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Scooped by Philippe J DEWOST

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The Epstein scandal at MIT shows the moral bankruptcy of techno-elites

From www.theguardian.com - September 9, 2019 2:34 AM

The MIT-Epstein debacle shows ‘the prostitution of intellectual activity’ and calls for a radical agenda pleads Evgeny Morozov.

As Frederic Filloux points in today's edition of The Monday Note,

"It matters because the MediaLab scandal is the tip of the iceberg. American universities are plagued by conflicts of interest. It is prevalent at Stanford for instance. I personally don’t mind an experienced professor charging $3,000 an hour to talk to foreign corporate visitors or asking $15,000 to appear at a conference. These people are high-valued and they also often work for free when needed. What bothers me is when a board membership collides with the content of a class, when a research paper is redacted to avoid upsetting a powerful VC firm who provides both generous donations and advisory fees to the faculty, when a prominent professor regurgitates a paid study they have done for a foreign bank as a support of a class, or when another keeps hammering Google because they advise a direct competitor. This is unethical and offensive to students who regularly pay $60,000-$100,000 in tuition each year."

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

MIT sounds like "Money Infused Technology" : shall we close the Media Lab, disband Ted Talks and refuse tech billionaires money ?

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Delphi acquires autonomous vehicle software supplier NuTonomy in $450 million deal

From www.autonews.com - October 24, 2017 2:08 PM

Delphi Automotive said it plans to acquire Boston-based autonomous vehicle software supplier NuTonomy in a deal that could be valued at $450 million.The acquisition, which is expected to close before the end of this year, will nearly double Delphi's 100-plus automated driving team with NuTonomy's 100 employees, including 70 engineers and scientists, the company said in a news release.NuTonomy will continue to operate in Boston, alongside Delphi's team in Boston, as well as in Delphi offices in Singapore; Pittsburgh; Santa Monica, Calif.; and in Silicon Valley in California.Glen De Vos, chief technology officer for Delphi, said the acquisition of NuTonomy allows Delphi access to the commercial truck market."We think this is the tip of the spear for automated driving," De Vos said Tuesday in a conference call with reporters. "This dramatically accelerates our penetration in this marketplace."

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Meanwhile, in Europe, ...

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Computer program fixes old code faster than expert engineers

From news.mit.edu - October 8, 2015 11:45 AM

Last year, MIT computer scientists and Adobe engineers came together to try to solve a major problem that many companies face: bit-rot.
A good example is Adobe’s successful Photoshop photo editor, which just celebrated its 25th birthday. Over the years Photoshop had accumulated heaps of code that had been optimized for what is now old hardware.
“For high-performance code used for image-processing, you have to optimize the heck out of the software,” says Saman Amarasinghe, a professor at MIT and researcher at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). “The downside is that the code becomes much less effective and much more difficult to understand.”
This results in what Amarasinghe describes as “a billion-dollar problem”: companies like Adobe having to devote massive manpower to going back into the code every few years and, by hand, testing out a bunch of different strategies to try to patch it.
But what if there were a computer program that could automatically fix old code so that engineers can focus on more important tasks, such as actually dreaming up new software?
Enter Helium, a CSAIL system that revamps and fine-tunes code without ever needing the original source, in a matter of hours or even minutes.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Code fixing code, software optimizing bloatware : MIT's CSAIL Helium system can make updates in one day that would take human engineers upwards of three months. When you know how software engineers hate to fix other's old code, and consider how complex it is to maintain such "old" software as Photoshop, this is worth a careful followup.

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Emmanuel HAVET's curator insight, October 9, 2015 2:16 AM

Un rêve pour les entreprises ...

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MIT's Cheetah robot moves by feel to approximate how humans and other animals navigate - without any visual sensor

From www.axios.com - July 10, 2018 3:53 AM

In a turn away from vision, a team at MIT has created a feline robot that attempts to better approximate how humans and animals actually move, navigating stairs and uneven surfaces guided only by sensors on its feet.

Why it matters: Many ambulatory robots rely on substantial recent improvements in computer-vision, like advanced cameras and lidar. But robots will be more nimble and more practically interact with humans with the addition of "blind" vision — a sixth sense of feeling that most living things have for their surroundings.

What's going on: Computer vision alone can result in a robot with slow and inaccurate movements, says MIT's Songbae Kim, designer of the Cheetah 3.

"People start adding vision prematurely and they rely on it too much," Kim tells Axios, when it's best suited for big-picture planning, like registering where a stairway begins and knowing when to turn to avoid a wall. So his team built a "blind" version in order to focus on tactile sensing.

How the blind version works: Two algorithms help the Cheetah stay upright when it encounters unexpected obstacles.

One determines when the bot plants its feet, by calculating how far a leg has swung, how much force the leg is feeling, and where the ground is.
The other governs how much force the robot should apply to each leg to keep its balance, based on the angle of the robot's body relative to the ground.
The sensors can also adjust to external forces, like a researcher's friendly kick from the side.

The result is a quick, balanced robot: The researchers measure the force on each of the Cheetah's legs straight from the motors that control them, allowing it to move fast — at 3 meters per second, or 6.7 miles an hour — and jump up onto a tablefrom a standstill. These tricks make the 90-pound bot look surprisingly nimble.

Cheetah's design emphasizes "sensors that you and I take for granted," said Noah Cowan, director of the LIMBS robotics lab at Johns Hopkins University.

Humans unconsciously keep track of where their arms and legs are — and the forces acting on them — to help stay balanced and move smoothly. MIT’s Cheetah “feels” its legs in a similar way.

The Cheetah's capabilities resemble some of the robots produced by the ever-secretive Boston Dynamics, which in May released a video of its four-legged SpotMini navigating autonomously through its lab with the help of cameras.

It's not clear whether Boston Dynamic robots use tactile technology like Kim's, and the company did not respond to an email.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

It "looks" like machine vision is not necessarily mandatory when it comes to designing efficient "walking" machines.

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Rescooped by Philippe J DEWOST from Consensus Décentralisé - Blockchains - Smart Contracts - Decentralized Consensus

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Fully homomorphic encryption, or how to perform operations over encrypted data | Orange Research blog

From recherche.orange.com - February 14, 2017 10:59 AM

Can we outsource medical analysis without giving away our medical information? Can we do biometrical identification without revealing our characteristics? Can we make statistics on data that we do not know? Yes we can, thanks to a cryptographic mechanism called “homomorphic encryption”.

Cryptography has known many transformations over the years. Many centuries ago, it was first used to protect military and political communications. Though very simple, the mechanisms then devised are still the foundation of current cryptography. The introduction of the computer during Second World War considerably increased the computation capacity. This increase reflected on cryptography in the late 70’s, when public key cryptography was invented. Cryptography became a thriving scientific field. Numerous academic works were produced, commercial standards were set and cryptographic algorithms began to secure our daily life. Today, cryptography is everywhere: in our credit cards, in our phone communications, in our internet browsing, etc.
But new services are today under deployment, such as mobile services, cloud computing, BigData or IoT. These services generate and process a huge amount of personal and sensitive information. As users become more and more concerned about their privacy, and industries want to protect their sensitive data, a new challenge arises for cryptography. Indeed, if this data was to be simply encrypted, processing it would be impossible. This leaves users and service providers with a dilemma: choose between usability and confidentiality of these sensitive data. Here comes fully homomorphic encryption!

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Philippe J DEWOST's curator insight, February 14, 2017 10:57 AM

Here is a fantastic "paper" by Orange Research that deciphers homomorphic encryption in a very clear way, and outlines its future and challenges.