Eric David
Latest from Eric David
Plex turns to Amazon cloud to let you stream your media from anywhere
Plex, a media server program that allows you to organize and stream video and other content from a PC, NAS (network attached storage) device or Nvidia Shield, has announced that it is beefing up its streaming capabilities with some help from Amazon Drive. According to the team behind Plex Inc., the new Plex Cloud service will allow users to ...
Deep learning researchers train AI killing machines with ‘Doom’
We all worry that the robot apocalypse is basically inevitable. Now it looks like researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are looking to speed it along. The researchers are teaching artificial intelligences how to become more efficient killing machines. How? With violent video games, of course. Guillaume Lample and Devendra Singh Chaplot, graduate students at Carnegie Mellon’s ...
Google subsidiary Jigsaw uses machine learning to fight online harassment
Thanks to the anonymity of the internet, it is next to impossible to effectively fight online harassment, as services like Twitter have repeatedly learned. Jigsaw, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. (Google), wants to change that by using machine learning to weed out caustic people in online communities. In a recent feature in Wired, Jigsaw founder and President ...
Researchers manage to hack Tesla brakes remotely
Researchers at Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s Keen Security Lab discovered a critical security hole in Tesla’s Control Area Network (CAN), which allowed them to remotely operate the vehicle’s brakes without ever having to physically interact with it. Although Tesla Motors quickly patched the flaw, Keen Security Lab’s success raises serious security concerns for the future of self-driving vehicles. In a ...
Microsoft wants to use AI to ‘solve’ cancer
Microsoft Corp. has announced several new healthcare initiatives that will put the immense power of artificial intelligence and deep learning into the hands of doctors and medical researchers. The goal? To “solve” cancer. In a blog post, Microsoft revealed that it has four separate research teams who are using a variety of AI tools to tackle cancer from different ...
Alphabet buys Urban Engines to supercharge Google Maps
Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google, has acquired Urban Engines Inc., a Big Data startup that specializes in using location analytics to power smart urban planning. Urban Engines will be joining the Google Maps team, and while the startup did not say exactly how Google will be using its tools, the Urban Engines team ...
Amazon building massive Texas wind farm to help power AWS
Amazon.com Inc. has announced that it will be building a massive wind farm in West Texas as part of its ongoing sustainability initiative. The company, which has been criticized by environmentalists for its power usage, says that the new project will be capable of generating up to 1,000,000 megawatt hours of wind energy each year, or “enough energy ...
Lucid Software raises $36 million for its cloud-based diagramming and publishing tools
Salt Lake City-based startup Lucid Software, creator of cloud-based diagramming and design tools, has just secured $36 million in Series B funding from Spectrum Equity, bringing the company’s total funding to-date up to $42 million. According to the company, the new funding will allow it to further develop its software and strengthen its focus on landing more ...
Why Apple’s Tim Cook thinks AR will be bigger than VR
Until Pokemon GO made headlines as the most successful mobile game of all time, augmented reality (AR) had largely been overshadowed by its more famous cousin, virtual reality (VR), but now Apple CEO Tim Cook says that the tide could shift the other direction, and we may soon see a world where AR is the more ...
Vertebrae raises $10 million to serve up VR ads
It was only a matter of time until the advertising industry sank its claws into the rapidly growing virtual reality market, and now it looks like Santa Monica-based startup Vertebrae Inc. wants to be one of the first to bring ads to VR. Vertebrae exited stealth mode today and announced that it has secured $10 ...
