Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: internet

You might only know JPEG as the default image compression standard, but the group behind it has now branched out into something new: JPEG XS. JPEG XS is described as a new low-energy format designed to stream live video and VR, even over WiFi and 5G networks. It’s not a replacement for JPEG and the file sizes themselves won’t be smaller; it’s just that this new format is optimized specifically for lower latency and energy efficiency. In other words, JPEG is for downloading, but JPEG XS is more for streaming.

The new standard was introduced this week by the Joint Photographic Experts Group, which says that the aim of JPEG XS is to “stream the files instead of storing them in smartphones or other devices with limited memory.” So in addition to getting faster HD content on your large displays, the group also sees JPEG XS as a valuable format for faster stereoscopic VR streaming plus videos streamed by drones and self-driving cars.

“We are compressing less in order to better preserve quality, and we are making the process faster while using less energy,” says JPEG leader Touradj Ebrahimi in a statement. According to Ebrahimi, the JPEG XS video compression will be less severe than with JPEG photos — while JPEG photos are compressed by a factor of 10, JPEG XS is compressed by a factor of 6. The group promises a “visual lossless” quality to the images of JPEG XS.

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Artificial intelligence is permeating everybody’s lives through the face recognition, voice recognition, image analysis and natural language processing capabilities built into their smartphones and consumer appliances. Over the next several years, most new consumer devices will run AI natively, locally and, to an increasing extent, autonomously.

But there’s a problem: Traditional processors in most mobile devices aren’t optimized for AI, which tends to consume a lot of processing, memory, data and battery on these resource-constrained devices. As a result, AI has tended to execute slowly on mobile and “internet of things” endpoints, while draining their batteries rapidly, consuming inordinate wireless bandwidth and exposing sensitive local information as data makes roundtrips in the cloud.

That’s why mass-market mobile and IoT edge devices are increasingly coming equipped with systems-on-a-chip that are optimized for local AI processing. What distinguishes AI systems on a chip from traditional mobile processors is that they come with specialized neural-network processors, such as graphics processing units or GPUs, tensor processing units or TPUs, and field programming gate arrays or FPGAs. These AI-optimized chips offload neural-network processing from the device’s central processing unit chip, enabling more local autonomous AI processing and reducing the need to communicate with the cloud for AI processing.

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Before I started working on real-world robots, I wrote about their fictional and historical ancestors. This isn’t so far removed from what I do now. In factories, labs, and of course science fiction, imaginary robots keep fueling our imagination about artificial humans and autonomous machines.

Real-world robots remain surprisingly dysfunctional, although they are steadily infiltrating urban areas across the globe. This fourth industrial revolution driven by robots is shaping urban spaces and urban life in response to opportunities and challenges in economic, social, political, and healthcare domains. Our cities are becoming too big for humans to manage.

Good city governance enables and maintains smooth flow of things, data, and people. These include public services, traffic, and delivery services. Long queues in hospitals and banks imply poor management. Traffic congestion demonstrates that roads and traffic systems are inadequate. Goods that we increasingly order online don’t arrive fast enough. And the WiFi often fails our 24/7 digital needs. In sum, urban life, characterized by environmental pollution, speedy life, traffic congestion, connectivity and increased consumption, needs robotic solutions—or so we are led to believe.

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Investors are sounding the alarm after a little-known U.S. government agency green lit what could be the next trillion-dollar technology.

This tight-lipped agency, known as DARPA, has a history of developing some of the most transformative technologies known to man. But what many don’t realize is that it can PAY to follow DARPA’s biggest projects.

In fact, one DARPA-funded venture was a computer network designed to provide interconnectivity among users – we now call this network the internet.

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‘Google should not be in the business of war’: Over 3,000 employees pen letter urging CEO to pull out of the Pentagon’s controversial AI drone research, citing firm’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’ motto…

More than 3,000 Google employees have penned an open letter calling upon the internet giant’s CEO to end its controversial ‘Project Maven’ deal.

Calling the deal ‘business of war’, they said Google boss Sundar Pichai should ‘cancel this project immediately’.

It was revealed last month that Google is allowing the Pentagon to use some of its artificial intelligence technologies to analyze drone footage.

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Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that’s taken over our lives.

With so much fake news slithering around the web all year, is it still possible to enjoy April Fools’ Day?

Or was April 1 ever that enjoyable?

The day does, though, underline how everyone now has to nourish their skepticism at all times.

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Three years in, what I find most incredible about e-Residency is that it actually works.

Estonia’s quest to become a “digital nation”

To better understand how e-Residency came about, let’s go back almost 30 years, to 1991. Estonia had just won independence from the Soviet Union and was in the early stages of building a market-oriented economy from scratch. At the time, leaders were quick to identify the potential of the internet and open source collaboration tools (interestingly this was less out of principle, and more for the simple reason that they had no money to pay for Microsoft Office). They decided to become the world’s premier “digital nation.” A favorite quote I’ve heard in Estonia: “What do you think of when you hear the word Slovenia? Nothing. Precisely! We don’t want to be Slovenia.”

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SpaceX has a green light from the FCC to launch a network of thousands of satellites blanketing the globe with broadband. And you won’t have too long to wait — on a cosmic scale, anyway. Part of the agreement is that SpaceX launch half of its proposed 4,425 satellites within six years.

The approval of SpaceX’s application was not seriously in doubt after last month’s memo from FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, who was excited at the prospect of the first U.S.-based company being authorized to launch a constellation like this.

“I have asked my colleagues to join me in supporting this application and moving to unleash the power of satellite constellations to provide high-speed Internet to rural Americans,” he wrote at the time. He really is pushing that “digital divide” thing. Not that Elon Musk disagrees:

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