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,…

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 carry the weight of ice-melting fluids, or to power  heating elements at key points on the plane. Also, deicing at the wrong time can lead to other risks – such as ice forming in places not protected by countermeasures. £100k is up for grabs.
https://rob.al/2M9cmSl
Stop, collaborate and listen: Ice is back we need a brand new invention

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://rob.al/2wADjd1
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 unapproac…

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 on the content of their tests and code, rather than spending time iterating and tweaking.
https://rob.al/2NaPvKZ
Posted by Pablo Samuel Castro, Research Software Developer and Marc G. Bellemare, Research Scientist, Google Brain Team Reinforcement lear…

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 (e.g. kitty -> cat is closer than kitty -> rocket). Using this model, the relative positions of words can be used to create the translation between languages for which there is little existing identical material. Although promising, performance is still lower than using supervised methods.
https://rob.al/2Cdsi6C
Automatic language translation is important to Facebook as a way to allow the billions of people who use our services to connect and communicate in their preferred language. To do this well, curren…