March 2016. Like the original Google Home, the Mini will feature fabric over its speaker grill. But Google assures us this is no ordinary fabric. Google's lead designer for home hardware, Isabelle Olsson, said the company invented its own yarn for the Mini--going through 157 iterations to find just the right colors: chalk, charcoal, and coral.

"We have better light rings than any other products on the market," says Adam Mittleman. This is a sentence that I have never before heard uttered by anyone, even after a long time living on Planet Earth. But because I am visiting Nest, and Mittleman is its Head of Product Design, working on a new gadget that this startup-turned-controversial Alphabet division is launching, I can't say I am surprised. After all, light rings--the shimmering glow-circles that allow digital appliances to provide feedback--have been a leitmotif for Nest throughout its eventful journey of disrupting the home. Nest has given a lot of thought to them. Naturally, there is a light ring on the Nest Guard, which is the hub of the Nest Secure suite. That suite has been in the works since well before the company was acquired by Google in January 2014 and then underwent a second recalibration in October 2015 when Google made Nest one of the divisions ("bets") in the Alphabet archipelago. Depending on the message the new Nest Guard wants to convey, its ring might glow red, yellow or green.

When Yoky Matsuoka was a small child in Tokyo, she dreamed that one day she would be the next Serena Williams. But while she never made it to Wimbledon, Matsuoka's pioneering work studying robotics and the human brain earned her the prestigious MacArthur "genius" fellowship. Speaking at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech dinner in San Francisco on Wednesday, Matsuoka discussed her work in the red-hot field of artificial intelligence and her career at Apple aapl, Google's googl experimental research group, and Nest, the home technology arm of Google's parent company. Matsuoka first became enamored with robotics when she attended the University of California at Berkeley. At the time she wanted to merge her love of tennis with robotics, and thought it would be cool to potentially build a tennis buddy "with legs and arms and eyes with computer vision" that could track a tennis ball and hit with her like a human. But building such a robot is very complex.

This story was delivered to BI Intelligence IoT Briefing subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here. Nest is looking to improve the artificial intelligence (AI) and use of machine learning for its products, as indicated by the recent appointment of Yoky Matsuoka as the company's chief technology officer. Matsuoka, who previously cofounded Alphabet's X unit before becoming the VP of technology at Nest, will leave her current position at Apple to employ her expertise in AI and robotics for the company, according to Recode. This move will likely lead to Nest introducing the Google Assistant to its devices, better positioning the voice assistant within the competitive smart home market.

Google is acquiring Nest, makers of a smart thermostat, for a reported $3.2 billion. Perhaps it seems obvious why Google would want to buy the company, founded by former Apple executive Tony Faddell. The comments on Twitter were immediate, for sure. For example, investor Howard Lindzon wrote, "[Google] wants all your home data." But I think it's easier to slot in this purchase with Google's recent push into robotics, led by the former head of Android, Andy Rubin.

Yoky Matsuoka, who joined Apple Inc. in May as an executive to help run health technology initiatives, has left the iPhone maker, according to people familiar with the matter. Matsuoka was hired to lead teams involved with the company's HealthKit tracking software, the CareKit tool for managing patient medical care, the ResearchKit framework for conducting medical studies via Apple devices, and related machine learning algorithms. Matsuoka reported to Jeff Williams, Apple's chief operating officer, who also runs the teams related to the Apple Watch, health research, and fitness applications. An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment. Before joining Apple, Matsuoka led technology efforts as a vice president at Alphabet Inc.'s Nest Labs.