Facebook is making big strides in using its artificial intelligence systems for image recognition, but it’s also working on bringing this technology to video. As the company demoed at its F8 developer conference in San Francisco today, it has a team working on automatically tagging people in videos. As Facebook’s director of machine learning Joaquin Quiñonero Candela […]
Talent wars may never cease in Silicon Valley. Facebook today announced it has hired former Google vice president of advanced technology and projects, Regina Dugan, to head up a new group dubbed Building 8. According to a company statement, Dr. Dugan’s department will combine R&D with product development, and focus on technologies that “fluidly blend […]
Microsoft is making Skype in the browser plugin-free, the company announced this morning. But before you get too excited, be aware that this new experience only works in Microsoft Edge for now. Other browsers, including IE, Chrome, Firefox and Safari, will continue to require plugins as before. Skype for Web, the browser-based version of the online […]
Twitter has appointed its first managing director for China. A former general manager at Microsoft and Cisco, Kathy Chen will reach out to companies who can use Twitter to reach international audiences, even though the service is blocked by the Great Firewall. Despite being banned by the government in mainland China, the country is still an […]
Social media startup RebelMouse has created a new tool for publishers — Rebel Discovery, which helps those publishers identify the social media accounts that they should be sharing stories with for maximum impact. Founder and CEO Paul Berry said that when you publish a story, there are probably many Facebook Pages or Twitter accounts that […]
The source image on the left was used to generate the one on the right. A British startup is using the unique abilities of convolutional neural networks to do a sort of scaled-up version of Adobe’s content-aware fill — but instead of filling in the gaps in a picture, it’s imagining a whole new picture, […]
Apple estimates the Watch’s years of use from product testing, based on power consumed and daily usage patterns. Image: Apple If you spent between $300 and $17,000 on an Apple Watch, you might be intrigued to know that Apple only reckons with the device being in use for three years. Apple outlines the expected first-owner […]
If you’ve read a tabloid recently—or simply haven’t been hiding beneath a rock—you’ve probably heard about the ‘wedding photographer from hell’ who showed up late, delivered bad pictures, and spent time taking selfies in the photo booth. But the drama doesn’t end there. A great photo takes both the skill and creative talent of a […]
Not all important scientific research is cool looking, or has a cool name. But now and then you get something with both. These self-assembling carbon nanotubes are created with a process called Teslaphoresis. If you’ve read a more impressive-sounding sentence today, I’d like to hear it. Even the lab of Rice University chemist Paul Cherukuri […]
With Microsoft’s decision a couple of years ago to offer Windows at a much cheaper price to manufacturers as a way to entice them to create lower-priced devices that run the OS, a new generation of bargain-priced and modestly spec’d laptops — first running Windows 8, then Windows 10 — have become popular. So popular, […]