Month: April 2020
How a team of NASA engineers developed a ventilator for COVID-19 patients in just a month
Working as an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, David Van Buren usually spends his time designing and building instruments for space telescopes or robots that will explore other worlds in our Solar System. But for the last month, Van Buren and a group of his colleagues at JPL have…
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SiriusXM extends free Premium streaming offer through May
Last month, SiriusXM announced that its premium channels would be available for free for six weeks, ending May 15th. The idea was to reach audiences in their homes, rather than their cars since fewer people are on the road. It’s now clear that, in ma… Source
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Determined AI makes its machine learning infrastructure free and open source
Machine learning has quickly gone from niche field to crucial component of innumerable software stacks, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. The tools needed to create and manage it are enterprise-grade and often enterprise-only — but Determined AI aims to make them more accessible than ever by open-sourcing its entire…
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Facebook releases its ‘Blender’ chatbot as an open-source project
The virtual assistants that inhabit our smartphones are helpful, sure, but they’re not going to pass the Turing test any time soon. They’re designed for understanding specific commands and actions like checking on restaurant reservations or getting u… Source
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Roomba maker iRobot’s lawnmower bot is indefinitely delayed because of COVID-19
iRobot, the company behind the autonomous Roomba vacuum, says it’s scrapping its plans to release its lawn-mowing robot, the Terra, because of the pandemic. The company said in its earnings release yesterday that it’s “suspended” its launch plans for the Terra because of COVID-19 and the subsequent global economic downturn…
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Marc Andreessen, Florence Nightingale and building in a vacuum
James Wise Contributor James Wise is a partner at Balderton Capital, a trustee of the think tank Demos and a former specialist advisor to UK Parliament on Social Enterprise. If you want to get a structural engineer excited, ask them what they could build in space. Freed from the constraints…
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