Four short links: 22 September 2017
Molecular Robots, Distributed Deep Nets, SQL Notebook, and Super-Accurate GPS
- Scientists Create World’s First ‘Molecular Robot’ Capable Of Building Molecules — Each individual robot is capable of manipulating a single molecule and is made up of just 150 carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen atoms. To put that size into context, a billion billion of these robots piled on top of each other would still only be the same size as a single grain of salt. The robots operate by carrying out chemical reactions in special solutions which can then be controlled and programmed by scientists to perform the basic tasks. (via Slashdot)
- Distributed Deep Neural Networks — in Adrian Colyer’s words: DDNNs partition networks between mobile/embedded devices, cloud (and edge), although the partitioning is static. What’s new and very interesting here though is the ability to aggregate inputs from multiple devices (e.g., with local sensors) in a single model, and the ability to short-circuit classification at lower levels in the model (closer to the end devices) if confidence in the classification has already passed a certain threshold. It looks like both teams worked independently and in parallel on their solutions. Overall, DDNNs are shown to give lower latency decisions with higher accuracy than either cloud or devices working in isolation, as well as fault tolerance in the sense that classification accuracy remains high even if individual devices fail. (via Morning Paper)
- Franchise — an open-source notebook for sql.
- Super-Accurate GPS Chips Coming to Smartphones in 2018 (IEEE Spectrum) — 30cm accuracy (today: 5m), will help with the reflections you get in cities, and with 50% energy savings.
