TLDR 2019-07-15

Amazon home robots, Musk's brain-computer

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Big Tech & Startups

Elon Musk’s brain-computer company schedules reveal (2 minute read)

Elon Musk’s brain-computing venture Neuralink has announced an event on Tuesday where it will reveal what the company has been secretly working on the last few years. Neuralink is rumored to be working on brain implants that would help treat cognitive impairments and neurological diseases. Musk has said before that he aims to create a product that would augment humans with artificial intelligence. Job listings on Neuralink’s website describe the company as developing “ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers.”

Amazon continues work on mobile home robot as it preps new high-end Echo, says report (2 minute read)

Rumors that Amazon was working on a wheeled home robot started in April last year. The project was reportedly named ‘Vesta’ and it is supposed to be a waist-high robot that can navigate with the help of an array of computer vision cameras. It will have Alexa built in and can be summoned with voice commands. Vesta was apparently meant to launch this year but there were issues with mass production. Amazon is also working on a high-end Echo device that will be released next year.
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Science & Futuristic Technology

A Chinese AI startup is tracking lost dogs using their nose prints (1 minute read)

Megvii is a Chinese AI startup that supplies facial recognition software for the Chinese government’s surveillance program. It has released an app that is able to recognize dogs by their nose prints, which are unique, just like our fingerprints. Owners are required to take photos of their dog’s snouts from multiple angles to register. Megvii claims that it has a 95 percent accuracy rate and that the app has reunited 15,000 lost pets with their owners. Due to Megvii’s relationship with the Chinese government, the app may also be used to track owners to make sure that they keep their pets controlled and clean in public areas.

India’s Going to the Moon, and the Country Is Pumped (8 minute read)

India’s plan to send a robotic rover to the south pole of the moon was delayed due to technical issues. Chandrayaan-2 will be the first ever space mission to the moon’s south pole. While India has hundreds of millions of people stuck in poverty, its universities produce some of the best software engineers and scientists in the world, making the country suited to space exploration. In 2008, an Indian space mission discovered water molecules on the moon. Many citizens are filled with a sense of national pride regarding the mission and children are learning about space exploration in special learning programs.
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Programming, Design & Data Science

Startup School (Website)

Startup School is a free 10-week online course that teaches how to start a startup. Participants have access to a global network of entrepreneurs, mentorship, exclusive deals, and a chance at receiving funding. The deadline to sign up is July 21, and the course begins on July 22.

MediaPipe (GitHub Repo)

MediaPipe is a framework for building multimodal machine learning pipelines. Using MediaPipe, a machine learning pipeline can be visualized as a graph of modular components. It is mainly used for rapid prototyping of applied machine learning pipelines with inference models and other reusable components.
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Miscellaneous

Thousands of people have taken a Facebook pledge to storm Area 51 to 'see them aliens' (1 minute read)

Over 300,000 people have signed up to a Facebook event pledging to raid Area 51. Attendees will run in a style adopted from a Japanese manga into the secure area on September 20. Area 51 has been shrouded in mystery for decades, with the government finally officially acknowledging it as a military site in 2013. Many people believe it is where the US government stores its secrets about aliens and UFOs. A few weeks ago, a group of US senators was briefed about reported encounters between the US Navy and an unidentified flying object.
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