Breakthrough Initiatives held an exciting scientific meeting at the beginning of this week, from exoplanets to technosignatures and the future of life on Earth:
Earlier this week, the Breakthrough Initiatives held the scientific meeting Life in the Universe 2021: Our Past, Present, and Future Selves.
Mounded, luminous clouds of gas and dust glow in this Hubble image of a Herbig-Haro object known as HH 45.
Herbig-Haro objects are a rarely seen type of nebula that occurs when hot gas ejected by a newborn star collides with the gas and dust around it at hundreds of miles per second, creating bright shock waves. In this image, blue indicates ionized oxygen (O II) and purple shows ionized magnesium (Mg II). Researchers were particularly interested in these elements because they can be used to identify shocks and ionization fronts.
This object is located in the nebula NGC 1977, which itself is part of a complex of three nebulae called The Running Man. NGC 1977—like its companions NGC 1975 and NGC 1973—is a reflection nebula, which means that it doesn’t emit light on its own, but reflects light from nearby stars, like a streetlight illuminating fog.
Speaker: Swarup Bhunia.
http://www.eecs.case.edu/doku.php?id=eecs: home: seminar_series:upcoming_seminars.
Roscosmos launched a new docking node module to the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday, November 24 at 13:06 UTC / 8:06 am EST.
Launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the module will add additional docking ports to the Russian Segment of the station to provide options for future expansion but is the final Russian model planned for the outpost.
Continue reading “Russia launches new docking node to space station” »
NASA’s Curiosity rover has marked the 10th anniversary of its launch to Mars by sending back a spectacular ‘picture postcard’ from the Red Planet.
The robotic explorer snapped two black and white images of the Martian landscape which were then combined and had colour added to them to produce the remarkable composite.
Continue reading “NASA’s Curiosity rover sends a ‘picture postcard’ from Mars” »
As Neptune and Uranus could solve the mysteries of planet formation, we need to go back and study them in depth.
Sending a spacecraft to study Uranus and Neptune could give planetary scientists better clues about the formation of ice giants.
Major sales milestone gives birth to a compact UNO clone, finished in eye-catching black and gold — and even boasting castellated pins.
In recent years, many frameworks and guidelines have been created that identify objectives and priorities for ethical AI.
This is certainly a step in the right direction. But it’s also critical to look beyond technical solutions when addressing issues of bias or inclusivity. Biases can enter at the level of who frames the objectives and balances the priorities.
In a recent paper, we argue that inclusivity and diversity also need to be at the level of identifying values and defining frameworks of what counts as ethical AI in the first place. This is especially pertinent when considering the growth of AI research and machine learning across the African continent.
Tutel is a high-performance MoE library developed by Microsoft researchers to aid in the development of large-scale DNN (Deep Neural Network) models; Tutel is highly optimized for the new Azure NDm A100 v4 series, and Tutel’s diverse and flexible MoE algorithmic support allows developers across AI domains to execute MoE more easily and efficiently. Tutel achieves an 8.49x speedup on an NDm A100 v4 node with 8 GPUs and a 2.75x speedup on 64 NDm A100 v4 nodes with 512 A100 GPUs compared to state-of-the-art MoE implementations like Meta’s Facebook AI Research Sequence-to-Sequence Toolkit (fairseq) in PyTorch for a single MoE layer.
Tutel delivers a more than 40% speedup for Meta’s 1.1 trillion–parameter MoE language model with 64 NDm A100 v4 nodes for end-to-end performance, thanks to optimization for all-to-all communication. When working on the Azure NDm A100 v4 cluster, Tutel delivers exceptional compatibility and comprehensive capabilities to assure outstanding performance. Tutel is free and open-source software that has been integrated into fairseq.
Tutel is a high-level MoE solution that complements existing high-level MoE solutions like fairseq and FastMoE by focusing on the optimizations of MoE-specific computation and all-to-all communication and other diverse and flexible algorithmic MoE supports. Tutel features a straightforward user interface that makes it simple to combine with other MoE systems. Developers can also use the Tutel interface to include independent MoE layers into their own DNN models from the ground up, taking advantage of the highly optimized state-of-the-art MoE features right away.
