Google has begun to build its own custom application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chip called tensor processing units (TPUs), Google chief executive Sundar Pichai said today at the Google I/O developer conference in Mountain View, California. The name is inspired by Google’s TensorFlow open source deep learning framework. But the technology is one of a kind — something that makes sense only at Google scale.
Pepper is finally coming to America. SoftBank said today that its chatty humanoid robot, unveiled with great fanfare by the company’s founder and CEO Masayoshi Son two years ago, is expected to debut in the North American market later this year. SoftBank also announced that a new developer portal is now available to anyone interested in creating applications for the robot. And tomorrow at Google I/O, SoftBank engineers will take the stage, along with Pepper, to introduce a tool that they hope will entice more developers to build apps for the robot: an Android SDK.
When Sean Harper took over as Amgen’s head of research in 2012, one of his first moves was to get the biotech giant to pay $415 million to buy DeCode Genetics, a struggling company in Iceland well-known for the huge DNA database it had built.
Today that bet paid off as scientists at DeCode describe how they found a specific DNA defect that lowers the chance of having a heart attack by 35 percent, which they call the largest such effect ever found.
DeCode’s DNA detective work is “outstanding,” says Sekar Kathiresan, a scientist at the MIT/Harvard Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “This work immediately suggests that a medicine which mimics the protective mutation should reduce risk for heart attack.”
Piet Dircke is standing on the sidewalk at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport pointing up to the building’s second floor. Or, as he puts it, sea level. The tarmac, where planes taxi nearby, should be about four meters under water, he explains. It isn’t submerged because of more than a century of work by Dutch engineers, like Dircke, on a complex network of dikes, sea barriers, and pumping stations.
Preguntémonos cuándo fue la última vez que escribimos a mano. ¿Días, semanas, meses? En algunos países, como Finlandia, la caligrafía está siendo desplazada por la mecanografía. Allí no consideran que algo tan arcaico como un lápiz y un papel sea el futuro. Ordenadores, tablets y teléfonos móviles se han convertido en herramientas imprescindibles en nuestro día a día, y la tarea de escribir a mano ha derivado en algo tan anticuado como un Nokia 3310. Todo ello a pesar de que cada vez más estudios en neurociencia indican que escribir utilizando sólo una pantalla táctil o el teclado puede afectar al desarrollo del cerebro.
Vodafone no se anda con chiquitas. La multinacional inglesa ha trasladado la guerra que mantiene con Telefónica por los derechos de televisión de la Liga, de la Fórmula 1 y de Moto GP a Indra, la compañía participada por la operadora presidida desde abril por José María Álvarez-Pallete.
Traffic wardens in Tampere, Finland, are now using Vincit’s app and Google Glass devices to vastly increase the number of parked cars they are able to check each hour. While this is good news for the city’s bank account, the app is likely to be received with far less enthusiasm by residents and visitors.
First, wardens focus the Google Glass on a car’s registration number. Then, the app will identify the vehicle and scroll through the EasyPark database to check whether the driver has paid to park using the mobile system. Depending on the results, wardens may then manually check if the driver used the pay-and-display machine. If the allotted time has expired or the space was never paid for, wardens can issue a ticket.
A recent study by three professors at Purdue’s Krannert School of Management is part of a growing mountain of evidence of the superior and more lasting performance of companies where the founder still plays a significant role as CEO, chairman, board member, or owner or adviser. Specifically, the study found that S&P 500 companies where the founder is still CEO are more innovative, generate 31% more patents, create patents that are more valuable, and are more likely to make bold investments to renew and adapt the business model — demonstrating a willingness to take risk to invent the future.
