MXNet stands for mix and maximize. The idea is to combine the power of declartive programming together with imperative programming. In its core, a dynamic dependency scheduler that automatically parallelizes both symbolic and imperative operations on the fly. A graph optimization layer on top of that makes symbolic execution fast and memory efficient. The library is portable and lightweight, and it scales to multiple GPUs and multiple machines.
Source: MXNet
The duration (2016–09–22 to 2017–02–20) and potential breadth of information exposed is huge — Cloudflare has over 2 million websites on its network, and data from any of these is potentially exposed. Cloudflare has said the actual impact is relatively minor, so I believe only limited amounts of information were actually disseminated. Essentially, broad range of data was potentially at risk, but the risk to any individual piece of data was very low. Regardless, unless it can be shown conclusively that your data was NOT compromised, it would be prudent to consider the possibility it has been compromised.
[…]
From an individual perspective, this is straightforward —the most effective mitigation is to change your passwords. While this is on all probability not necessary (it is unlikely your passwords were exposed in this incident), it will absolutely improve your security from both this potential compromise and many other, far more likely security issues. Cloudflare is behind many of the largest consumer web services (Uber, Fitbit, OKCupid, …), so rather than trying to identify which services are on Cloudflare, the most cautious is use this as an opportunity to rotate ALL passwords on all of your sites. This will improve your security, although the primary benefit is from threats unrelated to this incident.
Source: Cloudbleed: How to deal with it – octal – Medium
The Kerala government has made a saving of Rs 300 crore through introduction and adoption of Free & Open Source Software (FOSS) in the school education sector, said a state government official on Sunday.
IT became a compulsory subject in Kerala schools from 2003, but it was in 2005 only that FOSS was introduced in a phased manner and started to replace proprietary software. The decision made by the curriculum committee to implement it in the higher secondary sector has also been completed now.
K. Anwar Sadath, executive director IT@School, said they have been entrusted the job for easy classroom transaction of chapters including customisation of applications, teachers’ training, and video tutorials.
“The proprietary version of this software would have incurred a minimum cost of Rs 150,000 per machine in terms of licence fee. Hence, the minimum savings in a year (considering 20,000 machines) is Rs 300 crore. It’s not the cost saving that matters more, but the fact that the Free Software licence enables not only teachers and students but also the general public an opportunity to copy, distribute and share the contents and use it as they wish,” he said.
Source: Kerala saves Rs 300 crore as schools switch to open software
The Check Point Mobile Threat Prevention has recently detected a severe infection in 38 Android devices, belonging to a large telecommunications company and a multinational technology company. While this is not unusual, one detail of the attacks stands out. In all instances, the malware was not downloaded to the device as a result of the users’ use, it arrived with it.
According to the findings, the malware were already present on the devices even before the users received them. The malicious apps were not part of the official ROM supplied by the vendor, and were added somewhere along the supply chain. Six of the malware instances were added by a malicious actor to the device’s ROM using system privileges, meaning they couldn’t be removed by the user and the device had to be re-flashed.
Source: Preinstalled Malware Targeting Mobile Users | Check Point Blog
By using lasers to manipulate a superfluid gas known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, the team was able to coax the condensate into a quantum phase of matter that has a rigid structure—like a solid—and can flow without viscosity—a key characteristic of a superfluid. Studies into this apparently contradictory phase of matter could yield deeper insights into superfluids and superconductors, which are important for improvements in technologies such as superconducting magnets and sensors, as well as efficient energy transport. The researchers report their results this week in the journal Nature.
“It is counterintuitive to have a material which combines superfluidity and solidity,” says team leader Wolfgang Ketterle, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics at MIT. “If your coffee was superfluid and you stirred it, it would continue to spin around forever.”
Physicists had predicted the possibility of supersolids but had not observed them in the lab. They theorized that solid helium could become superfluid if helium atoms could move around in a solid crystal of helium, effectively becoming a supersolid. However, the experimental proof remained elusive.
Source: Researchers create new form of matter—supersolid is crystalline and superfluid at the same time
Apis Cor are the first company to develop a mobile construction 3D printer which is capable of printing whole buildings completely on site.Also we are people. Engineers, managers, builders and inventors sharing one common idea – to change the construction industry so that millions of people will have an opportunity to improve their living conditions.On the six continents of Earth there are families which cannot afford to buy or build a house. A good accommodation is costly. And waiting for it to get construction takes more than a single month.So it used to be. Today – it’s different.Today we have a 3D printing technology, new building materials and a mobile 3D printer to build affordable, eco-friendly houses within a single day, capable of lasting up to 175 years
Source: Who we are | Apis Cor. We print buildings
IBM Q is an industry-first initiative to build commercially available universal quantum computers for business and science. While technologies like AI can find patterns buried in vast amounts of existing data, quantum computers will deliver solutions to important problems where patterns cannot be seen and the number of possibilities that you need to explore to get to the answer are too enormous ever to be processed by classical computers.
Source: IBM Q – US
A new material can absorb up to 90 times its own weight in spilled oil and then be squeezed out like a sponge and reused, raising hopes for easier clean-up of oil spill sites.
But to determine whether this material could help sort out a big spill in marine waters, they needed to perform a special large-scale test.
Recreating a spillTo do this, the team made an array of square pads of the sponge material measuring around 6 square metres. “We made a lot of the foam, and then these pieces of foam were placed inside mesh bags – basically laundry bags, with sewn channels to house the foam,” Darling says.
The researchers suspended their sponge-filled bags from a bridge over a large pool specially designed for practising emergency responses to oil spills.
They then dragged the sponges behind a pipe spewing crude oil to test the material’s capability to remove oil from the water. They next sent the sponges through a wringer to remove the oil and then repeated the process, carrying out many tests over multiple days.
Source: Sponge can soak up and release spilled oil hundreds of times | New Scientist
Cloud Video Intelligence API (now in Private Beta) uses powerful deep-learning models, built using frameworks like TensorFlow and applied on large-scale media platforms like YouTube. The API is the first of its kind, enabling developers to easily search and discover video content by providing information about entities (nouns such as “dog,” “flower” or “human” or verbs such as “run,” “swim” or “fly”) inside video content. It can even provide contextual understanding of when those entities appear; for example, searching for “Tiger” would find all precise shots containing tigers across a video collection in Google Cloud Storage.
Announcing Google Cloud Video Intelligence API, and more Cloud Machine Learning updates
Did they just copy the Github project Miles Deep – AI Porn Video Editor which can recognise and classify sexual acts in porn videos and make it more socially acceptable?
Scientists have trained a quantum computer to recognize trees. That may not seem like a big deal, but the result means that researchers are a step closer to using such computers for complicated machine learning problems like pattern recognition and computer vision.
The team used a D-Wave 2X computer, an advanced model from the Burnaby, Canada–based company that created the world’s first quantum computer in 2007
In a pilot starting in the north of the Netherlands, Weee Nederland is asking packet couriers to accept old electronics after delivering packages. Hopefully for recycling. If so, this sounds really good.
Pakketbezorger neemt oude apparaten mee
WikiLeaks begins its new series of leaks on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Code-named “Vault 7” by WikiLeaks, it is the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency.
The first full part of the series, “Year Zero”, comprises 8,761 documents and files from an isolated, high-security network situated inside the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virgina. It follows an introductory disclosure last month of CIA targeting French political parties and candidates in the lead up to the 2012 presidential election.
Recently, the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized “zero day” exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.
“Year Zero” introduces the scope and direction of the CIA’s global covert hacking program, its malware arsenal and dozens of “zero day” weaponized exploits against a wide range of U.S. and European company products, include Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.
Source: Vault7 – Home
A recent study from researchers at University of Twente (UT) and Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (AUAS) has found that three-phase static (electronic) energy meters, which are replacing traditional electromechanical meters, can exaggerate energy consumption by as much as 582 per cent.
Estimates of the number of households in the Netherlands with smart meters range from 750,000 to 1.5 million. In the US, smart meter penetration at the end of 2016 has been estimated at 70 million, according to the Edison Foundation [PDF].
The government of the Netherlands aims to replace at least 80 per cent of the energy meters in the country with smart meters by 2020, in keeping with EU goals. EU authorities suggest that smart meters, on average, result in energy savings of 3 per cent.
But as researchers Frank Leferink, Cees Keyer, and Anton Melentjev report, “Some consumers are complaining about their energy bills after replacement of the energy meter, because the registered energy is higher with the static meter compared to the old Ferraris meter.” Smart meter billing problems have also been documented in the US.
Source: Watt the f… Dim smart meters caught simply making up readings • The Register
So what problem are these smart meters solving anyway? Nowadays the energy companies don’t need to send someone to the house to check the meter, a photo will do?
28 countries backed the Planning and Conduct Capability (MPCC) with a view to it taking over this spring.
The embryonic military headquarters has long been opposed by Britain, the bloc’s leading military power, but the idea was revived by Germany and France after the British voted to leave the EU.
The organisation would command the bloc’s “non-executive military missions”, within the existing EU military staff of the European External Action Service (EEAS). These include the three military training missions the bloc now runs in Mali, Somalia and Central African Republic.
“These missions are important for peacekeeping but also for security in the region,” said Carmelo Abela, foreign minister of Malta, whose country chairs the rotating presidency of the EU.
In the future, this could also cover any capacity-building, monitoring or demobilisation and disarmament military missions.
“We are progressing steadily towards strengthened defence cooperation and we will continue to do more,” EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini said after the ministers’ meeting.
Source: EU takes first steps towards military HQ – EURACTIV.com
It is currently compromised of 30 personel and is designed to simplify the reporting from the (now 3) EU missions to this staff and from there a single report to Brussels.
Keras: Deep Learning library for Theano and TensorFlow
You have just found Keras.Keras is a high-level neural networks library, written in Python and capable of running on top of either TensorFlow or Theano. It was developed with a focus on enabling fast experimentation. Being able to go from idea to result with the least possible delay is key to doing good research.
Use Keras if you need a deep learning library that:
Allows for easy and fast prototyping (through total modularity, minimalism, and extensibility).
Supports both convolutional networks and recurrent networks, as well as combinations of the two.
Supports arbitrary connectivity schemes (including multi-input and multi-output training).
Runs seamlessly on CPU and GPU.
Source: Keras Documentation
Caffe is a deep learning framework made with expression, speed, and modularity in mind. It is developed by the Berkeley Vision and Learning Center (BVLC) and by community contributors. Yangqing Jia created the project during his PhD at UC Berkeley. Caffe is released under the BSD 2-Clause license.
Source: Caffe | Deep Learning Framework
Tensors and Dynamic neural networks in Python
with strong GPU acceleration.
PyTorch is a deep learning framework that puts Python first.
We are in an early-release Beta. Expect some adventures.
Source: PyTorch
Machine learning is cropping up more and more in research papers – does it work?
Source: From drugs to galaxy hunting, AI is elbowing its way into boffins’ labs • The Register
We investigate conditional adversarial networks as a general-purpose solution to image-to-image translation problems. These networks not only learn the mapping from input image to output image, but also learn a loss function to train this mapping. This makes it possible to apply the same generic approach to problems that traditionally would require very different loss formulations. We demonstrate that this approach is effective at synthesizing photos from label maps, reconstructing objects from edge maps, and colorizing images, among other tasks. As a community, we no longer hand-engineer our mapping functions, and this work suggests we can achieve reasonable results without hand-engineering our loss functions either.
Source: Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks
This is the pix2pix implementation in Tensorflow
The above link also has concrete examples allowing you to play with the data yourself on level = easy.
This is the man who made the tensorflow port and also uses it to fill in drawings of cats.
Astronomers have found a system of seven Earth-sized planets just 40 light-years away. They were detected as they passed in front of their parent star, the dwarf star TRAPPIST-1. Three of them lie in the habitable zone and could harbour water, increasing the possibility that the system could play host to life. It has both the largest number of Earth-sized planets yet found and the largest number of worlds that could support liquid water.
Source: Temperate earth-sized worlds found in extraordinarily rich planetary system (Update)
ETSI is pleased to announce the creation of the Industry Specification Group ‘Experiential Network Intelligence’ (ISG ENI).
The purpose of the group is to define a Cognitive Network Management architecture that is based on the “observe-orient-decide-act” control model. It uses AI (Artificial Intelligence) techniques and context-aware policies to adjust offered services based on changes in user needs, environmental conditions and business goals. The system is experiential, in that it learns from its operation and from decisions given to it by operators to improve its knowledge of how to act in the future. This will help operators automate their network configuration and monitoring processes, thereby reducing their operational expenditure and improving the use and maintenance of their networks.
Source: New ETSI group on improving operator experience using Artificial Intelligence
“It has been established that charge transport is possible in DNA, but for a useful device, one wants to be able to turn the charge transport on and off. We achieved this goal by chemically modifying DNA,” said Tao, who directs the Biodesign Center for Bioelectronics and Biosensors and is a professor in the Fulton Schools of Engineering. “Not only that, but we can also adapt the modified DNA as a probe to measure reactions at the single-molecule level. This provides a unique way for studying important reactions implicated in disease, or photosynthesis reactions for novel renewable energy applications.”
Engineers often think of electricity like water, and the research team’s new DNA switch acts to control the flow of electrons on and off, just like water coming out of a faucet.
Previously, Tao’s research group had made several discoveries to understand and manipulate DNA to more finely tune the flow of electricity through it. They found they could make DNA behave in different ways—and could cajole electrons to flow like waves according to quantum mechanics, or “hop” like rabbits in the way electricity in a copper wire works —creating an exciting new avenue for DNA-based, nano-electronic applications.
Source: Switched-on DNA: Sparking nano-electronic applications
People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of the participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
Source: PsycNET – DOI Landing page
309
Easy Solutions #1
So, you’re in love with one of your friends, but she has a boyfriend and probably wouldn’t have sex with you anyway.
What you will need: 1 x knife, 1 x ring, access to a sunbed, the ability to grow a beard.
Step One: Place the ring on your wedding finger and avoid contact with your friend for a month.
Step Two: Stop shaving and use the sunbed to gain a tan.
Step Three: After a month when your beard is full and your tan is noticeable, remove the ring from your finger.
Step Four: Remove all your clothes and break into your friend’s house.
Step Five: Use the knife to cut your body in various places. Avoid the face. If possible, focus on your back. The more blood the better.
Step Six: Enter your friend’s bedroom and lie face down on the floor. Wait for her return.
Step Seven: When she enters the room pretend to be unconscious. Allow her to turn you over and try to wake you for a few seconds before you open your eyes. The injuries to your body will serve as a distraction to your nakedness. She will be more concerned about your wellbeing instead of fearing the naked man in her room.
Step Eight: When she asks you what’s happened you should ignore her questions. Instead you must act confused and ask the date. If it’s September 15th she will say ‘September 15th’ to which you must reply ‘No, what year is it?’
Step Nine: Upon hearing the year say the words ‘It worked.’ Pretend to lose consciousness again for a few seconds, implying that whatever it is that has worked took a great effort.
Step Ten: If your friend is a curious person she will probably ask ‘What worked?’, even if she doesn’t ask this question it is important that you now say the words ‘(Insert Friend’s Name), I’m from the future’ in your most deadpan voice.
Step Eleven: Pause for ten seconds to allow the incrediblness of the situation to sink in. There will be no reason for her to doubt your claim, because your beard will make you appear many years older and your cuts would add weight to the idea that you’ve come from a post-apocalyptic future where a war is currently taking place.
Step Twelve: Raise your left hand to your face. All women are very observant, so your friend will immediately notice the tanline on your wedding finger. If she is educated to a decent standard she will realise that you are married and your ring has simply disappeared, because clothing and other items cannot travel through time. Your nudity will support this.
Step Thirteen: Now comes the hard part – The monologue. In your own words you must give a speech in which you mention all of these key points:
a) You are married to each other in the future
b) Her current boyfriend is dead
c) The world is coming to an end. It’s up to you to pick a reason, but I would recommend a war against machines. This whole situation will be backed up by the Terminator franchise
d) In the future your relationship is not going well
e) You’ve come back in time because you can’t help but feel that she would have been happier with her current boyfriend if he hadn’t been killed
f) Her current boyfriend is going to be hit by a bus on a day six months from her present. She should stop him going to work that day
g) If she does exactly what you say this current version of yourself will be erased and you will never get married. If she questions this flaw in your time travel logic, because you cannot change the past, simply reference Back to the Future
Step Fourteen: Unless your friend is made of stone she will now be overcome by emotion, especially at your selflessness. Get to your feet and go to kiss her goodbye. It is important that you do this with the confidence of a man who has done this to her many times.
Step Fifteen: There is now no possible way that you aren’t about to have sex with her. You’re naked, kissing her, in her bedroom, agreeing to erase a version of yourself from history to make her happy. And as far as she knows you’ve had sex many times in a future that will no longer happen, so she thinks to herself that maybe she should have one memory of it.
Step Sixteen: After having the sex, ask to borrow some clothes then leave.
Step Seventeen: Shave off your beard and coat your wedding finger in fake tan. Carry on as if nothing has happened. There will be three possible outcomes:
1) During the sex some feelings that she didn’t know existed are awakened and she will leave her boyfriend for you.
2) Life will carry on as normal.
3) You will be filled with guilt because of this moral grey area where you aren’t entirely sure if what you’ve done counts as some kind of low level rape. You will take your own life by hanging, overdose or wrist cutting.
