Busy with travelling and family this week, so have held over the usual Thursday post.
Accelerated computation for Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), which enables direct computation on encrypted data, improving both security and privacy.
Sony offers a service whereby you can shoot your own photos from space, or book a 90 minute orbital session for photography or videography, from one of 16 different orbits. Its first photo is of China taken over the Sea of Japan.
Fascinating thread on radiation-eating fungi, with potential uses in space exploration.
Romania has developed an AI bot that will participate in Cabinet meetings. The bot will ‘automatically identify the opinions of Romanians that have been shared on social media or submitted to a newly established portal. The machine synthesizes their thoughts into categories, prioritizes their importance and delivers the information back to government decision-makers.’ Oh boy. Nothing like an intransparent magic oracle for decision-making and accountability.
AI and the future of education, Duolingo edition. It makes me wonder whether simply encouraging the use of Duolingo in schools, supplemented by, for example, consversations with communities isn’t a way of improving foreign language proficiency in Australia, rather than relying on traditional teaching through schools.
MIT Technology Review looks at its first set of tech breakthrough predictions, from 2001. Lessons include that progress is often slow, sometimes it takes a crisis and path dependency matters.
Another area of skills shortages: pilots.
Lesley Seebeck 