Adobe has "rearchitected" its creative apps, including Photoshop, its video editing software Premiere and its 3D design platform Substance 3D to "take full advantage" of NVIDIA's RTX Spark, according to company VP Deepa Subramaniam. RTX Spark is NVIDIA's new system-on-chip (SoC) that's meant to give Windows laptops and small desktops the capability to run AI tasks locally on device. Unlike NVIDIA's DGX Spark, which mainly targets companies and AI developers, RTX Spark is more accessible to creatives and novice developers. "Our apps like Photoshop, Premiere and Substance are trusted by the world's most talented storytellers, from photographers and designers creating iconic campaigns, to filmmakers and editors bringing award-winning film and television to life, to artists creating characters and visual effects that bring those stories to the screen," Subramaniam said. "For this audience, performance across creative workflows is critical to allow them to stay focused on their story and craft."

The over-parametrized nature of Deep Neural Networks leads to considerable hindrances during deployment on low-end devices with time and space constraints. Network pruning strategies that sparsify DNNs using iterative prune-train schemes are often computationally expensive. As a result, techniques that prune at initialization, prior to training, have become increasingly popular. In this work, we propose neuron-to-neuron skip connections, which act as sparse weighted skip connections, to enhance the overall connectivity of pruned DNNs. Following a preliminary pruning step, N2NSkip connections are randomly added between individual neurons/channels of the pruned network, while maintaining the overall sparsity of the network. We demonstrate that introducing N2NSkip connections in pruned networks enables significantly superior performance, especially at high sparsity levels, as compared to pruned networks without N2NSkip connections. Additionally, we present a heat diffusion-based connectivity analysis to quantitatively determine the connectivity of the pruned network with respect to the reference network. We evaluate the efficacy of our approach on two different preliminary pruning methods which prune at initialization, and consistently obtain superior performance by exploiting the enhanced connectivity resulting from N2NSkip connections.

On November 26, the World Health Organization designated the strain of coronavirus surging in South Africa a "variant of concern" and christened it Omicron. The next day, University of British Columbia professor Sriram Subramaniam downloaded a genome sequence posted online and ordered samples of Omicron DNA to be shipped to his lab. Subramaniam's group uses electron microscopes to reveal the 3D structure of proteins, to better understand how they work. It had already mapped the spike proteins that coronaviruses use to bind and enter human cells for some earlier strains. Describing Omicron's spike protein felt urgent because its DNA differed in ways that might explain the variant's rapid spread.

Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) an advantage to your business? While most say yes, tech experts concur that AI brings in a whole new set of challenges to organizations, especially around data security, transparency and data protection. Irrespective of the challenges, analysts have predicted that the artificial intelligence market will register a CAGR of over 33% by 2023. But, it's time that organizations start addressing a few key aspects around data. Ajoy Menon, Managing Director and Lead – Financial Services, Accenture Advanced Technology Centers in India, informs, "We are seeing great traction among BFSI companies to incorporate AI along the whole spectrum of its value chain and to reimagine their processes, products, employees and customer experience."