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“Today’s technology announcement is about challenging convention and rethinking how we continue to advance society and deliver new innovations that improve life, business and reduce our environmental impact,” said Dr. Mukesh Khare, Vice President of Hybrid Cloud and Systems, IBM Research. “Given the constraints the industry is currently facing along multiple fronts, IBM and Samsung are demonstrating our commitment to joint innovation in semiconductor design and a shared pursuit of what we call ‘hard tech.’”

Moore’s Law – an ongoing trend that shows the number of transistors on a computer chip doubling every two years or so – is now approaching what are considered fundamental barriers. Simply put, as more and more transistors are crammed into a finite area, engineers are running out of space.

Historically, transistors have been built to lie flat upon the surface of a semiconductor, with the electric current flowing laterally, or side-to-side, through them. Vertical Transport Field Effect Transistors (VTFET), by contrast, are built perpendicular to the surface of the chip with a vertical, or up-and-down, current flow.

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The end of the year is a time not just for predictions of top trends but also to watch for the biggest hype and most misleading recommendations that get dished out to business leaders. There’s no scarcity of these in the artificial intelligence (AI) space.

As AI evolves, its influence on humanity continues to rise. People often focus on AI’s ability to automate and amplify tasks but underestimate its more profound impact on society. “Very few human creations have had the kind of impact as AI,” says Loomis. He compares it with the invention of language—a “tool” that has changed the trajectory of humans and helped birth civilizations. Today, we are still taking baby steps with AI. However, unlike early humans, we are waking up to the fact that AI is not just a tool but will weave deeper into our society.

“I hope 2022 will be the start of this realization, where we don’t just create new technical practices for AI but also understand how it shapes us. This should alert us to the fact that this is the time to lay the guardrails—the checks and balances needed to guide this change into something greater and not dystopian,” concludes Loomis.

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Advancing Veterinary Care With Predictive Diagnostics, AI & One Health Principles — Dr. Jennifer Ogeer, DVM, Antech Diagnostics, Mars Petcare, Mars Inc.

Dr. Jennifer Ogeer, DVM, MSC, MBA is Vice President of Medical Science & Innovation at Antech Diagnostics (https://www.antechdiagnostics.com/), one of the world’s largest reference laboratory networks, and a unit of Mars Veterinary Health (https://www.marsveterinary.com/).

Dr. Ogeer is also Chair of the Board Of Directors of Veterinarians Without Borders (https://www.vetswithoutborders.ca/), an organization that works with governments, educational institutions, non-governmental organizations, local communities, farmers’ groups, and international agencies, to tackle root-cause issues affecting public health, animal health and ecosystem health in developing communities around the world.

Dr. Ogeer is also Vice-Chair of the Diversify Veterinary Medicine Coalition (https://diversifyvetmed.org/) which is working to bring greater diversity to the veterinary profession.

Dr. Ogeer is a graduate of the Ontario Veterinary College (OVC), University of Guelph, Canada. She completed an emergency medicine/critical care residency at Tufts University/Angell Memorial Animal Hospital in Boston and a Master of Science degree in Critical Care at the Ontario Veterinary College. She also has completed an Executive MBA at Western University (Canada).

Dr. Ogeer is a highly experienced residency-trained emergency and critical care veterinarian with a rich and diverse background in clinical practice, academic teaching/education, research and business management consulting.

As a former associate professor she has worked in specialty referral hospitals and several university teaching hospitals, including University of Guelph, University of Saskatchewan and Texas A&M University.

Dr. Ogeer is an active member of the veterinary community, and has published various articles in peer-reviewed journals and conducted research on hospital-acquired infections and developed protocols for infectious disease outbreak management and prevention.

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Who better to answer the pros and cons of artificial intelligence than an actual AI?

Students at Oxford’s Said Business School hosted an unusual debate about the ethics of facial recognition software, the problems of an AI arms race, and AI stock trading. The debate was unusual because it involved an AI participant, previously fed with a huge range of data such as the entire Wikipedia and plenty of news articles.

Over the last few months, Oxford University Alex Connock and Andrew Stephen have hosted sessions with their students on the ethics of technology with celebrated speakers – including William Gladstone, Denis Healey, and Tariq Ali. But now it was about time to allow an actual AI to contribute, sharing its own views on the issue of … itself.

The AI used was Megatron LLB Transformer, developed by a research team at the computer chip company Nvidia and based on work by Google. It was trained by consuming more content than a human could in a lifetime and was asked to defend and question the following motion: “This house believes that AI will never be ethical.”

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The company’s current Glass hardware is built on Android.

Google is hiring an “Augmented Reality OS” team focused on building software for an “innovative AR device,” according to job listings spotted by 9to5Google. The team is led by Mark Lucovsky, who announced he’d joined the company this week. Lucovsky previously worked at Meta developing an in-house alternative to Android to power the company’s hardware, and also co-authored the Windows NT operating system.

According to Google’s job listings, the Augmented Reality OS team is building “the software components that control and manage the hardware on [its] Augmented Reality (AR) products.” This is far from Google’s first stab at developing AR software, and follows the company’s work on ARCore for Android and Tango. The company’s Google Glass, which is aimed at the business and enterprise market, is currently built on Android.

This morning I became a Noogler. My role is to lead the Operating System team for Augmented Reality at Google.

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Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has announced an ambitious plan to operate its own commercial space station called Orbital Reef sometime after 2024.

“Designed to open multiple new markets in space, Orbital Reef will provide anyone with the opportunity to establish their own address on orbit,” the company announced on Monday. Blue Origin describes the station as a “mixed used business park” in space. Orbital Reef will reside in a low Earth orbit at 310 miles, and function as a hub for research, commerce, tourism and logistics, where spaceships can also come and go.

Jeff Bezos’s company is partnering with Sierra Space and Boeing to build the space station, which is meant to be an orbiting business park.

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2021 saw massive growth in the demand for edge computing — driven by the pandemic, the need for more efficient business processes, as well as key advances in the Internet of Things, 5G and AI.

In a study published by IBM in May, for example, 94 percent of surveyed executives said their organizations will implement edge computing in the next five years.

From smart hospitals and cities to cashierless shops to self-driving cars, edge AI — the combination of edge computing and AI — is needed more than ever.

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