Is AI the hot topic of the moment? Well, tickets for one of the foremost conferences for academics, the Neural Information Processing Systems conference, sold out in under 12 minutes…
https://rob.al/2QbhPeR
The conference has become the one that everyone working in the field of artificial intelligence wants to attend.

Ever thought of becoming a bug hunter? The pay's ok – not great, just ok. For Evan Ricafort, in the Philippines, it's enough to make ends meet – in a typical month, Ricafort earns roughly average salary, sometimes more. Free t-shirts and tours of the US Capitol don't pay the bills…
https://rob.al/2QdpOrC
Independent cybersleuthing is a realistic career path, if you can live cheaply.

IBM is testing a paper test strip which, when analysed with an app on a standard smartphone, could reduce the time and cost for farmers trying to work out how to prepare soil for planting, treat water, or maintain optimal growth of crops. The card is about the size of a business card, and changes colour in specific patterns to measure pH, nitrogen dioxide, aluminium and other chemicals necessary for (or best avoided) for healthy plant growth. The app allows immediate, precise diagnosis (the camera is more a accurate colour sensor than the human eye), and aggregated data can help governments monitor fertilizer/chemical use.
https://rob.al/2MZR7b2
The IBM AgroPad is a paper testing strip that, when combined with a mobile app, relies on machine vision to measure the precise amounts of chemicals in samples of water and soil.

Prof Jim Al-Khalili, incoming president of the British Science Association, will say in his presidential address that without both increased transparency and public engagement, AI could become uncontrolled and unregulated, in the hands of the powerful for the benefit of the few, or being seen as sinister and scary by a public which doesn't understand what it is or how it works. More public engagement, he says, is necessary to ensure that leaders and governments properly design regulations to ensure the technology is used in ways which does not increase inequality in society.
https://rob.al/2NXNX49
Without greater transparency AI’s full potential may not be realised, warns British Science Association’s incoming president

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, supply chain options and more. So where does Amazon see this ending up? “The sky’s the limit … you will also see that Alexa will just be embedded in more devices and customers will stop thinking about talking to a device per se. It will become more about speaking at large.”
https://rob.al/2oNUZxp
Home isn’t just where the smart is

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 on recent sales and product searches.
https://rob.al/2MTbUNz
Online shopping for Holiday Toy List: Top 100 Toys from a great selection at Toys & Games Store.

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 like.
https://rob.al/2Cy6MJW
The Voyager team is able to use a set of four backup thrusters, dormant since 1980, for orienting the spacecraft.

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 manufacturers – around the privacy and security implications of my forgetful behaviour.
https://rob.al/2CxlvET
Manufacturers seem reluctant to do anything about it

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://rob.al/2MXFWzx – and read the explanatory blog here:
https://rob.al/2MWMCht
Today we launched the 2018 update to the Stack Overflow Salary Calculator, a tool that allows developers and employers to find typical salaries for the software industry based on experience level,…

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