AMD’s Ryzen 2000-series has a couple of new X CPUs: The 2500X and 2300X. They should provide system builders with a broader range of hardware options for those looking for mid-range gaming PCs.
The post AMD Ryzen 2500X and 2300X expand quad-core options for new CPUs appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
Researchers from Finland have analyzed various anti-hate speech systems, including tools built by Google’s Counter Abuse team. Their findings show just how easily these systems can be tricked.
The post Current tech for detecting hate speech is woefully inadequate, researchers find appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
Apple may define the future of the iPad Pro at its Sept. 12 event.
Source: CNET
Grab your pager and get ready to head back to the 1990s for a solo film about a Marvel heroine who just might save the universe. Here’s what we know.
Source: CNET
Don’t miss any of the major announcements this season.
Source: CNET
Snapdragon’s been talking up its new wearable chip architecture since Google I/O back in May. The component giant finally took the wraps off the product at an event earlier today in San Francisco.
As one imagines from the I/O partnership, Wear 3100 has Google’s smartwatch operating system firmly in its sites. And not a moment too soon, really. In spite of a handful of updates, Wear OS has felt pretty stagnant for some time. Not even the rebrand from Android Wear could help shake loose the cobwebs.
The new architecture replaces the 2100. Qualcomm’s chips are currently shipping in more than 100 different Wear OS watches by 25 different brands, according to the company. Honestly, I’m mostly surprised to hear that Wear OS devices have hit the triple digits. After all, category leaders like Apple, Fitbit and Samsung have all opted to invest in their own software ecosystem, rather than embracing Google.
Interestingly, the first three partners for the new chip are luxury watch makers, rather than tech companies like LG or Huawei. Fossil Group, Louis Vuitton and Montblanc have all signed up to use the tech, perhaps marking the perceived way forward for the operating system. A Pixel Watch launching at Google’s fall event also seems like a very likely possibility, given the timing of the news.
Extended battery life is the main thing here — that, after all, has long been the bane of smartwatch makers. The new chip also brings new modes, include a “Traditional Watch Mode” to cut down on battery use and a “Rich Interactive Mode” for a more robust experience.
The new chip starts shipping for mass production today.
Source: TechCrunch
Everything about the newest MCU character, Carol Danvers and her place in the Marvel universe. Spoilers ahead!
Source: CNET
What happens when you add AI to food? Surprisingly, you don’t get a hungry robot. Instead you get something like PixFood. PixFood lets you take pictures of food, identify available ingredients, and, at this stage, find out recipes you can make from your larder.
It is privately funded.
“There are tons of recipe apps out there, but all they give you is, well, recipes,” said Tonnesson. “On the other hand, PixFood has the ability to help users get the right recipe for them at that particular moment. There are apps that cover some of the mentioned, but it’s still an exhausting process – since you have to fill in a 50-question quiz so it can understand what you like.”
They launched in August and currently have 3,000 monthly active users from 10,000 downloads. They’re working on perfecting the system for their first users.
“PixFood is AI-driven food app with advanced photo recognition. The user experience is quite simple: it all starts with users taking a photo of any ingredient they would like to cook with, in the kitchen or in the supermarket,” said Tonnesson. “Why did we do it like this? Because it’s personalized. After you take a photo, the app instantly sends you tailored recipe suggestions! At first, they are more or le
ss the same for everyone, but as you continue using it, it starts to learn what you precisely like, by connecting patterns and taking into consideration different behaviors.”
In my rudimentary tests the AI worked acceptably well and did not encourage me to eat a monkey. While the app begs the obvious question – why not just type in “corn?” – it’s an interesting use of vision technology that is definitely a step in the right direction.
Tonnesson expects the AI to start connecting you with other players in the food space, allowing you to order corn (but not a monkey) from a number of providers.
“Users should also expect partnerships with restaurants, grocery, meal-kit, and other food delivery services will be part of the future experiences,” he said.
Source: TechCrunch
While many lament the death of local news, a small army of tech startups have been developing a new set of tools to figure out how to save it. In one of the latest developments, Hoodline — which has built a platform to ingest and analyse hundreds of terabytes of data to find and then write local news stories — has raised $10 million in a Series A round to help take its effort nationwide.
“We want to cover the news deserts that no one else is covering,” said Hoodline’s founder and CEO Razmig Hovaghimian. “It’s filling a gap. It’s filling a need.”
The San Francisco startup had once been called Ripple News (in reference to the news that “ripples out” from one event) but then took the name of a hyperlocal news blog network that it acquired in 2016 after another Ripple began to make waves.
It is currently generating stories in 20 cities, with ABC, MSN, Yahoo, Hearst and CBS among the publishers that are partnering with it to use its content.
This latest Series A round was led by Neoteny, a seed and early stage investment firm out of Boston whose founder and lead partner, MIT Media Lab director Joichi Ito, is also joining Hoodline’s board.
Sound Ventures, Dentsu Ventures and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors also participated, among other investors who asked not to be named.
Hoodline had been a part of Disney’s accelerator in 2017, so it too has backed the company, as has Rakuten, the Japanese e-commerce behemoth that acquired Hovaghimian’s previous startup, the crowdsourced online video subtitling startup Viki.
Hoodline is not disclosing its valuation, but from what we understand, it’s around $75 million and a bump up from its previous valuation.
Hoodline’s platform today has two parts: a local data wire producing local news stories; and a recommendation module that is somewhat similar to the likes of Outbrain and Taboola. Rather than recirculating stories from a wider network of clickable sites, however, it suggests stories from Hoodline’s inventory of stories, alongside a publication’s own inventory to keep people engaged on a site for longer.
The first of these inks partnerships with media platforms to supply content but currently is provided free to them; the second runs ads alongside the recommended articles.
One of the big issues with local news and its decline is that, as more traditional publishers have moved to the internet to cut the costs of producing printed newspapers, they’ve found that the revenues and margins that they generated from the older activities have not translated to the newer medium and the issues that even exist for large, world-famous publications are only compounded for smaller ones: they have a hard time getting the economies of scale needed to make the ad-based model work, and then when they club together they have to contend with the fact that their readership has moved on to other forms of infotainment.
But as it turns out, there is still an appetite for local information.
“There are so many good stories that go uncovered,” Hovaghimian said. “Plus, forty percent of all searches have local intent.” Facebook’s new interest in local news and Google’s own experiments with local journalism aren’t simple good-will attempts at fostering more community; they reflect interests that these companies have observed among their user bases.
So now, while tech has arguably “killed” the local news business in that way, it’s also been trying to save it be — namely in the form of providing more intelligent ways to run its business, from the advertising technology and/or paywalls to fund it, through to disrupting and improving the means of producing it.
Hoodline is part of the guard of companies that have been looking at how the rise of new kinds of computing technology, such as AI and big data analytics, can be used to help with the latter of these.
“Hoodline is bringing pioneering technology to the world of hyper-local news and content, while layering in editorial expertise and perspective. This uniquely allows them to craft dynamic stories across a wide range of verticals and outlets,” said Ito in a statement. “We’re incredibly excited to be partnering with Hoodline and Razmig as they continue to deliver consumers content that they want, but was previously not available to them.”
Hoodline is not the only one exploring how to tap into big data to build stories; there are many. Among them, in the UK, the Press Association is working with a startup called Urbs to develop AI systems that can help surface interesting stories for (human) journalists to write. In the US, Automated Insights has been developing “robot” reporters to cover local sports and quarterly earnings beats. Other efforts like LiveStories is also tackling a trove of publicly available information — in its case civic data — to visualise and shape narratives from it, products that potentially also make their way into the news.
Hovaghimian said that Hoodline’s system ingests around 250 terabytes of data from a pretty diverse range of sources, spanning from hyperlocal listings services like Yelp and Foursquare through to things like feeds of local high school football sports results, and organises it and passes it through its algorithms to surface interesting items that can be used in stories. Editors, meanwhile, write templates that can be used for different types of stories, such as local food events, job trends in a particular city, or sports results from a local team. One person at the company described the templates as “advanced Madlibs.”
And for now, it’s as basic as this, too. Hoodline has bylined content written by journalists, but the content that is bylined to Hoodline is created by the company’s big data platform, and those articles, it has to be said, are more anodyne than earth-shattering. But Hovaghimian says this is almost intentional, it’s to clear the way for more serious work.
“We are filling a gap and covering news that is not being covered, even if it’s just to test what audiences want to read,” he said. “This frees up resources for more journalistic pursuits.”
Whether or not publications dedicate resources to more journalistic pursuits to complement the Hoodline work, of course, is another matter.
Meanwhile, Hoodline also has journalists to work on original content and to build these templates. The company currently has a ratio of around two engineers to one editor, Hovaghimian said, but believes that as it scales it will be bringing in fewer editors and more engineers: “At this point it’s about growth now that we have figured out what our bottlenecks are,” he said.
As for what comes next, Hovaghimian said that the ambition is to bring this to more than just the US eventually, and to work with different kinds of partners beyond news organizations. Facebook and Google’s own interests in this area haven’t gone unnoticed and the company has thought about how it could partner with them, too.
Source: TechCrunch
Multiple reports point to Apple’s new iPhones being called the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max. But what about the other one?
Source: CNET