Demis Hassabis started playing chess at age four and soon blossomed into a child prodigy. At age eight, success on the chessboard led him to ponder two questions that have obsessed him ever since: first, how does the brain learn to master complex tasks; and second, could computers ever do the same?
Now 38, Hassabis puzzles over those questions for Google, having sold his little-known London-based startup, DeepMind, to the search company earlier this year for a reported 400 million pounds ($650 million at the time).
Intel is expected to supply the chips for a new version of Google’s Glass device in 2015, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed sources.
The Intel processor will replace one from Texas Instruments, which is used in the current version of Glass, which is a device that allows people to view the Internet or take pictures while wearing it on their heads. Intel hasn’t commented yet.
Google, Amazon, and Apple are among the least transparent multinationals in the world, worse than Russian state-owned energy companies Gazprom, and Rosneft, according to a report published today (5 November) by anti-corruption campaigners.
The US tech giants scored less than three out of a possible ten in the Transparency International ranking, which rates the 124 firms on the Forbes list of the world’s largest publicly traded companies.
Google has been working hard on its self-driving car, and based on the comments of the Google X designers here at the company’s FORM design conference, that once fantastical notion is well on its way to becoming a real product that people will use and even trust.
No huge surprise there, but the Google car, in its current form, is designed in such a way that the user experience is heavily reliant on a mobile app. Instead of the old paradigm — using a key — people will unlock and start Google’s cars via the app.
Now, you, too, can run complicated applications super-efficiently inside of Google data centers, thanks to a new tool in the company’s public cloud called Google Container Engine.
See, Google knows a good bit about scheduling a wide variety of applications to run simultaneously in its data centers, having run popular web services for so many years. This year, Google shared some of its knowledge with the world in the form of the open-source Kubernetes container-management software. Today, it’s going one step further by introducing the Container Engine, which amounts to a hosted version of Kubernetes running on the Google Cloud Platform.
When we think of Google, we think of the company that powers the widely used search engine, and we think of computer programming, engineering, and electrical design. However, recently Google has expanded and moved towards research in medical technology. Just a few months ago, the tech giant partnered with Novartis to license a glucose measuring smart contact lens.
Google today introduced a new tool for testing network traffic security called Nogotofail. The company has released it as an open source project available on GitHub, meaning anyone can use it, contribute new features, provide support for more platforms, and do anything else with the end goal of helping to improve the security of the Internet.
One of the great challenges of neuroscience is to understand the short-term working memory in the human brain. At the same time, computer scientists would dearly love to reproduce the same kind of memory in silico.
