Month: May 2020

Apple-Google Contact Tracing App Gets First Trial in Switzerland By Richard Adhikari

Waqas Awan

Switzerland this week launched a pilot program for SwissCovid, a contact tracing app based on Apple and Google’s jointly developed APIs. The APIs will work with iOS 13.5 and devices running Android 6.0 or higher. The pilot involves several thousand workers at Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, ETH Zurich, the Swiss Army, and staff at … Continue reading Apple-Google Contact Tracing App Gets First Trial in Switzerland By Richard Adhikari Continue Reading →

Government of Pakistan deploys the intelligence service to locate suspected corona cases

Waqas Awan

Pakistan is using one of the intelligence services to locate the people infected by the coronavirus. The surveillance tool is used to locate the militants normally. The government of Pakistan has recently contacted the ISI or Inter-Services Intelligence and asked for help in controlling the number of people getting affected by the virus as the … Continue reading Government of Pakistan deploys the intelligence service to locate suspected corona cases Continue Reading →

Volkswagen doubles down on EV push in China with checks worth $2.3 billion

Waqas Awan

Shares in Chinese automaker JAC Motors and battery supplier Gotion High-tech surged around 10% on Friday, after Volkswagen announced to invest a combined €2.1 billion ($2.3 billion) in the two electric vehicle partners. Why it matters: The $2.3 billion funding boost from the world’s largest automaker could exert great influence in reshaping the Chinese EV market and also … Continue reading Volkswagen doubles down on EV push in China with checks worth $2.3 billion Continue Reading →

Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2020: Rust is the most loved programming language, VBA the most dreaded

Waqas Awan

Stack Overflow’s annual survey of programming languages and developers is in, and it brings us some very interesting results. Notably, Rust grabs the top spot in the ‘Most Loved’ programming language category for 2020, with TypeScript and Python close behind.  On the other side of the road, VBA gets the unwelcome distinction of topping the ‘Most Dreaded’ … Continue reading Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2020: Rust is the most loved programming language, VBA the most dreaded Continue Reading →

First Pakistani female student gets selected for international training at CERN

Waqas Awan

Zoniah Ahmad recently made waves by becoming the first female student from Pakistan to secure a prestigious opportunity at CERN. The Masters student has been selected for international training at the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Switzerland, where she will be working in the world’s largest particle physics laboratory. In an interview with PakiScience, Ahmad … Continue reading First Pakistani female student gets selected for international training at CERN Continue Reading →

OpenAI and Uber create Virtual Petri Dish to find the best AI model for a task

Waqas Awan

Researchers affiliated with Uber AI and OpenAI have proposed a new approach to neural architecture search (NAS), a technique that involves evaluating hundreds or thousands of AI models to identify the top performers. In a preprint paper, they claim their technique, called Synthetic Petri Dish, accelerates the most computationally intensive NAS steps while predicting model performance with … Continue reading OpenAI and Uber create Virtual Petri Dish to find the best AI model for a task Continue Reading →

New AI technique speeds up language models on edge devices

Waqas Awan

Researchers at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab recently proposed Hardware-Aware Transformers (HAT), an AI model training technique that incorporates Google’s Transformer architecture. They claim that HAT can achieve a 3 times inferencing speedup on devices like the Raspberry Pi 4 while reducing model size by 3.7 times compared with a … Continue reading New AI technique speeds up language models on edge devices Continue Reading →

Pico Neo 2 and Tobii-powered eye-tracking variant now available worldwide

Waqas Awan

Pico Interactive is making its Neo 2 line of standalone headsets available worldwide. The base model is $700, while an eye-tracking variant powered by Tobii is $900. We tried both models at CES in January and while the eye-tracking wasn’t perfect in the early demo, it also worked without calibration and the electromagnetic controller tracking technology was very interesting. The … Continue reading Pico Neo 2 and Tobii-powered eye-tracking variant now available worldwide Continue Reading →