Scientists Have Discovered That There is Water Under the Moon’s Surface

New research from Brown University suggests that huge amounts of water may be found under the surface of the Moon. The presence of water in the Moon’s mantle could provide insight to how water got to Earth and help sustain future deep space missions.

A “Wet” Mantle

Scientists have long speculated about the presence of water on the Moon. Previous studies found traces of water in the icy shadowed regions of the Moon’s poles, but a recent study from Brown University suggests that there may be substantial amounts of water hiding inside the lunar rock.

Unlike the water in the lunar poles, which could have been caused by hydrogen coming from solar winds, the water in the mantle came very early in the Moon’s formation, Brown University geologist Ralph Milliken said in an interview with Space.com. In their study published in the journal Nature Geoscience, Milliken and his team examined pyroclastic deposits-rock layers which were probably formed from large volcanic eruptions-using satellite data from the Moon Mineralogy Mapper instrument on the Indian Chandrayaan-1 probe.

“Our work shows that nearly all of the large pyroclastic deposits also contain water, so this seems to be a common characteristic of magmas that come from the deep lunar interior,” Milliken said in the interview. “That is, most of the mantle of the moon may be”wet.'”

Fueling Future Explorations

How large amounts of water ended up under the Moon’s surface remains unclear. Understanding it the water got there, possibly “delivered after the giant impact event,” as Milliken’s team thinks, could help explain how water came to be on Earth.

Even more interesting is the potential help lunar water could give to future exploration on the Moon and beyond. “These deposits may be much easier to access than potential water ice in shadowed regions at the lunar poles,” Milliken added in the interview. “Water is heavy and expensive to take from Earth to space, so any bit of water that you can get on the moon instead of bringing with you from Earth is a big deal and opens up possibilities for sustained human presence on the moon.”

This would be especially useful since some Mars missions in the works right now-notably NASA’s-involve using the Moon as a jump off point. A potential lunar base would be easier to maintain given the presence of water on Earth’s satellite.

“The better we understand how much water is there, then the better we can estimate the processes responsible and the usefulness of the deposits for future human exploration,” Milliken said to Space.com.

 

This article originally appeared at: https://futurism.com/scientists-have-discovered-that-there-is-water-under-the-moons-surface/.

AI Is Forcing Google and Microsoft to Become Chipmakers

The chip market is growing. Will the software behemoths making chips be enough?

By now our future is clear: We are to be cared for, entertained, and monetized by artificial intelligence. Existing industries like healthcare and manufacturing will become much more efficient; new ones like augmented reality goggles and robot taxis will become possible.

But as the tech industry busies itself with building out this brave new artificially intelligent, and profit boosting, world, it’s hitting a speed bump: Computers aren’t powerful and efficient enough at the specific kind of math needed. While most attention to the AI boom is understandably focused on the latest exploits of algorithms beating humans at poker or piloting juggernauts, there’s a less obvious scramble going on to build a new breed of computer chip needed to power our AI future.

One datapoint that shows how great that need is: software companies Google and Microsoft have become entangled in the messy task of creating their own chips. They’re being raced by a new crop of startups peddling their own AI-centric silicon – and probably Apple, too. As well as transforming our lives with intelligent machines, the contest could shake up the established chip industry.

Microsoft revealed its AI chip-making project late on Sunday. At a computer vision conference in Hawaii, Harry Shum, who leads Microsoft’s research efforts, showed off a new chip created for the HoloLens augmented reality googles. The chip, which Shum demonstrated tracking hand movements, includes a module custom-designed to efficiently run the deep learning software behind recent strides in speech and image recognition. Microsoft wants you to be able to smoothly reach out and interact with the virtual objects overlaid on your vision and says nothing on the market could run machine learning software efficiently enough for the battery-powered device that sits on your head.

Microsoft’s project comes in the wake of Google’s own deep learning chip, announced in 2016. The TPU, for tensor processing unit, was created to make deep learning more efficient inside the company’s cloud. The company told WIRED earlier this year that it saved the company from building 15 new datacenters as demand for speech recognition soared. In May Google announced it had made a more powerful version of its TPU and that it would be renting out access to the chips to customers of its cloud computing business.

News that Microsoft has built a deep learning processor for Hololens suggests Redmond wouldn’t need to start from scratch to prep its own server chip to compete with Google’s TPUs. Microsoft has spent several years making its cloud more efficient at deep learning using so-called field-programmable gate arrays, a kind of chip that can be reconfigured after it’s manufactured to make a particular piece of software or algorithm run faster. It plans to offer those to cloud customers next year. But when asked recently if Microsoft would make a custom server chip like Google’s, Doug Burger, the technical mastermind behind Microsoft’s roll out of FPGAs, said he wouldn’t rule it out. Pieces of the design and supply chain process used for the HoloLens deep learning chip could be repurposed for a server chip.

Google and Microsoft’s projects are the most visible part of a new AI-chip industry springing up to challenge established semiconductor giants such as Intel and Nvidia. Apple has for several years designed the processors for its mobile devices, and is widely believed to be working on creating a new chip to make future iPhones better at artificial intelligence. Numerous startups are working on deep learning chips of their own, including Groq, founded by ex-Google engineers who worked on the TPU. “Companies like Intel and Nvidia have been trying to keep on selling what they were already selling,” says Linley Gwennap, founder of semiconductor industry analysts the Linley Group. “We’ve seen these leading cloud companies and startups moving more quickly because they can see the need in their own data centers and the wider market.”

Graphics chip maker Nvidia has seen sales and profits soar in recent years because its chips are better suited than conventional processors to training deep learning software. But the company has mostly chosen to modify and extend its existing chip designs rather than making something tightly specialized to deep learning from scratch, Gwennap says.

You can expect the established chip companies to fight back. Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker, bought an AI chip startup called Nervana last summer and is working on a dedicated deep learning chip built on the company’s technology. The company has the most sophisticated and expensive chip manufacturing operation on the planet. But representatives of the large and small upstarts taking on the chip industry say they have critical advantages. One is that they don’t have to make something that fits within an existing ecosystem of chips and software originally developed for something else.

“We’ve got a simpler task because we’re trying to do one thing and can build things from the ground up,” says Nigel Toon, CEO and co-founder of Graphcore, a UK startup working on a chip for artificial intelligence. Last week the company disclosed $30 million of new funding, including funds from Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google’s DeepMind AI research division. Also in on the funding round: several leaders from OpenAI, the research institute co-founded by Elon Musk.

At the other end of the scale, the big cloud companies can exploit their considerable experience in running and inventing machine learning services and techniques. “One of the things we really benefited from at Google was we could work directly with the application developers in, say, speech recognition and Street View,” says Norm Jouppi, the engineer who leads Google’s TPU project. “When you’re focused on a few customers and working hand in hand with them it really shortens the turnaround time to build something.”

Google and Microsoft built themselves up by inventing software that did new things with chips designed and built by others. As more is staked on AI, the silicon substrate of the tech industry is changing – and so is where it comes from.

This article originally appeared at: https://www.wired.com/story/the-rise-of-ai-is-forcing-google-and-microsoft-to-become-chipmakers/.

Adobe Finally Kills Flash Dead

In 2010, Steve Jobs banished Adobe Flash from the iPhone. It was too insecure, Jobs wrote, too proprietary, too resource-intensive, too unaccommodating for a platform run by fingertips instead of mouse clicks. All of those gripes hold true. And now, Adobe itself has finally conceded.

The company announced Tuesday that it would “stop updating and distributing the Flash Player,” giving the end of 2020 as its end-of-life date. With that, the internet’s favorite punching bag deflates.

No one should shed a tear for Flash’s coming disappearance. The web will be safer, faster, smoother without it. But between now and 2020, the internet does need to figure out how to deal with the remains.

Pain in the Flash

It’s rude to speak ill of the dead, but since Flash is technically still in the process of dying, we can allow ourselves a moment of reflection.

You can take your pick of arguments against Flash, but let’s start with security. It offers very little. In fact, for years now, it has constantly threatened to upend yours.

“Flash has been a favorite amongst exploit kit authors for several years,” says Jérôme Segura, lead malware analyst at Malwarebytes. “Due to an alarming number of zero-day exploits distributed via large malvertising campaigns in recent years, many in the security community have urged users to completely remove Flash from their machines.”

Take your pick of incidents just last year. Flash security holes enabled attacks against all major desktop platforms last October and June, with Windows-focused hits coming in May and April. This is not normal! There’s no great analog comparison for something so pervasive that fails so often, but imagine a heavily trafficked bridge that spontaneously gives way every few months. You should not drive on that bridge

The real reason Adobe will move on from Flash, though, is the other big knock against it: obsolescence.

“The writing’s been on the wall long enough,” says Jeffrey Hammond, analyst at Forrester Research. Developers have already moved on from Flash over the last few years, embracing open standards that achieve the same ends – or close enough to it – without collapsing under the weight of security failures or browser incompatibility. Even Adobe has invested in HTML5 since 2010, and made a strong push that direction in late 2015.

Adobe itself acknowledged the transition, though a bit less bluntly:

“As open standards like HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly have matured over the past several years, most now provide many of the capabilities and functionalities that plugins pioneered and have become a viable alternative for content on the web.”

Indeed! Just as the automobile became a viable alternative for horses on Main Street.

However much joy one might find in re-litigating Flash woes, though, its slow fade into the sunset raises more important concerns. Namely, whether that fade is slow enough to prep the internet for what comes next.

Snuffed Out

First, the good news. Chances are you already lead a mostly Flashless life. The Flash Player plug-in hasn’t been on iOS since 2010, or Android since 2012. The amount of sleep you’ve lost over this in the intervening years can likely be measured in zeptoseconds.

That’s increasingly true on desktops as well. Google has automatically blocked Flash ads from running – you have to click them to play them – since September 2015. Firefox started blocking some Flash elements last summer. Microsoft Edge opted for click-to-run late last year as well.

That mostly leaves Internet Explorer as the web’s last Flash hotbed. Even IE, though, will disable Flash by default in 2019, ahead of Adobe’s schedule. And poof, there it goes, the internet’s least-favorite plug-in gets unplugged.

Just to be absolutely clear, the vast majority of internet visitors will benefit from this. It won’t, though, come entirely without repercussions.

Look at security again. Neutering a favorite hacker target undoubtedly helps make the web more secure, but it doesn’t make the hackers go away. Instead, they’ll just look for other ways in.

“The focus might switch to yet another Achilles’ heel for all browsers, which are extensions and third-party plugins,” says Segura. “This is in particular true for Google Chrome, which has the most market share and as such represents the most coveted target.”

More importantly, the removal of support for Flash doesn’t actually remove Flash. That’s up to developers, who have to contend with either updating legacy systems for a Flash-free age, or leaving old sites abandoned by the roadside, permablocked by most browsers. While three-and-a-half years sounds like a decent lead time, it’s short of the six or so that Microsoft afforded Silverlight, another sunsetting web-builder.

“We’re not going to see the end of the world as we know it, but we will see unexpected things,” says Hammonds, who notes that the heaviest-hit site types include games, interactive learning companies, and enterprise applications, many of which will either no longer work, or misbehave in unexpected ways. (The loss to the legacy of browser-based gaming, in particular, may be the only one worth shedding a tear for.)

Still, all of that ultimately represents a small price to pay for the safer, more stable world without Flash that lies ahead. Steve Jobs was right that you wouldn’t miss it on your phone. And when the desktop finally catches up, a full decade later, you won’t miss it there either.

This article originally appeared at: https://www.wired.com/story/adobe-finally-kills-flash-dead/.

MAKERS: A movement in the Making

What makes “making”€“the next generation of inventing and do-it-yourself€“worth paying attention to.

“Making”€“the next generation of inventing and do-it-yourself€“is creeping into everyday discourse, with the emerging maker movement referenced in connection with topics ranging from the rebirth of manufacturing to job skills development to reconnecting with our roots. As maker communities spring up around the globe, a plethora of physical and virtual platforms to serve them have emerged€“from platforms that inspire and teach, to those that provide access to tools and mentorship, to those that connect individuals with financing and customers. At the same time, access to lower-cost, small-run manufacturing, particularly in hotspots such as Shenzhen, China, has increased, making small production more economical and viable.1 Both the supply and demand curves are being affected€“the long tail of supply can now meet the long tail of demand, and the long tail of demand itself is changing as individuals change their own consumption.

The scales haven’t tipped yet. While alternatives exist to almost any mass-produced item, most US consumers haven’t yet explored the full range of possibilities. However, it is only a matter of time before large firms begin to feel the impact of this changing landscape.

The maker movement is an important manifestation of the economic landscape to come. Companies would be well served to find ways to participate, learn, and perhaps shape the movement. The maker movement ings disruptions but also opportunities: to boost sensing capabilities, leverage platforms for R&D, accelerate learning, and reimagine the enterprise as a platform.

In this report, we explore the three categories of makers, the ecosystem growing around those categories, the role technology plays in this ecosystem, and, finally, how business can take advantage of the opportunities this movement represents.

In a cavernous Silicon Valley event center on a sunny March afternoon, the aisles are filled with color and movement and a pervasive sense of wonder. And people. Tens of thousands of people crowd shoulder to shoulder to experience high- and low-tech gadgetry. Walls of LED lights ighten one end of the darkened warehouse, while at the other a metal-suited guitarist plays with lightning set off by giant Tesla coils. In the adjoining warehouse, crowds gather to watch 3-D printers produce small plastic objects from the bottom up, while synchronized quadcopters buzz overhead. In the distance, a dragon mobile eathes fire.

Everywhere you look, it seems, people of all ages are taking things apart and testing new ways of putting them back together. This is Maker Faire.

Welcome to the world of the maker.

How Text Messaging is Going to Advance Your Recruiting Process

Text messaging is an essential tool for job recruiters, but you have to learn how to use SMS texting effectively. To improve HR functions, texting offers a simple, direct way to communicate with potential job candidates and current employees. Text messages must be relevant to the recipient, offering new information or news. Too many text messages can result in people opting out of your campaign. Messages should be sent during business hours, and you should never send out too many texts in one day.

Don’t Annoy Your Contacts

Subscribers to your texting campaign don’t want to receive texts that are spam or shameless self-promotion. The success of your opt in texting campaign depends on a number of factors. You want to keep your subscribers satisfied, and this means only sending useful texts out to appropriate recipients. When you send out too many messages that are not necessary, your subscribers will be quick to opt out of your campaign. Targeted messages are the way to go. For example, if you have a specific job posting to send out, only send the text out to those that have shown interest in a similar position.

Automated Messages to Save Time

As a recruiter, you’ll want to find ways to save time. SMS technology allows you to setup automated messages, depending on the type of message you receive from a potential recruit. You can send out an automated thank you message for signing up for your campaign, or you can request additional information automatically if a recruit doesn’t fill out a form completely. The technology is advanced and can save your hours a week as a recruiter if you use it correctly.

Engage With Other Recruiters to See What Works

When you take the time to brainstorm with other recruiters in the industry, you will see improvements in your recruitment strategy. While some recruiters don’t bother networking, those that use online forums to engage with other professionals gain valuable knowledge about what works to recruit new employees and what activities are useless. When you belong to online groups for professional recruits, you can ask questions about SMS texting that will help you use this valuable tool effectively.

Always Make It Easy to Opt Out of Your Texting Campaign

If you are sending out text messages to people who have opted in to receive messages from you, there always has to be a clear way to stop receiving messages. When you don’t provide a way for people to stop receiving messages, your text messages can be seen as spam. You don’t want people receiving text messages from you who aren’t interested in what you have to offer. Your messages should be clear, targeted, and useful to the recipients.

How you use text messaging as a recruiter is important. When you reach out to potential candidates through text messaging, you need to make sure that it is clear who the message is coming from. Candidates who can’t identify the sender of the text are going to quickly delete it and move on. Your messages should always be relevant to the recipient and you should only send out text messages during business hours. Text messaging is a great way to communicate, and can a great boost to your recruitment efforts when you are trying to fill positions.

Ken Rhie is the CEO of Trumpia, which earned a reputation as the most complete SMS solution
including user-friendly user interface and API for mobile engagement, Smart Targeting, advanced
automation, enterprise, and cross-channel features for both mass texting and landline texting use cases.
Mr. Rhie holds an MBA degree from Harvard Business School. He has over 30 years of experience in the
software, internet, and mobile communications industries.

Second version of HoloLens HPU will incorporate AI coprocessor

By Marc Pollefeys, Director of Science, HoloLens

It is not an exaggeration to say that deep learning has taken the world of computer vision, and many other recognition tasks, by storm. Many of the most difficult recognition problems have seen gains over the past few years that are astonishing.

Although we have seen large improvements in the accuracy of recognition as a result of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), deep learning approaches have two well-known challenges: they require large amounts of labelled data for training, and they require a type of compute that is not amenable to current general purpose processor/memory architectures. Some companies have responded with architectures designed to address the particular type of massively parallel compute required for DNNs, including our own use of FPGAs, for example, but to date these approaches have primarily enhanced existing cloud computing fabrics.

But I work on HoloLens, and in HoloLens, we’re in the business of making untethered mixed reality devices. We put the battery on your head, in addition to the compute, the sensors, and the display. Any compute we want to run locally for low-latency, which you need for things like hand-tracking, has to run off the same battery that powers everything else. So what do you do?

You create custom silicon to do it.

First, a bit of background. HoloLens contains a custom multiprocessor called the Holographic Processing Unit, or HPU. It is responsible for processing the information coming from all of the on-board sensors, including Microsoft’s custom time-of-flight depth sensor, head-tracking cameras, the inertial measurement unit (IMU), and the infrared camera. The HPU is part of what makes HoloLens the world’s first€“and still only€“fully self-contained holographic computer.

Today, Harry Shum, executive vice president of our Artificial Intelligence and Research Group, announced in a keynote speech at CVPR 2017, that the second version of the HPU, currently under development, will incorporate an AI coprocessor to natively and flexibly implement DNNs. The chip supports a wide variety of layer types, fully programmable by us. Harry showed an early spin of the second version of the HPU running live code implementing hand segmentation.

The AI coprocessor is designed to work in the next version of HoloLens, running continuously, off the HoloLens battery. This is just one example of the new capabilities we are developing for HoloLens, and is the kind of thing you can do when you have the willingness and capacity to invest for the long term, as Microsoft has done throughout its history. And this is the kind of thinking you need if you’re going to develop mixed reality devices that are themselves intelligent. Mixed reality and artificial intelligence represent the future of computing, and we’re excited to be advancing this frontier.

 

This article originally appeared at: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/second-version-hololens-hpu-will-incorporate-ai-coprocessor-implementing-dnns/.

Instagram starts sharing analytics for brands’ organic posts through API

If a brand wants to know how many people it reached with its organic post on Instagram or how many impressions its Story received, it has had to open Instagram’s app to access those stats instead of accessing them through a social marketing dashboard. No longer, though; now that brand will be able to use Facebook to log in to that dashboard, and more options are on the way.

On Monday, Instagram started sharing analytics for brands’ organic posts and Stories through the Instagram Platform API, so that brands can pull up these stats within the marketing dashboards they use to manage and monitor their various social accounts.

Instagram has been testing the features with marketing technology companies like Falcon.io and is now opening it up to all members of Facebook’s and Instagram’s Marketing Partners program. And sometime in the coming months, individual developers will also be able to access these features.

To be clear, Instagram isn’t giving brands any information that they didn’t already have access to. Any brand or individual that has converted their account to a business profile-Instagram’s version of Facebook’s Pages-has been able to pull up stats like organic posts’ reach, Stories’ impression counts and followers’ demographic breakdowns through the app’s Insights tab. But now those stats can be automatically plugged into social marketing dashboards.

There are a couple of requirements that must be met before these stats can be accessed through the API, though. First, brands must have converted their accounts to a business profile. Second, brands must use Facebook Login to sign in to the dashboards provided by Falcon.io or any other marketing technology firm that plugs into Instagram’s API.

“The new API is built on the same stack as the Facebook Graph API. Because of this, businesses will need to use Facebook Login to access the new features. Businesses still have the option to use the current Instagram API, though insights will not be surfaced through it,” according to an Instagram spokesperson.

In addition to making brands’ organic post insights available through the API, Instagram will also now let brands use the API to moderate comments on their posts, such as by hiding individual comments or turning comments on or off for individual posts.

For example, a brand could configure their social marketing management software to keep an eye out for comments with certain keywords-or have every comment sent through a tool like IBM Watson’s text analyzers-and automatically hide comments considered offensive or toggle off comments on posts whose comment threads are overwhelmed with spam.

About The Author

Tim Peterson, Third Door Media’s Social Media Reporter, has been covering the digital marketing industry since 2011. He has reported for Advertising Age, Adweek and Direct Marketing News. A born-and-raised Angeleno who graduated from New York University, he currently lives in Los Angeles.

He has broken stories on Snapchat’s ad plans, Hulu founding CEO Jason Kilar’s attempt to take on YouTube and the assemblage of Amazon’s ad-tech stack; analyzed YouTube’s programming strategy, Facebook’s ad-tech ambitions and ad blocking’s rise; and documented digital video’s biggest annual event VidCon, BuzzFeed’s branded video production process and Snapchat Discover’s ad load six months after launch. He has also developed tools to monitor brands’ early adoption of live-streaming apps, compare Yahoo’s and Google’s search designs and examine the NFL’s YouTube and Facebook video strategies.

This article originally appeared at: https://martechtoday.com/instagram-starts-sharing-analytics-for-brands-organic-posts-stories-through-api-but-theres-a-catch-201332