Top Tech

After the defeat of Donald Trump, there was little time between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ celebratory speeches and the start of conversations about transition team members and key administration appointments. Some of the first names to emerge include people with tech backgrounds like former Google CEO Eric Schmidt who may be tapped to lead a tech industry panel in the White House. Since…

Many real-world problems require complex coordination between multiple agents — e.g., people or algorithms. A machine learning technique called multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has shown success with respect to this, mainly in two-team games like Go, DOTA 2, StarCraft, hide-and-seek, and capture the flag. But the human world is far messier than games. That’s because humans face social…

In October, Google announced it would let users search for songs by simply humming or whistling melodies, initially in English on iOS and in more than 20 languages on Android. At the time, the search giant only hinted at how the new Hum to Search feature worked. But in a blog post today, Google detailed the underlying systems that enable Google Search to find songs using only hummed…

How much information about a person’s behavior can you ascertain from a wearable device? Researchers at the University of Cambridge and Alan Turing Institute sought to investigate this in a study involving over 280,000 hours of wrist accelerometer and wearable electrocardiogram (ECG) data. They claim they successfully trained classifiers on the dataset to capture physiologically meaningful…