TLDR 2019-07-23

Microsoft invests in OpenAI, IBM's debating robot

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Big Tech & Startups

Microsoft invests $1 billion in OpenAI to pursue holy grail of artificial intelligence (4 minute read)

Microsoft is investing $1 billion in OpenAI and will provide cloud computing services to the artificial intelligence research lab in order to develop new technologies. Originally, OpenAI started as a nonprofit research lab focused on developing AI in a safe and democratic fashion, but earlier this year OpenAI announced that it needed more money to continue work. A new for-profit firm to seek outside investment was created, with clear rules to restrict the amount of potential return that investors could expect. OpenAI is dedicated to creating artificial general intelligence and has so far created many impressive projects, but none that come close to actual AGI.

Apple reportedly in talks to buy Intel’s 5G modem business for $1 billion (2 minute read)

Intel announced in April that it was backing out of the 5G mobile modem business after Apple settled with Qualcomm in a deal where Apple would use Qualcomm modems in their devices again. Apple may now be buying a portion of Intel's business, which covers a portfolio of patents and staff, for $1 billion. After the deal with Qualcomm, Apple had reportedly been working on developing its own in-house modems. Purchasing Intel's modem business would make sense for Apple as Intel had previously produced modems for Apple. The merger would speed up the development process and allow Apple to operate independently of a third party.
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Science & Futuristic Technology

IBM's debating robot argues it out with human for first time (1 minute read)

Project Debater is an AI that IBM spent six years developing that is able to draw from a bank of several hundred million articles to construct arguments. It also uses speech recognition to analyze its opponent's arguments. In its first public debate, it scored 1-1 against a human opponent. While it performed well, it had some un-human slip-ups, including sentences that didn't follow naturally from the previous statement and phrases that it included from the source text that were annotations.

Robots will soon invade St. Petersburg’s sewer pipes. Do not fear them (5 minute read)

Autonomous crawling robots are being used to scan sewage pipes for potential problems in St. Petersburg. Between 2015 and 2016, the city's pipes overflowed by up to 1 billion gallons. It was determined that old pipes were the cause of the issue, and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection required the city to upgrade the system, allowing five years for the city to evaluate the state of its pipes. The crawling robots are able to map the pipe system and prioritize sections of the pipe network that require the most work. They can scan between 7,000 to 10,000 linear feet of pipe per day, compared to the 2,000 feet of pipe that can be inspected with current methods.
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Programming, Design & Data Science

Sinuous (GitHub Repo)

Sinuous is a small, blazing-fast, reactive UI library. It uses declarative views, making code clear, more predictable, and easier to debug while matching the performance of direct DOM manipulation. Sinuous is currently ranked in the top 80+ of UI libraries.

ML and DS Applications in Industry (GitHub Repo)

This repository contains a curated list of applied machine learning articles, data science notebooks, and libraries across different industries. Topics are organized according to industry and each link has a short description. The repository will be deprecated in November 2019, after which new edits will appear in a private repo.
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Miscellaneous

Huawei reportedly helped North Korea build its wireless network (3 minute read)

According to several sources, Huawei worked with the North Korean government to build and maintain a commercial wireless network. Documents show that Huawei partnered with a Chinese state-owned firm on several projects over eight years. Huawei states that it has no business presence in North Korea and that it is fully committed to complying with all laws and regulations in the areas where it operates. In the last few months, Huawei has been involved in several legal disputes, including trade sanctions from the US and criminal investigations by the Department of Justice.
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