Daniel Rausch, Amazon's Vice President of Smart Home, reveals that it took 3 years to get to 4,000 Alexa-compatible devices on the market, but in the past 9 months that number has risen from 9,000 to 20,000, helped in no small part by Amazon's efforts to simplify OEM vendor adoption through SDKs, hardware development training,…

The Verge has published a great round up on 5G, outlining the technical background, (US) carrier rollout plans, chip manufacturers, and phone vendor plans. https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/7/17829270/5g-phone-cell-mobile-network-hardware The state of 5G

It's only September, and already people are thinking about Christmas shopping, or so Amazon would have us believe. In what's pitched as an example of data science at scale, but which a cynic might refer to as a solid marketing campaign, Amazon's published their "Top 100 toys" to put under the Christmas tree, apparently based…

Sometimes the code i write doesn't work 6 months later – so I was incredibly impressed to read about the NASA team who reprogrammed the Voyager 1 space probe some 37 YEARS after the code was last changed. I can't imagine what the 40 hour wait between sending the commands and receiving the response was…

Although we're all used to resetting our smartphones before we sell them, I have to admit that i often forget to wipe the memory of the carplay-enabled hire cars I used over the summer before returning them to the hire company. The Register highlights growing concern among a range of stakeholders – but not car…

In their 2018 Salary Survey, Stack Overflow reveals a global increase in Software Engineer salaries, with some locations like London and San Francisco seeing rises in median salary of around 25%, with DevOps engineers commanding the highest pay. Check out how your salary compares here – https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/salary – and read the explanatory blog here: https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/09/05/developer-salaries-in-2018-updating-the-stack-overflow-salary-calculator/…

In a push to increase collaboration between the UK and Canada on industrial uses of AI, the UK government has teamed up with Canadian aircraft manufacturer Bombardier to offer a prize for ideas which solve an interesting problem – an optimal, self managing de-icing strategy for aircraft. De-icing causes extra fuel burn – either to…

In what must have been a fun project, creative agency redpepper has built a robot which can play Where's Wally (Waldo in the US) using Google's AutoML Machine vision service. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i7HMPpxB-Y We built a little robot called “There’s Waldo” to test the capabilities of Google’s new AutoML Vision service. We’ve found that technologies can be…

As more and more teams work with the Arcade Learning Environment to train RL models on Atari games, it becomes more important to a) ensure that comparisons are truly like-for-like and reproducible, and b) find ways to speed up and simplify model iteration. Google has developed a Tensorflow framework, called Dopamine, allowing researchers to focus…

One problem with existing training methods for unsupervised learning used in human language translation is the availability of text "pairs" (such as the same sentence written twice) between obscure languages – such as Welsh to Urdu. Facebook is testing out a new mechanism involving "word embeddings" – vector-space representation of words in a given language…