This article is part of our coverage of the latest in AI research. What is the next step toward bridging the gap between natural and artificial intelligence? Scientists and researchers are divided on the answer. Yann LeCun, Chief AI Scientist at Meta and the recipient of the 2018 Turing Award, is betting on self-supervised learning, machine learning models that can be trained without the need for human-labeled examples. LeCun has been thinking and talking about self-supervised and unsupervised l
By: Alfred Ng and Jon Keegan There is an estimated $12 billion market of companies that buy and sell location data collected from your cellphone. And the trade is entirely legal in the U.S. Without legislation limiting the location data trade, Apple and Google have become the de facto regulators for keeping your whereabouts private—through shifts in transparency requirements and crackdowns on certain data brokers. Specifically, the app stores have cracked down on data brokers that market softwar
We’re now years into this great experiment in remote work. It started off as a Zoom, but now it feels more like a plod. Our work lives are lived on camera all day, every day—and it’s time to let people take a break. Face-muting is ok Communicating remotely isn’t new. For ages, we corresponded by mail. Then we added telegraphs, which increased the speed of communication. Then came telephones, which allowed us to communicate beyond cables. Fax, email, instant message—the communication options cont
By: Eve Zelickson Chances are at some point in your internet travels you’ve stumbled on a warning that reads something like “Your connection is not private. Attackers might be trying to steal your information.” The page usually gives you an option to proceed to the website anyway. But should you? Why did I get rerouted to this page? Today, we conduct more activities online than ever before: paying bills, buying groceries, and interfacing with doctors, to name a few. With more of these websites r
This article was originally published by Christopher Carey on Cities Today, the leading news platform on urban mobility and innovation, reaching an international audience of city leaders. For the latest updates, follow Cities Today on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube, or sign up for Cities Today News. Micromobility firm TIER has announced a new partnership that gives ageing electric lithium batteries a second life. Partnering with German start-up Vertical Values, the firm will
Baseball’s back and I couldn’t care less. What I’m excited about is the world champion Atlanta Braves’ new virtual stadium. A company called Surreal Events is working with the champs to bring a virtual representation of Truist Park to life via a virtual platform-as-a-service model built in the Unreal engine. As boring as that sounds, the emergence of an interface-agnostic portal to bespoke metaverses might be what finally convinces the cynical masses that the future is now. It’s not so much that
“Orwellian” references are invoked to the point of cliche, but big tech sure makes them hard to resist. The latest temptress is Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta. In a move redolent of 1984’s Two Minutes Hate, the company has temporarily permitted calls for violence and deaths. The social media behemoth has provisionally permitted hate speech in certain Facebook and Instagram posts. There’s no need to worry, however; the malice can only target Meta-approved baddies. Violent speech will now be permitted whe
The electric transformation of Volkswagen’s iconic T1 microbus has been in the making for five years — a decade if we count the various Bulli concepts VW has consistently teased us with. Now, the VW ID Buzz has finally made its debut as an all-electric, multi-purpose vehicle (MPV) and cargo van. Was it worth the wait? ABSOLUTELY. Feast your eyes! On the left, the ID Buzz. On the right, the ID Buzz Cargo. Image: Volkswagen Design-wise the ID Buzz is clearly channeling the retro DNA of the origina
The Andean highlands of South America — where Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia meet — is also known as the “Lithium Triangle,” as the region contains more than half of the world’s supply of the valuable metal. This has attracted numerous mining companies, with their focus especially on one lake in northeastern Chile called Salar de Atacama. This is estimated to contain almost 30% of the globe’s known lithium. The so-called “Lithium Triangle.” Image: Economist But as promising as this sounds for our
One year ago, an artwork was sold for US$69 million (£52.6 million) by the prestigious auction house Christie’s. This was no lost Matisse or rarely seen Van Gogh. Instead, it was a composite collection of digital art by the then relatively unknown artist Beeple. What makes this piece, Everydays: the First 5000 Days, truly remarkable, is that it was sold as a non-fungible token (NFT). In the year since that sale, NFTs have gone from a relatively obscure tech-world phenomenon to the mainstream. NF