Tensorflow- Smarter Machine Learning, For Everyone

TensorFlow – Faster/Smarter/Flexible

TensorFlow, a faster, smarter and a much more flexible than the earlier system can be adapted easily to latest products and research. Moreover it is also highly accessible machine learning system which can run on an individual smartphone or through thousands of computers in data-centres.

Machine learning is yet in its initial stage and computers presently are unable to do what a 4 year old could do naturally such as knowing the name of an animal on seeing only a few examples. However with Tensorflow, it is a good start.

TensorFlow is utilised for all purpose, from speech recognition in Google app to Smart Reply in Inbox, to search in Google Photos. It has the potentials to build and train neural nets up to five times quicker than the first generation system and hence it could be used in improving the products in a quicker manner.

Deep Learning has had a great influence on computer science, with the possibility of exploring new areas of research and in the creation of incredibly useful products which millions of people tend to use daily. The internal deep learning infrastructure – DistBelief developed in 2011, enabled Googlers to create even bigger neural networks and scale training to thousands of cores in data centres.

Twice as Fast as DistBelief

In 2014, DistBelief has trained the Inception mode which had won Imagenet’s Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge, driving the experiments in automated image captioning and DeepDream. DistBelief had some limitation though it was very successful and was closely directed to neural networks.

To organise it, was difficult and it was firmly coupled to Google’s internal infrastructure thus making it difficult in sharing research code externally. The open source release of TensorFlow has been publicised, the second-generation machine learning system which has been designed in correcting shortcomings. TensorFlow is flexible, portable, general, easy to use and is a completely open source. On enhancing DistBelief, addition of speed, scalability together with production readiness has been done.

 TechFlow is twice as fast as DistBelief.TensorFlow tends to have all-encompassing built-in support for the purpose of deep learning though it is more general than any computation. One can express as computational glow graph and can compute with TensorFlow.

Any grade based machine learning procedure could profit from TensorFlow’s auto-differentiation and set of first rate optimizers. It tends to get easy in expressing new ideas in TensorFlow through the flexible Python interface.

Open-Sourced TensorFlow – Standalone Library

One can move their idea flawlessly from training the desktop GPU to running on the mobile phone. Moreover you could also get started rapidly with the powerful machine learning tech by utilising the state-of-the-art example model architectures.

However, the most important fact about TensorFlow is that it your own possession. It is an open-sourced TensorFlow as a standalone library associated with tools, tutorials and examples with the Apache 2.0 licence. Hence, the user is free to use TensorFlow at their institution, at any place of work.

TensorFlow has been utilised for all the experiments by deep learning researchers and the engineers tend to use it to permeate Google Search with signals from deep neural networks as well as to power the features of tomorrow. TensorFlow will continue to be used in serving machine learning in products and the research team has been committed in sharing its implementation of available ideas.

Iranian Military Hackers Focus on U.S. Administration Officials

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards – Hacking emails & Social Media Account -US Officials

Wall Street Journal had recently reported that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have come up with hacking of email and social media accounts of Obama administration officials in recent weeks in cyber-attacks, is said to be connected with the arrest of an Iranian-American businessman in Tehran.

The newspaper referring to unnamed U.S. officials stated that people working on Iran policy seemed to be the focus of cyber-attacks with personnel connected to the State Department’s office of Iranian Affairs and the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs among those who had been hacked.

 Besides these, other targets comprised of journalist and academics. The most recent reports in hacking attacks came up after a landmark international agreement in July which improved the severe economic sanction on Iran in compensation of Tehran curbing its nuclear program ensuring that it will not be utilised in the development of weapons.

Recently, a powerful branch of the Iranian military – the Revolutionary Guards, regularly made hacking attacks on U.S. government agencies, though a source informed the Journal that the hacking seemed to have increased after the arrest of Siamak Namazi in mid-October

Cyber-Attacks – Obtain Information/Get Connected with Targets of Interest

A senior administration official informed Reuters in response to the Journal story, that they were aware of certain reports involving Iran and while they have no comment on the specific reports, they are aware that hackers in Iran and other areas often tend to use cyber-attacks to obtain information or get connected with targets of interest.

 Namazi, head of strategic planning for Crescent Petroleum, which is an oil and gas company in the United Arab Emirates, had worked for think tanks in Washington. He had been apprehended and interrogated by the Revolutionary Guards, regularly prior to his arrest. Namazi had studied in the U.S. and had friendships at Washington which included the National Endowment for Democracy and the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars.

 He had earlier been the managing director of Atieh Bahar, a consulting firm promoting foreign investment in Iran. The fact sheet had indicated that he had studied at Tufts and Rutgers universities though had returned to Iran in late 1990s for the purpose of military service.

China/Russia Accused of Cyber-Attacks

It stated that he stayed out of discussion of U.S. or Iranian political queries in recent years with the exception of very public role he had played recounting the adverse impact of Western sanction on the Iranian population. A source had informed the Journal that U.S. officials are of the belief that some of the more recent attacks could have been linked to reports of detained dual citizens as well as the others.

The Journal had revealed that Namazi’s friends as well as business associates has informed that the Revolutionary Guards had confiscated his computer after raiding his family’s home in Tehran. According to a spokesman at Iran’s U.N. mission in New York informed newspaper that Tehran had been wrongly accused of cyber-attacks.

Over the past several months, China and Russia have been accused of cyber hacking administration officials in the United States and the countries have denied the charges too. As per LA Times it was said that the hackers were on the lookout for information on U.S. spies.

This Sprout Pencil Grows into a Tomato

Plantable Sprout Pencils – Grow into Vegetables/Flowering Plants/Herbs

Denmark based Sprout World has plans in eliminating waste from pencil stubs that are thrown away, which are not of much use and are tossed into the bin. According to CEO of Sprout World, Michael Stausholm, around 15 billion pencils are made every year with three million of them just in United States and these could be a good amount of them being thrown away.

The start-up tends to make plantable pencils which can grow into vegetables, flowering plants or herbs when it is not useful anymore. Stausholm stated that the pencils which are made from cedar in Pine City, Minnesota seem to be the perfect ecological product since one `dying product tends to give life to a new product.

Where an eraser would be, the wooden pencils tend to have a capsule which is made from biodegradable substance which comprises of a small combination of seeds and peat. The stub end of the pencil is used as a marker and the capsule is planted in pot of soil, which tends to dissolve and seed grows into a plant. These pencils are in a range of 14 varieties at a cost of $19.95 for a pack of eight which comprise of basil, green pepper, lavender, sunflower and tomato and had been developed by three MIT students in 2012.

Sprout Pencils – Kickstarter Campaign

Stausholm informed that while he was living in Denmark, he worked a lot on sustainable companies. However sustainability was hard to illustrate to consumers and he was searching for product which could do that easily. A year thereafter, he came across Sprout Pencils when it was a Kickstarter campaign.

He valued the idea and it was an appropriate way of explaining what sustainability was all about. He partnered with the students convincing them to permit him to sell the pencils in Denmark. He stated that around 70,000 pencils were sold in the spring of 2013 and realized that there was demand for them. The start-up had sold around a million pencils all across Europe by 2014.

He acquired the patents and rights to the brand later that year and became the CEO of Sprout World. He informed that Sprout World presently sells on an average around 450,000 pencils monthly and has logged more than $3 million by way of revenue.

Mission – Educate What to Purchase/Product Reusable

His next ambition is to overcome the U.S. market. In September, he had opened an office in Boston to get drive going with two employees there and 15 in Europe. He stated that with regards to embracing eco-friendliness, America is a couple of years behind Europe.

However he is of the belief that it is an impeccable market for Sprout World pencils since its makers are based in the U.S. The pencils are sold on Amazon – AMZN, Tech30 and in Whole Foods – WFM stores in U.S. Stausholm is keen in bringing the price down and eventually he would want all students across the globe to use Sprout World pencils.

The start-up plans are likely to roll out new products which include plantable greeting cards and coloured pencils in January. He had commented that he is aware that they cannot save the planet just with his product but their mission is to educate people on how to be more aware in what they purchase and look for products which are reusable.

Google Uncovers 11 Serious Security Flaws within the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge

Google Discovered 11 Serious Security Problems – Samsung’s Galaxy S6

Google has discovered 11 serious security problems in Samsung’s Galaxy S6 smartphone in a sequence of severe test intended to clear the vulnerabilities in handsets. The company had set its security analyst team Project Zero with the challenge to seek out bugs in the Galaxy S6 Edge running an open source version of Google’s Android software called Android Open-Source Project – AOSP, to see how quickly Samsung patched the issue.

Google calls the companies, Original Equipment Manufacturers or OEMs, whose smartphones use its software that include Samsung, LG and Motorola. The researcher of Project Zero, Natalie Silvanovich, wrote in a Google blogpost that, `OEMs are an important area for Android security research since they introduce additional and possibly vulnerable code in Android devices at all privilege levels and they decide the frequency of the security updates which they provide for their devices to carriers’.

Project Zero researchers that were based in Europe and North America, identified within a week, 11 possibly severe security issues in the device especially surrounding media processing and device drivers. They reported the susceptibilities to Samsung specified that eight of the 11 were fixed in their October Maintenance Release while the remaining three which had been marked as lower-severity would be fixed throughout November.

Project Zero – Seeking Bugs in Software

Mr Silvanovich added that it is promising that the highest severity issues were fixed and updated on-devices in a reasonable time frame’. Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge had been released together with its non-curved equivalent the Galaxy S6 in April.

 It was launched as Samsung’s flagship handsets to contend against iPhone 6 and 6 Plus which was released the previous September and these two smartphones faced disappointing sales with Samsung’s profit fell by 8% in July. Recently, it’s most recent version of Android 6.0; Marshmallow had been issued by Google.

Google Nexus 5, 6, 7 and 9 smartphones together with LG’s G4 now are capable of running it while the other manufacturers Samsung, HTC as well as Sony are likely to update their devices in the following weeks. Project Zero has been running for some time now by Google with the task of seeking out bugs in software, alerting the software makers and then reporting the public if nothing is fixed in an attempt to force something to be done.

Internal Contest between Two Teams of Google’s Project Zero Security Teams

Earlier, Google had taken on Windows and OS X with Project Zero bugs, however now it is Samsung in the firing line for 11 serious faults with the Galaxy S6 Edge. The issues with Samsung’s device as high impact have been described by Google, which means that they tend to be quite serious.

The faults comprise of script injections, driver issues, image parsing issues, permission weaknesses as well as a directory traversal bug that enables a file to be written in unexpected settings. Project Zero blog post of Google tends to go in-depth on each of the 11 security faults detected in the Galaxy S6 Edge. Presently most of them are already fixed but three of the tricky ones still remain which include the script injection bug with two specific image parsing errors.

All this was part of an internal contest between two teams of Google’s Project Zero security teams. They had selected Galaxy S6 Edge since it is a decent example of a recently released high-profile Android smartphone.

Wonder Material Could Harvest Energy from Thin Air

Graphene – Most Innovative Advance in Battery Technology

Claims for new battery technology have been all over the place since the development of lead acid battery for over 150 years. Researchers however, at Manchester University in UK, state that their discovery regarding the new material graphene would be the most innovative advance in battery technology.

As per study which had been published in the journal Nature, graphene membranes could be utilised in sieving hydrogen gas from the atmosphere, an improvement which could make way for electric generators powered by air.

Post-doctoral researchers in the project, Dr Sheng Hu commented that it seems extremely simple and promising since graphene can be produced in square metre sheets and they hope that it would find its way to commercial fuel cells sooner than later.

At the core of technology is the physical properties of graphene which is an element having the same atomic assembly as the lead which is present in the household pencil. Graphene already very popular as a technological game changer, however was isolated in 2004 by a group from Manchester University ledby Andrew Geim and Kostya Novoseloy, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics for their discovery in 2010.

Lightest/Thinnest/Strongest Harder than Diamond

Graphene is the lightest, thinnest and the strongest object obtained and the first two dimensional crystal known to science. Moreover, it is harder than diamond and about 200 times stronger than steel. Being transparent and flexible in conducting electricity much better than copper, this substance is set to transform from smartphones and wearable technology to green technology as well as medicine.

Known for its barrier qualities, it is about an atom thick and more than a million times thinner than a human hair. With the latest discovery, graphene is smart for probable usage in proton conducting membranes that is at the heart of modern fuel cell technology.

Fuel cell tends to function by using hydrogen and oxygen for fuel, converting the chemical energy created by its input into electricity directly. But present membrane that tend to discrete protons essential for the process are comparatively incompetent, enabling contamination in the crossover of fuel.

Hydrogen Acquired Entirely from Fossil Fuels

Graphene membranes can boost their durability as well as efficiency. The team discovered that the protons passed through the ultra-thin crystals with relative ease especially at increased temperatures as well as with the utilization of platinum based catalyst covered on the membrane film.

The amazing feature of the research is that the membranes could be utilised in extracting hydrogen from the atmosphere wherein the scientist believed that such harvesting could be joined with fuel cells in creating a mobile electric generator fuelled by hydrogen present in the air. According to the scientist, it is a simple setup when one knows how it should work.

You could put a hydrogen containing gas on one side and apply a small electric current to collect pure hydrogen on the other side and this hydrogen could then be burned in a fuel cell. They had worked with small membranes and had achieved the flow of hydrogen tough tiny.

 However, this is the initial state of discovery and the paper is to bring about an awareness of the prevailing prospects, among experts. Further efforts would be needed to build up and test hydrogen harvesters and presently hydrogen is acquired entirely from fossil fuels.