Power in IoT edge devices gets a lot of press around how to make devices last for years on a single battery charge, significantly through “dark silicon” – turning on only briefly to perform some measurement and shoot off a wireless transmission before turning off again. But we tend to forget that the infrastructure to support… Read More
It had to happen. We’ve read about hacking deep learning / machine learning, so now there is a discipline emerging around studying and defending against potential attacks. Of course, the nature of attacks isn’t the same; you can’t really write an algorithmic attack against a non-algorithmic analysis (or at least a non-standard… Read More
There’s an article published in InfoWorld on jobs trends in several emerging tech areas. The trends are based on analysis of job postings and job-seeker searches from the beginning of 2014, sourced by Indeed.com. I would have liked to dig deeper into Inded.com, to get more info on jobs in our industry but unfortunately it seems you… Read More
Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, gave the opening keynote at CES this year. That’s hardly surprising. From a company that operated on the fringes of mainstream awareness (those guys that do gamer graphics), they finished 2016 as the top-performing company in the S&P 500, returning revenue growth of 35% (forecast). That’s startup… Read More
Bluetooth has always been a popular communication protocol for short-range applications, but now anticipating BT5 it’s really moving into the big leagues as a significant option for IoT applications. The new standard combines ultra-low power with significantly higher range and higher performance. Ultra-low power is always… Read More
Some companies are famously, even obsessively secretive about internal development. We never get to see discussion of areas they are working on (other than through patent filings) – we only see the polished and released product/service. Amazon is one such company but Apple must rank for many of us as the pre-eminent company in … Read More
I attended a Mentor verification seminar earlier in the year at which Russ Klein presented a fascinating story about a real customer challenge in debugging a power problem in a design around an ARM cluster. Here’s the story in Russ’ own words. If you’re allergic to marketing stories, read it anyway. You might… Read More
Questions are being raised on how autonomous vehicles should react in life-or-death situations. Most of these have been based on thought experiments, constructed from standard dilemmas in ethics such as what should happen if the driver of a car or an autonomous car is faced with either killing two pedestrians or killing the occupants… Read More
You might think that one special advantage of AI systems is that they should be immune to attacks. After all, their methods are so complex and/or opaque that even we can’t understand how they work, so what hope would a hacker have in challenging these systems? But you would be mistaken. There’s nothing hackers like better than a challenge.… Read More
I touched earlier on challenges that can appear in AI systems which operate as black-boxes, particularly in deep learning systems. Problems are limited when applied to simple recognition tasks, e.g. recognizing a speed limit posted on a sign. In these cases, the recognition task is (from a human viewpoint) simply choosing from… Read More
