Deep learning and artificial intelligence are on their way to bringing about a sea change in how we use computers in medicine. Neural networks have the power to work toward solutions using approaches they devise on their own — and it gives them incredible problem-solving capabilities. You can’t exactly plug more RAM into a human brain (yet), but you can combine a supercomputer cluster with neural networks that do diagnostic image processing. This mighty partnership gives the ability to apply the collective wisdom and insight of doctors and scientists worldwide to the collective processing power of every core in the cluster.
Nvidia has another design win for its Drive PX artificial intelligence platform for autonomous driving: Toyota. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made the announcement this week in the opening keynote of the company’s GPU Technology Conference in San Jose. Coming on the heels of Nvidia hookups with Mercedes-Benz and Audi, it’s a clear sign that the once-just-a-graphics-card company is serious competition in the automotive sector for the likes of Intel, which plans to invest $15 billion on autonomous driving.
Cassini has entered its stately death spiral, and the images it’s beaming back from Saturn are second to none. As it starts the Grand Finale, Cassini is taking a long, intense burst of observations designed to beam back as much data from Saturn as we can possibly scrape up, including parsing out an audio recording from flecks of dust smacking into the orbiter’s hull. “Cassini’s imaging cameras, the Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS), takes advantage of the last opportunity to observe Saturn’s rings at extremely high phase angles while the Sun is hidden behind Saturn, allowing the instrument to survey faint ringlets in the main rings, many of which are difficult to observe outside of this geometry.
The Amazon Echo seemed like a bizarre device when it was announced, but it was just the first home of Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant. Alexa has since expanded to more smart speakers, tablets, and phones. Now, Amazon is preparing to add a visual element to Alexa with the ($229), the first Echo device with a screen. Since the launch of the original Echo, has aggressively expanded its Alexa partnerships to end up with thousands of so-called “skills.” An Alexa skill is any service or product that plugs into Alexa voice commands. Skills include everything from CNN headlines to Arlo security cameras.
Device coverage in the smartphone world tends to focus on high-end products, rather than midrange or upper midrange hardware. That makes sense, from a feature standpoint, since companies tend to debut new capabilities in their highest-end devices, but it misses some of the improvements that happen lower down the stack. Qualcomm’s new upper-midrange and midrange Snapdragon 600 refreshes were announced today, and both parts are a solid improvement over their predecessors. Both the Snapdragon 630 and 660 are being upgraded with the X12 LTE modem that debuted with the last year. You don’t need to sweat the technical details too much on this — the bottom line is that the newer modem is capable of up to 600Mbps downstream and 150Mbps upstream connectivity.
Microsoft Edge has come a long way since Microsoft introduced it nearly two years ago, and while the browser hasn’t caught up with Firefox or Chrome in terms of extensions or market share, MS has been adding features and capabilities in its major OS releases. As BleepingComputer , however, Edge has a major printer bug that could cause significant headaches for anyone who uses the browser. The problem is compounded by the fact that Edge is set to be the default PDF handler in Windows 10. Microsoft has already confirmed the bug exists, and its recommendation for how to deal with the problem at this point is rather amusing.
Over the past few years, companies like Samsung, TSMC, and GlobalFoundries have all jockeyed for the pole position in the highly competitive (and extremely expensive) foundry business. Even Intel, which used to march to the beat of its own drum, has gotten in on the action. As the cost of each new node has risen, the need to be first has increased as well. The first company to hit a new node tends to secure many of the most lucrative contracts. For most of the past two decades, the pure-play foundry world was dominated by TSMC, but Samsung beat its Taiwanese rival to 14nm and made a fair bit of cash in the process.
Google released the first developer preview of the upcoming Android O update several months ago, but the Android beta program was still busy with Android 7.1 Nougat at the time. Now, Google says a full beta test of Android O will begin soon, and that means the Android Nougat beta is now closed. The current build of Android O (which has neither a name nor a version number) is . The only way to install it is to connect your eligible phone to a PC and use the Android SDK tools to flash the system image. It’s not terribly difficult if you’re familiar with , but it’s not the sort of thing average consumers should be attempting.
Ever since Microsoft debuted the Surface brand five years ago, the Surface Pro has been its high-end tablet offering, intended as an uncompromising example of what PCs can offer in this space. For the past 18 months, the Surface lineup has rested on its laurels with the Surface Pro 4 — a solid system based on Intel’s Skylake processors, but one that’s showing some age. In a with CNET, Panos Panay, Microsoft’s VP of Devices, declared there’s “no such thing” as Surface Pro 5, and seemed to dismiss the idea that Microsoft would be launching a new device with that branding in the near-term future.
