When Mateo Catano
returned for his second year as an undergraduate at Saint Louis University in
the fall of 2018, he found himself with a new roommate—not another student but
a disembodied brain in the form of an Amazon Echo Dot.
Earlier
that summer, the information technology department at SLU had installed about
2,300 of the smart speakers—one for each of the university’s residence hall
rooms, making the school the first in the country to do so. Each device was
pre-programmed with answers to about 130 SLU-specific questions, ranging from
library hours to the location of the registrar’s office (the school dubbed this
“AskSLU”). The devices also included the basic voice “skills” available on
other Dots, including alarms and reminders, general information, and the
ability to stream music.
For
Catano, the Dot was a welcome addition. He liked hearing the weather first
thing in the morning and knowing which dining halls were open. And, if he’s
being honest, he liked the company. “Living in a single, AskSLU definitely made
me feel less lonely,” he says. “And I liked the status of being at the first
university to do this.”
Catano’s reaction was
exactly what SLU administrators were hoping for. This fall, the Jesuit
institution announced plans to broaden the voice skills of its Echo Dots by
including both text messaging and chatbot functions.
No idea of
the long-term effects
We’re on the verge of a new era of smart speakers on campus.
Schools as wide-ranging as Arizona State University, Lancaster University in
the UK, and Ross University School of Medicine in Barbados have adopted
voice-skill technology on campus. Some, including Northeastern University, have
taken the technology a step further and now give students access to financials,
course schedules and grades, and outstanding fees via voice devices.
In
late 2018, Boston’s Emerson College announced it was one of 18 recipients of a
grant from Amazon to advance voice--enabled technology on campuses, part of the
tech giant’s Alexa Innovation Fellowship. Emerson has created a dedicated voice
lab where students can interact and experiment with Alexa skills, and it plans
to install Alexa devices in places like theaters and outside elevator banks.
Administrators at some
of these schools told me they believe Alexa will bolster enrollment and reduce
dropout rates. Several also said they believe voice technology can increase
their students’ success and boost their overall happiness.
World’s 1st remote brain surgery via 5G network performed in China Published time: 17 Mar, 2019 13:12 · A Chinese surgeon has performed the world’s first remote brain surgery using 5G technology, with the patient 3,000km away from the operating doctor. Dr. Ling Zhipei remotely implanted a neurostimulator into his patient’s brain on Saturday, Chinese state-run media reports . The surgeon manipulated the instruments in the Beijing-based PLAGH hospital from a clinic subsidiary on the southern Hainan island, located 3,000km away. The surgery is said to have lasted three hours and ended successfully. The patient, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, is said to be feeling well after the pioneering operation. The doctor used a computer connected to the next-generation 5G network developed by Chinese tech giant Huawei. The new device enabled a near real-time connection, according to Dr. Ling. “You barely feel that the patient is 3,000 kilometers away,” he said.
Visualizing The Power Of The World's Supercomputers BY TYLER DURDEN FRIDAY, JAN 21, 2022 - 04:15 AM A supercomputer is a machine that is built to handle billions, if not trillions of calculations at once. Each supercomputer is actually made up of many individual computers (known as nodes) that work together in parallel. A common metric for measuring the performance of these machines is flops , or floating point operations per second . In this visualization, Visual Capitalist's Marcus Lu uses November 2021 data from TOP500 to visualize the computing power of the world’s top five supercomputers. For added context, a number of modern consumer devices were included in the comparison. Ranking by Teraflops Because supercomputers can achieve over one quadrillion flops, and consumer devices are much less powerful, we’ve used teraflops as our comparison metric. 1 teraflop = 1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion) flops. Supercomputer Fugaku was completed in March 202
Beijing Orders Alibaba To Dump Media Assets That Rival China's Propaganda Machine BY TYLER DURDEN MONDAY, MAR 15, 2021 - 07:30 PM Beijing is reviving its crackdown on the country's biggest tech firms, reminding the world that the CCP is still focused on neutralizing any and all threats to its control of the Chinese economy and its people. Even after amending China's official ideology to include entrepreneurs among the protected classes represented by the CCP (in addition to workers, farmers and soldiers), Beijing, with President Xi at its center, has apparently decided that Chinese tech firms won't follow the American model after all. Instead, their growth and competitive capabilities will be curtailed for the sake of stability at home. After Tencent was censured and strict new requirements were officailly imposed on Alibaba-owned Ant Group that will prevent the company from growing , the Wall Street Journal reports that next up on Beijing's to-do lis
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