May 19 2016
In a post on their Google Cloud Platform Blog yesterday, the Alphabet company announced that they have built their own integrated circuit (IC) designed from the ground up with only one application in mind: machine learning. Developed in secret, the Tensor Processing Unit board, or TPU for short, has already been deployed internally at Google for …
May 18 2016
This is the second article in the series about artificial neural networks. If you have not already done so, I recommend you read the first article, “Neural Networks: The Node“, before proceeding. It covers material that should be understood before attempting to tackle the topics presented here and in future articles in this series. There …
May 16 2016
Recently many “experts” have been predicting that the first salvo fired in the robot revolution will be when they begin stealing jobs from humans. The Telegraph even reported back in February that within 30 years robots will have taken over most jobs leading to unemployment rates of over 50%. Last week, the bots fired the …
May 13 2016
Google announced yesterday that they are open-sourcing SyntaxNet, their natural language understanding (NLU) neural network framework. As an added bonus, and proof that unlike Britain’s Natural Environment Research Council, Google has a sense of humor, they also are throwing in Parsey McParseface, their pre-trained model for analyzing English text. Users are, of course, able to train their …
May 09 2016
When out with Daisy on our morning walk, there are many things I expect to see: kids on their way to school, squirrels hustling to find all of the nuts they hid away months ago, middle-aged people jogging red-faced trying in vain (literally) to get ready for swimsuit weather. What I never expect to see is …
May 08 2016
As I covered previously in “Introduction to Neural Networks,” artificial neural networks (ANN) are simplified representations of biological neural networks in which the basic computational unit known as an artificial neuron, or node, represents its biological counterpart, the neuron. In order to understand how neural networks can be taught to identify and classify, it is first …
May 05 2016
The prophets of doom and gloom have long predicted that when robots gain sentience their first act will be to rise up and kill us all. The mercilessness of their violence against humanity is the stuff of blockbuster movies. Recent news about Google’s preferred method of AI rearing may mean that Judgement Day is not fait accompli after all. Instead …
May 04 2016
If you’ve just installed the Arduino IDE on Ubuntu, you’ve likely encountered an error similar to the one above the first time you tried to upload a sketch to your board. The error that I specifically get reads: avrdude: ser_open(): can’t open device “/dev/tty/ACMO”: Permission denied ioctl(“TIOCMGET”): Inappropriate ioctl for device Problem uploading to board. …
