On a desk in his lab at the University of Pennsylvania, physicist Sam Dillavou has linked an array of breadboards by way of an internet of brightly coloured wires. The setup appears like a DIY dwelling electronics undertaking, however this unassuming meeting can study to type knowledge like a machine-learning mannequin.
While its present functionality is rudimentary, the hope is that, if it really works, it may assist spark a much more energy-efficient strategy to constructing sooner AI. Read the full story.
—Sophia Chen
How QWERTY keyboards present the English dominance of tech
Have you ever considered the indisputable fact that, regardless of the myriad variations between languages, just about everybody makes use of the identical QWERTY keyboards? Many languages have extra or fewer than 26 letters of their alphabet—or no “alphabet” in any respect, like Chinese, which has tens of 1000’s of characters. Yet someway everybody makes use of the identical keyboard to speak.
Last week, MIT Technology Review revealed an excerpt from a brand new guide, The Chinese Computer, which talks about how this problem was solved in China.
Zeyi Yang, our China reporter, sat down with the guide’s writer, Tom Mullaney, a professor of historical past at Stanford University to debate how audio system of non-Latin languages to adapt fashionable applied sciences for his or her makes use of, and what their efforts contribute to computing applied sciences. Read the remainder of their dialog right here.



