Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Recently, two computer scientists had an idea: if computers use energy to perform calculations, could stored data be a form of saved energy? Why not use computing as a way to store energy? What if information could be a battery, man? As it turns out, the idea isn’t as far-fetched as […]
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images ) Training AIs remains very processor-intensive, in part because traditional processing architectures are poor matches for the sorts of neural networks that are widely used. This has led to the development of what has been termed neuromorphic computing hardware, which attempts to model the behavior of biological neurons in hardware. But […]
Enlarge / This photo has a job application for Boston University hidden within it. The technique introduced by Wang, Liu, and Cui could hide data inside an image classifier rather than just an image. (credit: Keith McDuffy CC-BY 2.0) Researchers Zhi Wang, Chaoge Liu, and Xiang Cui published a paper last Monday demonstrating a new technique […]
L’Atelier is among the firms building machine learning software to hunt for tech ripe for commercial success Read More
Sunspring, a short science fiction movie written entirely by AI, debuted exclusively on Ars in June 2016. (video link) Ars is excited to be hosting this online debut of Sunspring, a short science fiction film that’s not entirely what it seems. It’s about three people living in a weird future, possibly on a space station, probably in a love […]
A.I. systems need data to learn, but privacy and. governance concerns make sharing it difficult. Read More
(credit: Pawlowicz and Downum 2021) Real archaeological fieldwork is seldom as exciting as it looks in the movies. You tend to get fewer reanimated mummies, deadly booby traps, and dramatic shootouts with Nazis. Instead, you’ll see pieces of broken pottery—a lot of them. Potsherds are ubiquitous at archaeological sites, and that’s true for pretty much […]
Imagine the life of an advertising executive and a scene from Mad Men is likely to come to mind: Don Draper snake-charming a pair of Kodak marketing executives with a perfectly crafted pitch about the emotional pull of nostalgia (“It’s delicate, but potent…”) in order to win the account for their new slide projector. “This […]
Just a few years ago, smart cities, a catch-all phrase for connecting urban infrastructure like parking meters and stoplights online, had major buzz. The idea was to use machine learning to crunch data collected across cities to, for example, minimize traffic delays and reduce pollution. But smart city projects haven’t taken off as quickly as expected, […]
The journalist Malcolm Gladwell, on his podcast, “Revisionist History,” devoted a recent episode to his theory of “hiring nihilism.” It is Gladwell’s belief that people are so bad at predicting who will perform well at a given role—especially based on traditional screening criteria such as CVs and candidate interviews—that one should simply concede that all […]