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Content provided by IBM and TNW. Today’s AI systems are quickly evolving to become humans’ new best friend. We now have AIs that can concoct award-winning whiskey, write poetry, and help doctors perform extremely precise surgical operations. But one thing they can’t do — which is, on the surface, far simpler than all those other things — is use common sense. Common sense is different...

Content provided by IBM and TNW. Babies learn to talk from hearing other humans — mostly their parents — repeatedly produce sounds. Slowly, through repetition and discovering patterns, infants start connecting those sounds to meaning. Through a lot of practice, they eventually manage to produce similar sounds that humans around them can understand. Machine learning algorithms work much in the same way, but instead...

This article was originally published on .cult by Luis Minvielle, Inês Almeida. .cult is a Berlin-based community platform for developers. We write about all things career-related, make original documentaries, and share heaps of other untold developer stories from around the world. You’ve probably read this before: the Netherlands is an English-speaker’s paradise. Tied with the Nordic countries for proficiency, more than 90% of Dutch...

This article was originally published on .cult by Mikaella C, Inês Almeida. .cult is a Berlin-based community platform for developers. We write about all things career-related, make original documentaries, and share heaps of other untold developer stories from around the world. Last year we brought you our first comprehensive breakdown of developer salaries in Germany. We used extensive data gathered over the course of...

A UK scale-up this week unveiled an industry-first approach to identity verification: asking users to turn their heads. Onfido, an Oxford University spin-out, launched the software amid surging identity fraud. Growing economic pressures, increasing digitization, and pandemic-fuelled upheaval recently led politicians to warn that a “fraud epidemic”  is sweeping across Onfido’s home country of the UK. Similar developments have been observed around the world....

References: Didn’t they go out with the ark? These days we are far more inclined to think that all the power in job hunting lies in employee referral programmes or social media recommendations, and as a result, lots of job seekers forget about the power of a good reference. According to a Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) survey, 92% of employers conduct background...

You’ve got a brand new MacBook? Perfect. Now’s the time for you to completely ruin its battery, to ensure it only lasts for minutes when you’re out and about. I mean, what’s the point in your laptop being portable? As far as I’m concerned, none. That’s why we’ve put together a handy guide outlining everything you should do to mess up your MacBook’s battery...

It’s a bold new world for automobile makers. After a century of development and fine-tuning, the combustion engine is going the way of the dodos as Europe shifts to clean energy. But there’s more to the future of cars than just electric motors. The onset of fully autonomous vehicles may lie just beyond the technological horizon and the promise of a million-mile battery draws...

Vinyl has undergone one hell of a renaissance. In 2006, the format was effectively dead. But since then? Vinyl records have experienced year-on-year growth, with the US alone clocking 41.7m units sold in 2021, a 45-fold increase from 16 years ago. While in Germany, sales went from 0.3m in 2006, to 4.5m last year. Those numbers are somewhat misleading though — and their exuberance...

European businesses, investors, and talent are all vying for a ticket on the metaverse hype train. Even political heavyweights are making moves — or, at least, pronouncements. French President Emmanuel Macron wants to build “a European metaverse” to challenge US and Chinese tech giants. The EU’s digital chief, Margrethe Vestager, meanwhile, is mulling new antitrust regulation. But their ambitions are a long way from being...

Influencers may crave attention by “occupation,” but a new AI experiment shows they can’t always control their admirers’ gazes. Dubbed “The Follower,” the project tracks Instagrammers in the wild. In the process, it offers a glimpse at the terrifying capabilities of automated surveillance. The experiment is the brainchild of Dries Depoorter, a Belgian artist who previously caught our attention by monitoring politicians using phones at...

The global AI explosion has supercharged the need for a common sense, human-centered methodology for dealing with data privacy and ownership. Leading the way is Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), but there’s more than just personally identifiable information (PII) at stake in the modern market. What about the data we generate as content and art? It’s certainly not legal to copy someone else’s...

What’s big, good for your brain, and about to land in Spain? That’s right, TNW València! On March 30th and 31st in 2023, we’re bringing our world famous tech event to España. To achieve this, we’ve partnered with the Ajuntament de València (that’s the city council) for two days of celebrating and showcasing the best of Southern European tech and startups. So… why València?...

Scientists at the University of Oxford recently published the results of a mind-blowing experiment wherein they entangled two atomic clocks at a record-breaking distance of two meters. Up front: Atomic clocks have been in popular use since the 1950s. They’re used in myriad applications ranging from managing fairness on the stock market to allowing spaceships to navigate at extreme speeds. The Oxford team’s experiment...

The future is becoming less car-centric. But in Germany, the autobahn runs a whopping 13,000 kilometers. It’s not only one of the longest and most dense road systems globally but a love letter to taking cars to the limit featuring stretches with effectively no speed limit for certain classes of vehicles.  But it also provides a critical test bed for the future of mobility,...

You put your blood, sweat, and tears into building an amazing product that’ll solve your customers’ problems and blow the competition away. The problem is: no one knows about it. Sound familiar? You can spend all the time you want on product development, but without a well-defined brand, you’ll struggle to catch the eye of customers and investors, or stand out against competitors. The...

The ancient art of origami could have a future in space. Sweden’s first astronaut and the European Space Agency (ESA) this week unveiled a new project inspired by the paper-folding technique. The program will use technology designed by Stilfold, a Swedish startup that’s pioneered a manufacturing process called “industrial origami.” The technique uses robotic arms to fold sheets of steel over curves to form...

 The end of summer also sounded the end of Germany’s €9 public transport ticket — a tenth of its usual price. Unsurprisingly popular with commuters, it left people wondering what was next.  This week the Berlin Senate has announced its plan to secure funds for reduced-price BVG tickets. According to Mayor Franziska Giffey, a monthly ticket price of €29 for zones A-C has been...

In the age of Google, we all naturally turn to the internet when we’re facing a challenge. For example, “How do you snake a drain?”, “What’s the best way to get over a hangover?”, or perhaps even, “How do I land my dream job?.” If you’re currently in the market for a new career, you’ve probably spent a little bit of time trawling through...

The digital platform economy has exploded in the last few years. According to European Commission figures, over 28 million people in the EU work through digital labor platforms today. By 2025, their number is expected to reach 43 million. Workforce digitalization, which accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, has radically changed the European labor market. For some people, that means insecure contracts and stressful working...

Lithium-ion batteries have become a key component in the rise of electric mobility, but forecasting their health and lifespans is limiting the technology. While they’ve proven successful, the capacity of lithium-ion batteries degrades over time, and not just because of the ageing process that occurs during charging and discharging — known as “cycling ageing.” Batteries also degrade when not in use Lithium-ion battery cells...

Researchers from DeepMind, the UK’s juggernaut AI lab, have forsaken the noble games of chess and Go for a more plebeian delight: football. The Google sister company yesterday published a research paper and accompanying blog post detailing its new neural probabilistic motor primitives (NPMP) — a method by which artificial intelligence agents can learn to operate physical bodies. Per the blog post: An NPMP...

When it comes to mobility, the future is electric, and that means a lot of batteries. Unfortunately, batteries can potentially catch fire or explode, causing fast, ferocious fires. But we might have a solution – or several solutions. This article is Part Three, the final of a series I’ve been writing on lithium-ion battery fires in escooters and ebikes. Part One explored the incidence...

Scientists have tapped neuromorphic computing to keep robots learning about new objects after they’ve been deployed. For the uninitiated, neuromorphic computing replicates the neural structure of the human brain to create algorithms that can deal with the uncertainties of the natural world. Intel Labs has developed one of the most notable architectures in the field: the Loihi neuromorphic chip. Loihi is comprised of around 130,000 artificial...