CAN Info-Tech 2014 from Jan 2

Can Info-Tech 2014

CAN Info-Tech 2014, the annual fair on information communication and technology, will start in the capital on January 2 next year. The six-day event at Bhrikuti Mandap Exhibition Hall, is being organized by Computer Association of Nepal (CAN). According to Binod Dhakal, the president of CAN, the event this year will have as much as 270 stalls.  As earlier, we will try to give the best IT solutions to Nepalis within the event by showcasing the latest in technological innovations taking place around the world, Dhakal said. Dhakal said the booking of stalls will be announced within couple of days.       Republica,

Instagram, finally, debuts on Windows phones

Instagram is now available for Windows phones, some three years after the photo-sharing app’s launch, the company announced Wednesday.

Users can download the app starting Wednesday from the Windows Phone Store, Instagram said in a blog post.

Instagram, which launched its service in 2010, has been available on iOS and Android-based smartphones for some time. The company has noticed a rise, however, in the mobile Windows platform, with tens of millions of smartphone users around the world, Instagram said.

“Our team has been working hard to bring Instagram to Windows phone users everywhere,” the company said.

The move could improve Instagram’s ability to compete in other emerging markets around the world like Asia, where Windows-based smartphones made by Nokia are popular. Some Windows-based smartphones may also be perfect for photo sharing, like the Nokia Lumia 1020, which features a 41-megapixel camera sensor.

Right now, Instagram on Windows phones will focus on the app’s core features, but the company will continue to develop it, Instagram said.

Instagram was acquired by Facebook last year, when it had about 30 million users. The company has grown strongly since then, with roughly 150 million users today, Instagram has said.

 

Google buys new robots which run faster than humans: meet Wildcat

THEY run faster than people and are agile over rough surfaces and terrains that are challenging for most human beings.

Wildcat is the latest mobile robot acquired by Google to join BigDog, Cheetah and Atlas.

The internet giant has bought the machines in an acquisition of US company, Boston Dynamics, which has designed mobile research robots for the Pentagon.

Boston Dynamics has created machines which walk and stay upright over difficult terrain and run fast like big cats.

Why Google is buying up the machines is unstated, but it's thought the company may be working on systems to replace warehouse workers or carry out home care.

A video of BigDog shows a noisy, gas-powered, four-legged, walking robot that climbs hills, travels through snow, skitters precariously on ice and even manages to stay upright in response to a well-placed human kick.

The video has been viewed more than 15 million times since it was posted on YouTube in 2008.

Facebook hires artificial intelligence guru to improve site

Facebook

FACEBOOK is working to become your new best friend, getting to know you better by infusing the billion-member social network's software with artificial intelligence.

The California-based social network giant is hiring professor Yann LeCun from New York University's Center for Data Science to head up a new artificial intelligence lab, aiming to use cutting-edge science to make Facebook more interesting and relevant.

For now, Facebook feeds may seem like a random jumble, but LeCun argues these "can be improved by intelligent systems."

"This could include things like ranking (the items in) news feeds, or determining the ads that are shown to users, to be more relevant," Mr LeCun said.

"Then there are things that are less directly connected, like analyzing content, understanding natural language and being able to model users... to allow them to learn new things, entertain them and help them achieve their goals."

Facebook is the world's biggest social network, but it faces the challenge of maintaining growth, keeping users engaged and delivering enough advertising to generate revenue growth without turning members off.

LeCun said the new artificial intelligence lab would be the largest research facility of its kind in the world, though he declined to provide numbers.

"We're limited only by how many smart people there are in the world that we can hire," the French-born mathematician and computer scientist said.

The lab will be based in three locations - New York, London and Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, California.

But it will also be part of the broader artificial intelligence research community, according to LeCun, who starts his new job in January while keeping his NYU post.

Facebook's move follows Google's forays into artificial intelligence, and notably its acquisition earlier this year of DNNresearch, a startup created by University of Toronto professor Geoffrey Hinton and two of his graduate students, known for computer models of brain functions, which includes pattern and speech recognition.

Artificial intelligence can help computers "think" in ways similar to humans and help solve problems. In one famous example, IBM's Watson computer beat human contestants in the TV trivia game Jeopardy.

Big tech companies are all working on artificial intelligence to varying degrees, said Greg Sterling, analyst at Opus Research.

It's a somewhat "loaded and elusive term," he said, but it could "power a range of consumer and enterprise-facing applications" - even if Facebook doesn't quite know what those applications are yet.

Mr LeCun, the founding director of NYU's Center for Data Science, is known for creating an early version of a pattern-recognition algorithm that mimics in part the visual cortex of animals and humans.

LeCun's recent research projects include the application of "deep learning" methods for visual scene understanding, driverless cars and small flying robots, as well as speech recognition, and applications in biology and medicine.

James Hendler, who heads the Rensselaer Institute for Data Exploration and Applications, said Facebook already uses some artificial intelligence algorithms for its "social network graph," but that applying these to photos, videos and other "multimedia" data requires a boost in power.

"As they move into their own search and more of these new multimedia data types, they need more," Mr Hendler said.

"I expect that it will in the short term mainly focus on improving existing algorithms, for example better selection of what shows up in a user's Web feed.

"In the long run, we should see a lot more capabilities such as searching for photos of things one might be interested in, and more information in Facebook that results from your activities on other websites."              

                                                                               Source: news.com.au

Google robots to challenge Amazon drones for home delivery

Google’s new robotic grocery delivery service is expected to challenge Amazon’s drone project which envisages transporting goods to its customers by air.

The company has recently begun Google Shopping Express in San Francisco and San Jose, which is going to directly challenge Amazon's Prime Air Project, the BBC reports.

According to the report, Google's robots could be paired with its self-driving car research to help automate the delivery of goods to people's doors.

Google said it has taken over seven robotics companies in the past half-a-year to develop its own product.

A company spokesman confirmed that the effort was being headed up by Andy Rubin, who was previously in charge of the Android operating system.

However, Google does not plan to sell the resulting product to consumers at this stage.

                                                                                                   Source: dnaindia

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Snapchat lawyers seek to silence Reggie Brown

Snapchat

Snapchat's legal team is going on the offensive in the hopes of preventing more seemingly incriminating video footage or statements from appearing in the press.

Friday, the Los Angeles-based company's lawyers filed a motion with California's Central District Court seeking a temporary restraining order against the jilted Reggie Brown. Brown is suing Snapchat, its co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, and the company's investors for a stake in the application he claims to hav

e invented in the spring of 2011.

The suit, which was first filed by Brown and his lawyers in state court in February of this year, was moved to federal court by the defendants in November. It continues to gain media attention as Snapchat's popularity and value escalate with each passing month.

But the issue at hand now is whether Brown and his attorneys have the right to talk to the press about protected matters. Snapchat's legal team, Quinn Emaneul, is seeking the temporary restraining order against Brown because the firm believes that Brown provided Business Insider with deposition videos that were marked confidential. In the motion, Quinn Emanuel partner Bruce Van Dalsem alleges that Brown's lawyer, Luan Tran, confirmed in a December 2 phone call that his firm provided the video snippets of Spiegel's and Murphy's depositions to Business Insider.

"Plaintiff and his counsel boldly claimed they had a right to make such disclosures -- despite the contrary terms of the Protective Order -- because they unilaterally (and wrongly) determined that Snapchat had waived its rights under the Protective Order," Van Dalsem wrote. "Plaintiff and his counsel also refused to cease further violations of the Protective Order, stating that they reserve the right to disclose Snapchat's confidential documents and information to the media -- at any time and without any warning or meet and confer -- whenever they unilaterally determine that Snapchat has, in their erroneous view waived its rights under that Order."

 

 

The leaked videos show portions of the taped depositions of Brown, Murphy, and Spiegel, which were conducted earlier this year. In one telling clip, Spiegel testified that "Reggie may deserve something for some of his contributions."

And surely, there are more juicy bits of information that we haven't seen yet, as hinted at by Snapchat's lawyer. "Snapchat will suffer great or irreparable injury if plaintiff is permitted to disclose Snapchat's confidential information to the public," Van Dalsem said.

Brown, according to Quinn Emanuel, is said to have scheduled an "exclusive interview" with GQ. Clearly, Snapchat's legal team would like to have the restraining order granted before said interview takes place. Quinn Emaneul is also seeking monetary sanctions against the opposition for what it believes is a violation of a previously issued protective order.

When reached for comment, Tran told CNET that he would file his team's opposition to the restraining order request later Monday.                                 Source: cnet.com

 

Mozilla takes another stab at elusive multiprocess Firefox

Firefox may offer a lot of competitive features in a tight browser marketplace, but one thing it lacks is the kind of sandboxed, multiprocess architecture under its hood that other browsers have had for years.

 

Changing to a multiprocess architecture for Firefox would result in numerous benefits, wrote Firefox engineer Bill McCloskey on Thursday, in the three key areas of performance, security, and stability. A multiprocess architecture splits various browser functions into multiple tasks on the computer, instead of bundling them all together as one process for the browser.

 

While Firefox's performance now is significantly faster than it was a few years ago, thanks in large part to projects like MemShrink and Snappy, a multiprocess backend would allow Firefox developers to more easily debug problems, which in turn would allow developers to make their JavaScript run faster.

 

Another benefit on the performance front is that much of the work that went into Electrolysis, Mozilla's previous multiprocess attempt, found its way into Firefox OS. It would help, McCloskey wrote, for Firefox OS and Firefox to have backends that function as similarly as possible.

 

Multiprocess architecture would be safer for Firefox users as well, he said, because it would allow the browser's content processes to be sandboxed. While sandboxing is possible in single-process systems, it doesn't make sense in a browser where add-on and other processes have to regularly access the file system.

 

"Right now, if someone discovers an exploitable bug in Firefox, they're able to take over users' computers," McCloskey said.

 

The browser would become more stable as a result of the multiprocess implementation because a process crash would only take down that specific process, not the entire browser.

 

McCloskey also said that the multiprocess architecture is a long way from reaching the stable version of Firefox. Concerns about keeping the browser's memory footprint small will keep Mozilla from switching to the new architecture until its ready. "The total memory usage for multiprocess Firefox is only 10 MB greater than single-process Firefox," McCloskey said. "We should be able to shrink this difference with some effort." Also keeping Firefox from achieving multiprocess architecture are concerns about add-on and plug-in compatibility. "It's a large project and any predictions at this point would be foolhardy," he said.

                                  Source:- Cnet tech news