Google’s chip Pixel Visual Core in News
Pixel Visual Core: Google’s first custom smartphone chip
There is a special component inside Google’s flagship smartphones Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL that was not really announced during the Oct. 4 launch event. Google has now said it put a custom, self-designed chip inside Pixel 2 for image processing called Pixel Visual Core. A couple of months back there were rumors that Google could dabble into chip design and that a key Apple veteran had been hired to guide the architecture. Pixel Visual Core reportedly has eight Image Processing Units (IPUs), where each IPU core is packed with 512 arithmetic logic units capable of running 3 trillion operations per second. The Pixel Visual Core is expected to be activated in a future software update for Pixel 2 users, once developers have been able to write apps for it.
AI in News
Shutterstock’s Composition Aware Search feature uses deep learning to refine image search
Stock photo service Shutterstock has launched a new feature that will allow users to search images based on their compositions and layouts. The photo search tool, called Composition Aware Search, uses advanced deep learning technology to find the right images excluding the thousands of irrelevant images in the traditional image search. The feature is still in beta and its patent is pending.
ThinkSCM announces AI-enabled predictive analytics tool to boost supply chain
At the recently held APICS 2017 supply chain conference, ThinkSCM unveiled a prescriptive analytics tool that uses artificial intelligence for data analysis and future predictions and recommendations. The company said they had developed the algorithm to bridge a gap in SAP software for a client, but after the successful outcome, ThinkSCM decided to launch it commercially.
With McAfee Investigator and McAfee Cloud Workload Security, McAfee uses AI to boost enterprise security
McAfee has introduced several machine learning, deep learning, and artificial intelligence features into its enterprise security offerings and make use of automation, reasoning and data curation provided by analytics technologies. Apart from new innovations that can decrypt ransomware and steganography detection, the company has launched two new solutions: McAfee Investigator and McAfee Cloud Workload Security. While McAfee Investigator uses advanced analytics for accurate threat prioritization, McAfee Cloud Workload Security addresses challenges such as visibility across hybrid cloud workloads and enterprises service architecture.
Other Data Science News
Spring Data Neo4j 5.0 release brings smarter querying for better performance
After Spring Data Neo4j 4 which was a total rewrite from earlier versions, Spring Data Neo4j 5 has been released as another major version that brings several new functionalities. Built upon Neo4j OGM 3.0, SDN 5 adds dynamic properties and schema-based loading which eventually corrects the problems with SDN 4 where more data were often loaded than required. SDN 5 is now using a new load strategy based on a schema derived automatically from class metadata. It uses nested pattern comprehensions generated from the schema, and now only the data which will be mapped are fetched. Another change that makes the mapping easier is that entity fields are now written directly by the object mapper, not through annotated or derived setters. In addition to added support for query and projections methods, Spring Data Neo4j 5.0 carries the latest enhancements in the Spring world as it is built on the foundations of Java 8, the new Spring Framework 5.0 and Spring Data 2.0. A detailed documentation for the migration from SDN 4.2 to the new version has been released with guidelines.