A broad challenge of research on generalization for sequential decision-making tasks in interactive environments is designing benchmarks that clearly landmark progress. While there has been notable headway, current benchmarks either do not provide suitable exposure nor intuitive control of the underlying factors, are not easy-to-implement, customizable, or extensible, or are computationally expensive to run. We built the Sandbox Environment for Generalizable Agent Research (SEGAR) with all of these things in mind. SEGAR improves the ease and accountability of generalization research in RL, as generalization objectives can be easy designed by specifying task distributions, which in turns allows the researcher to measure the nature of the generalization objective. We present an overview of SEGAR and how it contributes to these goals, as well as experiments that demonstrate a few types of research questions SEGAR can help answer.

Arm, the leader in chips used in everything from mobile devices to supercomputers, has unveiled Armv9, the company's first major architectural change in a decade. The new designs should result in 30% faster performance over the next two chip generations. Arm is a chip architecture company that licenses its designs to others, and its customers have shipped more than 100 billion chips in the past five years. Nvidia is in the midst of acquiring Cambridge, United Kingdom-based Arm for $40 billion, but the deal is waiting on regulatory approvals. In a press briefing, Arm CEO Simon Segars said Armv9 will be the base for the next 300 billion Arm-based chips.

Arm said Tuesday that ray tracing and variable rate shading will migrate from the PC to Arm-powered smartphones and tablets as part of Armv9, the next-generation CPU architecture that the company expects will power the next decade of Arm devices. Chips based upon the v9 architecture will be released in 2021, providing an estimated 30-percent improvement in performance over the next two Arm chip generations and the devices that run them. Arm's v9 will also add SVE2, new AI-specific instructions that will probably be used for the AI image processing used on smartphones, such as portrait mode. Arm v9 will also include what Arm is calling Realms, a hardware container of sorts specifically designed to protect virtual machines and secure applications. As an intellectual-property licensing company, Arm enjoys a unique position in the computing industry.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is confident that the Nvidia-Arm deal, the biggest in semiconductor history at $40 billion, will get past global regulators. Speaking during a "fireside chat" as part of Arm Dev Summit, the company's developer conference, Huang said that the two companies are complementary and as such, the acquisition would drive innovation forward and be good for customers. We are confident that [the Nvidia-Arm deal] is going to go through," Huang said. "As soon as we explain the rationale of the transaction and our plans to regulators around the world, they will realize that these are two complementary companies." Arm CEO Simon Segars backed Huang up, while noting that the regulatory process will take some time. "This is a deal that's about expanding," Segars said. It's about putting that technology in the hands of people who are going to build really cool stuff with it. So from that point of view, this is about enabling more people to do more things. That's the positive thing, that as regulators do scrutinize this, they're going to be able to see." Extended reach Huang's reasoning behind the Nvidia-Arm deal is that the combination of the world leader in AI compute with the world's most popular CPU architecture will bring AI capabilities to the Arm ecosystem as well as give Nvidia's accelerated computing extended reach.

Nvidia's $40 billion acquisition of Arm is a hugely significant deal for the tech world, with implications that will take years to unravel spanning many areas of the sector. But if you listened to the press babble coming from the two companies over the last 24 hours, you'd think there was only one factor driving the purchase: artificial intelligence. "AI is the most powerful technology force of our time. It's the automation of automation, where software writes software," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told journalists during a press call this morning. "Together, [Nvidia and Arm are] going to create the world's premier computing company for the age of AI." On the same call moments later, Arm CEO Simon Segars repeated these sentiments.

The simultaneous maturation of three technologies--AI, the Internet of Things and 5G wireless--are ushering in a data-driven 5th wave of computing underpinned by current cloud infrastructure, according to the chief executive of chip intellectual property vendor ARM. Speaking at an annual Defense Department microelectronics summit, Simon Segars said new chip architectures are being designed around IoT sensors networks that will generate huge data volumes collected and transported by emerging 5G networks. Those massive data sets can then be used to train machine learning models to extract useful information via new AI algorithms. As DoD seeks to revive U.S. chip manufacturing, drive semiconductor innovation and secure its microelectronics supply chain, "You have to think about the underlying technologies, the science that drives the next evolution of all of these technologies," Segars told this week's Electronics Resurgence Initiative (ERI) summit sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). "And that's an area where I think governments can play a big role in helping stimulate research--because this stuff is really hard."

The study was also presented at the Heart Failure Society of America Annual Scientific Meeting in Philadelphia. Type 2 diabetes is a global epidemic that is expected to affect over 592 million people globally by 2035, a dramatic increased from 382 million people with diabetes mellitus in 2013, a prevalence that is likely to be underestimated. Type 2 diabetes patients are at more than double the risk of developing heart failure resulting in disability or death among such patients. Earlier this month, late-breaking trial results revealed that a new class of medications known as SGLT2 inhibitors may be helpful for patients with heart failure. These therapies may also be used in patients with diabetes to prevent heart failure from occurring in the first place.

Cambridge's relentless technology gamechanger, Arm, is exploring the long-term potential of three emergent technologies – AI, 5G and secure IoT – at Arm TechCon 2019 in San Jose next month. Chief executive Simon Segars says all these technologies are converging to enable more meaningful data insights and fuel a shift into "a new era of total compute." At the epicentre of this convergence is the Arm ecosystem whose technologies spanning multiple sectors – including mobile, infrastructure, automotive, and more – will be showcased at Arm TechCon 2019 from October 8-10. It is Arm's 15th annual such event. Segars says Arm and automotive industry leaders will use the California platform to share insights on progress in developing safe, autonomous vehicle platforms.

It's a bright September morning in San Carlos, California, and Masayoshi Son, chairman of SoftBank, is throwing me off schedule. I'd come, as he had, to meet with the people he's tapped to run the Vision Fund, his $100 billion bet on the future of, well, everything. After almost four decades of building SoftBank into a telecom conglomerate, Son, an inveterate dealmaker, launched this unprecedented venture two years ago to back startups that he believes are driving a new wave of digital upheaval. He has staked everything on its success–his company, his reputation, his fortune. We'd both arrived with the same basic question: Where is this massive vehicle heading? But because I wasn't the one footing the 12-figure allowance, I understood that I'd be the one to wait. When I finally arrive at the Vision Fund's offices, just off California's Highway 101, I'm struck by how mundane they are. Son is known for big, showy statements. He reportedly paid $117 million for a home in Woodside in 2013, the highest price ever in the U.S. This glass and concrete building, on the other hand, could be found in any part of suburban America. The room where I wait is spartan.

Tech security today is bad, and as people bring more and more connected tech gadgets into their homes, the risks are increasing dramatically. That's why it is time for the tech industry to step up and take responsibility for protecting the devices they make, and the people that use them. This was the message delivered by ARM CEO Simon Segars to ARM developers attending the annual ARM TechCon in Santa Clara, Calif., this week. The theme of security permeated the event, with ARM announcing its Platform Security Architecture, a set of architecture specifications and open source firmware aimed for use in the IoT, along with a programmable security core. But Segars and other speakers made it clear that this concern about security wasn't just about what ARM is doing.