Lifeboat Foundation

A plant-based poultry alternative will soon be available nationwide at KFC.

According to new research by Datagen, 99% of computer vision (CV) teams have had a machine learning (ML) project canceled due to insufficient training data. Delays, meanwhile, appear truly ubiquitous, with 100% of teams reporting experiencing significant project delays due to insufficient training data. The research also indicates that these training data challenges come in many forms and affect CV teams in near-equal measure. The top issues experienced by CV teams include poor annotation (48%), inadequate domain coverage (47%), and simple scarcity (44%).

The scarcity of robust, domain-specific training data is only compounded by the fact that the field of computer vision is lacking many well-defined standards or best practices. When asked how training data is typically gathered at their organizations, respondents revealed a patchwork of sources and methodologies are being employed both across the field and within individual organizations. Whether synthetic or real, collected in-house or sourced from public datasets, organizations appear to be utilizing any and all data they can in order to train their computer vision models.

However, computer vision teams have already identified and begun to embrace synthetic data as a solution. Ninety-six percent of CV teams reported having already adopted the use of synthetic data to help train their AI/ML models. Nevertheless, the quality, source, and proportion of synthetic data that’s used remains highly variable across the field, and only 6% of teams currently use synthetic data exclusively.

Today’s Google Doodle honors the late physicist Stephen Hawking on his 80th birthday. Hawking was a renowned cosmologist, and he spent his career theorizing about the origins of the universe, the underlying structure of reality, and the nature of black holes. But he became a household name for the way he communicated those ideas to the public through books and TV appearances.

“My goal is simple,” he once said. “It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.”

One of Hawking’s best-known ideas is that black holes slowly regurgitate information about all the matter they’ve swallowed — but it comes out in a jumbled form called Hawking radiation. In 1974, Hawking proposed that the event horizon of a black hole emits energy. Because energy can be converted into mass, and vice versa (that’s what Albert Einstein’s famous equation E=mc² tells us), emitting all that energy into space will shrink the black hole. Eventually, it will run out of mass and disappear.

Continue reading “Saturday’s Google Doodle Celebrates Physicist Stephen Hawking” »

In the state of Washington, advocates hope that the third time’s the charm for passing community solar legislation.

For this episode of the Local Energy Rules Podcast, host John Farrell speaks with Mason Rolph, President of Olympia Community Solar. In the absence of supportive state policy, Rolph has found a way to develop community solar gardens that reward subscribers. Farrell and Rolph discuss Olympia Community Solar, the organization’s advocacy work, and why Washington needs a proper community solar program.

Listen to the full episode and explore more resources below — including a transcript and summary of the conversation.

Incredible footage has emerged of a private jet roaring through a narrow pass in California’s so-called Star Wars Canyon.

Aviation photographer Christopher McGreevy captured the breathtaking flight of a Dassault Falcon 8X private jet thundering through the canyon that crosses Riverside and San Diego County in Death Valley National Park.

It is unclear who was flying the jet through the valley, which is made from walls of red, grey and pink rock which look similar to the fictional Star Wars planet Tatooine — Luke Skywalker’s home planet.

Artificial intelligence’s lack of transparency is leading many to fear the technology and others to elevate it to a mysterious god-like figure, but we should be more critical of those making decisions about how AI is used, says anthropologist Beth Singler.

We’re moving past the bottleneck of available space launches.

The bottleneck nature of space launches is beginning to change.

Continue reading “A New Wave of Space Companies Is Coming. Can It Help Life on Earth?” »

With 5G, apps and services that we can’t even imagine will be possible.

What good is a smart toaster if it can’t connect to the network?

CES 2022 is packed with tech that needs lightning-fast connection to the internet. That’s one reason why so many people at the trade show in Las Vegas are laser-focused on 5G. A handful of industry leaders got together at the conference to discuss the opportunities and challenges of making tech that works with the new global wireless standard.

Continue reading “5G is Poised to Change Everything, from Farming to Surgery” »

Could this find contradict years of dark matter theories?

Dark energy and dark matter are believed to make up almost 95% of our universe. We are still unsure about what they are or where they come from but we believe they hold galaxies together with their gravity.

That’s why we were shocked to find out astronomers spotted a perplexing galaxy without the ever-elusive matter, according to Gizmodo. It all began three years ago when Filippo Fraternali, an astronomer at Kapteyn Astronomical Institute of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, and his colleagues first came across a few diffuse galaxies that looked as though they lacked dark matter.

Continue reading “Scientists Are Perplexed to Find a Galaxy Without Dark Matter” »