It comes as the UN's human rights chief warns of possible war crimes happening in northern Tigray state.
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Friday, November 13, 2020
Ciara, Russell Wilson to release a pair of fragrances
‘It is the first beauty venture for the Seattle Seahawks quarterback and the Grammy award-winning entertainer.’
Ciara and Russell Wilson are both releasing a pair of fragrances just in time for the holiday season.
The couple have created R&C The Fragrance Duo in partnership with manufacturer Hampton Beauty.
“It is the first beauty venture for the Seattle Seahawks quarterback and the one-name, Grammy award-winning entertainer,” Women’s World Daily wrote in the caption of a photo of the superstar couple on Instagram.
“We wanted our scents to be able to be very strong individually but also be stronger together,” Wilson explained to WWD.
Read More: Ciara, Russell Wilson funding new Seattle charter school with $1.75 million donation
“That aspiration is represented in the physical shape of the perfumes, which wrap around each other like puzzle pieces and link via magnet to create a larger, unified structure,” the outlet writes.
Ciara and her NFL star hubby worked on the project “in the thick of quarantine” amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“I like scents to be distinctive,” Ciara explained of her fragrance. “I want it to be memorable. I always think about the feeling that I get when I smell someone that smells so fresh…You remember that scent. It leaves a mark on you.”
Wilson added, “For me, I really wanted to put out something sex. When you walk in the room, I think you want the man to bring a presence without overdoing it. That’s kind of something I’ve always wanted to feel.”
News of the fragrance collection coincides with the announcement that Wilson and Ciara are donating $1.75 million to a charter school in the Seattle area.
Read More: Ciara shows off candelight birthday surprise from Russell Wilson
According to the News Tribune, through their Why Not You Foundation, the couple will be donating money to rebrand an existing charter program known as Cascade Midway Academy, just south of Seattle.
theGRIO previously reported, the Cascade high school program was originally set to debut this year before the pandemic forced founders Garth Reeves and Scott Canfield to delay opening. Ciara and Wilson have stepped in to partner with the Seattle-based charter-school leaders to instead start the Why Not You Academy.
Calling it “a long-time dream,” Wilson said this is just the first of many schools he plans to start. The academy will open in the fall of 2021 to a freshman class of 100 and will operate as a tuition-free public high school.
Wilson and Ciara’s fragrance duo will be available for $90 when it launches November 17 on the new website RandCFragrance.com. A portion of the sales will be donated to the Why Not You Foundation, which promotes education and children’s health.
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Chicago boy, 12, shot while picking up school supplies with father
‘He was just sitting there in the car and someone shot him.’
A 12-year-old boy is lucky to be alive after he was shot multiple times in Chicago while shopping for school supplies with his father.
Lamar Davis was sitting in a parked car in the city’s Lawndale area on Wednesday, when a maroon SUV pulled up, rolled down a rear window and someone opened fire with a .45-caliber handgun, per the Chicago Tribune. Davis was struck in the back, hip, leg and buttocks. His father was not wounded. At this time, it appears the attack was random.
The child was treated at a local hospital and released the next day, according to the report. He must undergo follow-up treatment in the weeks ahead.
Davis told his family that he has no idea who shot him or why
Read More: Man arrested in Chicago after killing girlfriend and her family
“He was just sitting there in the car and someone shot him,” Lamar’s mother, Melissa Robinson, told the Chicago Tribune.
“Kids can’t go outside, they can’t do anything,” she added.
Davis is the oldest of six and has two sisters and three brothers. Robinson said “He is protective of them.”
According to the Chicago police, no arrests have been made in the shooting.
“Everybody just needs to think about what’s going on in the world and try not to harm others,” said Robinson. “I am just grateful he is OK.”
Read More: Chicago sisters accused of stabbing employee 27 times after being asked to wear a mask
Davis is the latest shooting victim in the city that continues to be rocked by gun violence. Earlier this month, 40 people were reportedly shot and five fatally in one weekend.
The Chicago Tribune reports that 3,619 people were shot between January 1, 2020, through November 9, 2020.
“You should see some of these cars. They’re shot up, the windshields are shot out, back windows and side doors. A lot of people are getting injured, including a number of children,” said Chicago freelance video journalist Ken Herzlich, who travels the city to document shootings and other senseless violence.
Anyone with information that could help the Davis investigation should call Chicago detectives at (312) 746-8250 or submit tips anonymously at CPDTIP.com.
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Kevin Hart: Zero Fucks Given | Official Trailer | Netflix Standup Comedy Special 2020
Kevin Hart like you've never seen him before. Zero Fucks Given. Launching Nov 17 from Kevin's living room. And only on Netflix. SUBSCRIBE: http://bit.ly/29qBUt7 About Netflix: Netflix is the world's leading streaming entertainment service with over 195 million paid memberships in over 190 countries enjoying TV series, documentaries and feature films across a wide variety of genres and languages. Members can watch as much as they want, anytime, anywhere, on any internet-connected screen. Members can play, pause and resume watching, all without commercials or commitments. Kevin Hart: Zero Fucks Given | Official Trailer | Netflix Standup Comedy Special 2020 https://youtube.com/Netflix Kevin Hart serves up laughs and brick oven pizza from the comfort of his home, and dishes on male group chats, sex after 40 and life with COVID-19.
View on YouTube
Kevin Hart like you've never seen him before. Zero Fucks Given. Launching Nov 17 from Kevin's living room. And only on Netflix. SUBSCRIBE: http://bit.ly/29qBUt7 About Netflix: Netflix is the world's leading streaming entertainment service with over 195 million paid memberships in over 190 countries enjoying TV series, documentaries and feature films across a wide variety of genres and languages. Members can watch as much as they want, anytime, anywhere, on any internet-connected screen. Members can play, pause and resume watching, all without commercials or commitments. Kevin Hart: Zero Fucks Given | Official Trailer | Netflix Standup Comedy Special 2020 https://youtube.com/Netflix Kevin Hart serves up laughs and brick oven pizza from the comfort of his home, and dishes on male group chats, sex after 40 and life with COVID-19.
View on YouTube
Kellyanne Conway trolled for 2016 tweet after Biden’s 306 electoral votes
The former White House adviser previously praised Trump for his ‘historic’ defeat over Hillary Clinton
Kellyanne Conway is being trolled and called out on Twitter over a 2016 post praising Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election.
It all started on Friday after CNN announced that the final electoral count for the 2020 election is Joe Biden: 306, Trump, 232. This is the same tally Trump had in 2016 that Conway considered a historic landslide.
“306. Landslide. Blowout. Historic,” wrote Conway in a tweet that was resurfaced by The Lincoln Project. She was Trump’s campaign adviser when he defeated Hillary Clinton. Conway had quote-tweeted CNN’s projections for Trump at the time. She also noted that he won Michigan’s 16 electoral votes, bringing his total to 306.
Read More: Trump’s former adviser Kellyanne Conway tests positive for COVID-19
Four years later, Michigan is one of five states that president-elect Biden flipped, along with Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona. Trump won these areas in 2016, and throughout his presidency he often referenced this victory.
Trump tweeted in 2018, “The Dems have tried every trick in the playbook-call me everything under the sun. But if I’m all of those terrible things, how come I beat them so badly, 306-223? Maybe they’re just not very good! The fact is they are going CRAZY only because they know they can’t beat me in 2020!,”
Not only did the Dems crush Trump in the election, he’s now suing to have Biden’s win overturned. Trump and several Republicans are pushing the unsubstantiated claim that the election was stolen from him through widespread voter fraud.
Read More: Kellyanne Conway’s daughter vows to seek emancipation amid WH departure
Meanwhile, Conway announced in August that that she was exiting her White House counselor post, while her husband, George Conway, was also stepping back from The Lincoln Project, both said they wanted to focus on their family.
“I will be transitioning from the White House at the end of this month. George is also making changes,” Kellyanne said in a statement.
“We disagree about plenty but we are united on what matters most: the kids. Our four children are teens and ‘tweens starting a new academic year, in middle school and high school, remotely from home for at least a few months. As millions of parents nationwide know, kids ‘doing school from home’ requires a level of attention and vigilance that is as unusual as these times.”
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Jemele Hill not ready to ‘turn the other cheek’ with some Trump supporters
The former ESPN host and journalist blasted the Trump supporters who have harassed her over the years
Journalist Jemele Hill isn’t ready to turn the other cheek when it comes to the more fervent supporters of President Donald Trump.
President-elect Joe Biden has struck a chord of unity since being the projected winner of the 2020 presidential election. There have also been calls for the country to heal the divisions that fall across political, social, and cultural fault lines. But given what she’s experienced as an outspoken Trump critic, Hill isn’t receptive to the idea of letting bygones be bygones.
Read More: ‘Home Alone 2’ director: Trump ‘did bully his way into movie’
On Wednesday’s episode of her VIce TV show, Stick to Sports that she co-hosts with fellow journalist Cari Champion, Hill described the acrimony of the recent years since Trump ascended to the presidency.
“A lot of us have been terrorized. We’ve been on the receiving end of a lot of hatred, a lot of vitriol. I’ve been a professional journalist since 1997. I’ve been getting hate mail since I was in college. Nothing has been like it has been like the past four years, particularly after I called out the president,” Hill said.
Hill left ESPN after 12 years in 2018 when she drew backlash for blasting the Trump as a ”white supremacist” who is “unqualified and unfit” to be president.
Hill moved on as a contributing writer for The Atlantic and has continued her high-profile career with other multimedia ventures but the harassment has not let up. She read a message that was left in her Instagram DMs recently.
“This is what came into my Instagram DMs this morning. Hey you f—– racist n— b—-. You got a problem with white folks then run your f— up bitch-ass mouth to one of us, and I don’t mean a little kid or an old man, and see if they don’t slap the Black off your sorry ass. F— you. Trump will still win. Get the f—- over it or leave,” she recounted.
Hill says she’ doesn’t believe all of Trump’s supporters are racist. But she wanted to make it clear that she has no tolerance for the ones who are.
“Now I realize that does not necessarily mean that all Trump supporters are that hateful or that vitriolic but this idea that we need to turn the other cheek, hell no. So, I say this with all the disrespect. F–k y’all,” she said, raising both middle fingers.
“I’m not turning the other cheek. I’m not forgiving you because you’ve terrorized my life. You’ve threatened it. You’ve come after my friends and my family. So, f– you.”
She flipped both birds one more time.
“Straight up, no chaser,” Hill declared and sipped a drink.
Read More: Biden to undo Trump orders on civil rights, focus on racial equality
“For the ancestors too y’all,” Champion replied.
“Exactly, Harriet [Tubman] would’ve wanted me to do that. Harriet, Sojourner [Truth], Shirley [Chisholm]. All of them. That’s for all y’all.”
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HBO releases trailer for upcoming ‘Tiger Woods’ documentary
“This is my treasure. Please accept it and use it wisely,” said Woods’ father in reference to his son.
A Tiger Woods documentary is on its way.
The film is based on the New York Times bestselling book “Tiger Woods,” which outlines the tumultuous yet extraordinary life and career of the 44-year-old golf star, per People.
Read More: Biden ad rips Trump for comparing Black shootings to a ‘choke’ in a game of golf
“Few global icons are more visible and less understood than Tiger Woods,” said Peter Nelson, the executive vice president of HBO Sports in a statement at the top of the year, per IndieWire. “His prodigy came with painstaking sacrifice; his perfected athleticism immobilized him in agony before the age of 40; his self-made fame enabled a self-destructive world of secrecy; and his redemptive reemergence posed as many questions as it answered — not only about one of the greatest sportsmen ever to live, but also the greater American society that engulfed him.”
The HBO movie will future appearances from Woods’ late father Earl Woods, his friend and former golf caddie Steve Williams, and his former mistress Rachel Uchitel.
It seems as if the world stopped back in 2009 when news broke that Woods was having an affair with Uchitel. The news ended Woods’ marriage to Elin Nordegren, with whom he has two children. The affair was so publicized that it tainted his career and there was a time when it seemed as if his public image wouldn’t recover.
But despite the personal drama, Woods is still revered as one of the best golfers of all time. He recently tweeted about the emotions he had after a big win in Augusta in 2019.
“It meant a lot to me and still does,” Tiger said reflecting on hugging his kids after last year’s win. “It just reminded me so much of me and my dad, and to come full circle like that—you know, a little teary.”
Read More: Tiger Woods cheers on son, 11, at golf tournament
In the documentary clip Woods’ dad is heard saying, “this is my treasure. Please accept it and use it wisely.”
The film will drop in Jan. 2021. Watch the teaser trailer below.
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Cracker Barrel issues apology for noose-like decorations hanging from ceiling
“We’re sorry this happened,” the eatery said in a statement
Just in time for the holidays…
Cracker Barrel is known for its antique shop and home-style country food. But the company known for celebrating history took its love for the good ol’ days and antiques too far when a customer spotted a noose-like decoration hanging from its ceiling.
Read More: Can Biden fix America’s racism problem?
“We’re sorry this happened,” explained the company in a reply to Alfonso Robinson who spotted the object at a Connecticut location. They described the piece as an “antique electric soldering iron that has an original wrapped cord that should not have been displayed,” per Today.
Robinson initially tweeted, “Someone at Cracker Barrel in East Windsor needs to explain why there are nooses on the ceiling.”
The company told Today in a statement, “While we have removed the item from this particular store, we are working with our teams to determine whether this item or others like it exist in any of our other stores, and, if so, (that they are) removed, we want to make sure our décor is welcoming and representative of the communities we serve.”
Another customer, Tamra Hawkins, went in search of the noose-like object and posted video of it to Facebook. Her caption read, “Omg!! Cracker Barrel has a noose hanging in its store 😳🥺😒 I will never eat here again!! Smfh
Look at 1:02 into the live!!, Don’t listen to me!! I missed it at first.”
She located it at a location near Hartford, Connecticut. She told NBC News she did not find the restaurant’s apology sincere.
“Honestly, I don’t accept it,” Hawkins said. “I feel like they made an excuse, instead of acknowledging that it was a noose and it was placed in the store with a lapse in judgment.”
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Atlanta couple drown on Puerto Rico vacation, leave behind 2 sons
The couple met when they were both studying at Florida A&M University
Jamar and AnnMari Robinson were on vacation at a beach resort in Puerto Rico when they were both pulled into the ocean by a current and drowned. The incident occurred on Sunday at Condado Beach, according to the Daily Mail.
Read More: Bond denied for father, son charged in Ahmaud Arbery slaying
AnnMari was swimming at the beach behind La Concha hotel when she was dragged out to sea. Her husband went in after her, but was also caught in the current. Bystanders attempted to save them but were unable to do so.
Read More: Lenox Square robbery victim arrested by Atlanta police
The couple left behind two teenage sons, 14 and 15. One of the them has special needs, according to The Daily Mail.
The Robinsons were prominent figures in the Atlanta area. Jamar was the principal of Westlake High School in South Fulton, Georgia and AnnMari was an assistant professor at Georgia State, working towards a Ph.D. In 2014, Jamar was named an Outstanding Georgia Citizen.
According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, an official for the Fulton County school system released a statement about Jamar.
“Robinson was an inspirational leader who brought joy with his passion for education and his students,” the statement said. “We join the community in remembering him and expressing our condolences to his family.”
The dean of George State, Nancy Kropf, said that AnnMari was a “beloved and admired member of the faculty.”
Read More: At least five people on newly relaunched Caribbean cruise test positive for the coronavirus
The couple met when they were both studying at Florida A&M University, before eventually settling in the Atlanta area.
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Thursday, November 12, 2020
How to Work with Date and Time in Bash Using date Command
Date command is an external bash program that allows to set or display system date and time. It also provides several formatting options. Date command is installed in all Linux distros by default. $
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How to Create Simple Shell Scripts in Linux
Creating shell scripts is one of the most essential skills that Linux users should have at the tip of their fingers. Shell scripts play an enormous role in automating repetitive tasks which otherwise would
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Mary Frances Wagley, dedicated educator and the first woman to join the MIT Corporation, dies at 93
Mary Frances Wagley ’47, a trailblazer for women and a lifelong educator, died Nov. 1 at her home in Cockeysville, Maryland. She was 93.
Having attended MIT at a time when there were few female students — only 12 in her class — Wagley became the first woman to be an MIT Corporation member and the first woman to serve as president of the MIT Alumni Association.
“Mary Frances Wagley was a force for a better world and a pioneer for women in science and technology. She set an example with both her intellect and her leadership across an inspiring and impactful life. Everyone at MIT is fortunate to be benefitting from her path-breaking footsteps,” says MIT Corporation Chair Diane Greene, who is the first woman to serve in this role.
Wagley was born in New York City to Caroline and James Cash Penney, the founder of JC Penney. She grew up in White Plains on a small farm, often working outdoors with her father or riding her horse. Her skill as an equestrienne brought her as far as Madison Square Garden, where she competed at the National Horse Show.
Applying to MIT, one of the deans tried in an interview to talk her out of attending, saying he was sure she wouldn’t like it, Wagley told “MIT Infinite History” in 2009.
“Well, I proved him wrong,” Wagley told the interviewer. “I was happy from the moment I stepped foot in the Institute. … I was just ready to soak up all I could learn, and from the day I walked in those doors at 77 Mass. Avenue, it just seemed to me this is the place I belong.”
Wagley represented the first generation in her family to attend college. Wagley and a friend, Emily “Paddy” Wade ’45, lived off campus and cooked for themselves because there were no dormitories or dining facilities for women. Nor did athletic facilities exist for women at the Institute. Starting out as a chemical engineering major, Wagley was not able to participate in the required chemical engineering summer camp because of her gender, and she was asked to change her major to chemistry, which she did. Despite the challenges associated with being one of very few women at MIT, however, she flourished, says her son, Jay Wagley SM ’89.
“My mom was a force. I think it was hard to be one of only 12 in her class, but she never shied away from a challenge,” he says. “She had a spectacular mind and enormous intellectual curiosity. I think having gone to MIT and having done well there gave my mom tremendous confidence.”
MIT also imbued Wagley with a sense of the importance of science and engineering in society. Speaking with a reporter for the “MIT News” section of MIT Technology Review, she recalled how on V-E Day, May 8, 1945, MIT President Karl Compton celebrated the Allied victory with students but then sent them back to class, telling them their skills were needed for the continued fighting in the Pacific and for reconstruction after the war.
“I guess this was the first time I felt important,” Wagley was quoted as saying.
After graduating from MIT, Wagley went directly to Oxford University, earning a doctoral degree there in physical chemistry. At the time of her return to the United States, she had two employment offers, in research at Princeton University and teaching at Smith College. She chose Smith and discovered that she loved teaching, delighting in finding ways to make concepts clear to students.
“I was earnest about trying to get what I knew across to the students in a way that they could grasp onto it,” Wagley said in the “Infinite History” interview.
Her interest in education also led her to teaching positions at Johns Hopkins University and Goucher College. Then, in 1966, she became head of St. Paul’s School for Girls, experimenting with a variety of new math courses and helping the school develop a reputation for strong math and science preparation.
In 1970, around the time that MIT started making some of the boys’ dorms co-ed, Wagley became the first female member of the MIT Corporation. Once referring to the group as “formidable,” she nonetheless managed to serve on visiting committees ranging from chemistry to biology, philosophy, libraries, nuclear engineering, psychology, sponsored research, and the humanities. She also participated on the search committees that selected two of MIT presidents, Paul Gray and Charles Vest.
“I’ve tried to do a good job,” said Wagley, “thinking that that paved the way for women who came after me.”
It was MIT’s athletics, which had been completely unavailable to her as one of the first women at the Institute, that became a particular focus for Wagley as a Corporation member. She was instrumental in getting the Zesiger Sports and Fitness Center built, and she later established a Mary Frances Wagley Fund, an endowment supporting the head coach position for varsity men and women’s swimming and diving.
Wagley was working as the executive director of Episcopal Social Ministries of the Diocese of Maryland, where she ran a food bank and a homeless shelter, when she became the president of the MIT Alumni Association in 1984. Again, it was a first for women.
“As the first female president, obviously my topic was women at MIT,” Wagley told “Infinite History.”
She became a life member of the MIT Corporation in 1988 and a life member emerita in 2002.
“My mom loved MIT, she loved her time there,” says Jay Wagley. “MIT was a good fit for her, and since she loved it there, she wanted to give back to the Institute.”
Wagley’s husband, physician Philip Franklin Wagley, died in 2000. She is survived by her three children — Anne Paxton Wagley of Berkeley, California; Mary Frances Kemper Wagley Copp of Providence, Rhode Island; and James “Jay” Franklin Penney Wagley of Dallas — as well as seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Donations in Wagley’s memory can be made to St. Paul’s School for Girls in Brooklandville, Maryland, or Immanuel Episcopal Church in Sparks Glencoe, Maryland. The Wagley family plans to hold a virtual service in the coming weeks. For information on the memorial service, please email mfpwservice@gmail.com.
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System brings deep learning to “internet of things” devices
Deep learning is everywhere. This branch of artificial intelligence curates your social media and serves your Google search results. Soon, deep learning could also check your vitals or set your thermostat. MIT researchers have developed a system that could bring deep learning neural networks to new — and much smaller — places, like the tiny computer chips in wearable medical devices, household appliances, and the 250 billion other objects that constitute the “internet of things” (IoT).
The system, called MCUNet, designs compact neural networks that deliver unprecedented speed and accuracy for deep learning on IoT devices, despite limited memory and processing power. The technology could facilitate the expansion of the IoT universe while saving energy and improving data security.
The research will be presented at next month’s Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. The lead author is Ji Lin, a PhD student in Song Han’s lab in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Co-authors include Han and Yujun Lin of MIT, Wei-Ming Chen of MIT and National University Taiwan, and John Cohn and Chuang Gan of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab.
The Internet of Things
The IoT was born in the early 1980s. Grad students at Carnegie Mellon University, including Mike Kazar ’78, connected a Cola-Cola machine to the internet. The group’s motivation was simple: laziness. They wanted to use their computers to confirm the machine was stocked before trekking from their office to make a purchase. It was the world’s first internet-connected appliance. “This was pretty much treated as the punchline of a joke,” says Kazar, now a Microsoft engineer. “No one expected billions of devices on the internet.”
Since that Coke machine, everyday objects have become increasingly networked into the growing IoT. That includes everything from wearable heart monitors to smart fridges that tell you when you’re low on milk. IoT devices often run on microcontrollers — simple computer chips with no operating system, minimal processing power, and less than one thousandth of the memory of a typical smartphone. So pattern-recognition tasks like deep learning are difficult to run locally on IoT devices. For complex analysis, IoT-collected data is often sent to the cloud, making it vulnerable to hacking.
“How do we deploy neural nets directly on these tiny devices? It’s a new research area that’s getting very hot,” says Han. “Companies like Google and ARM are all working in this direction.” Han is too.
With MCUNet, Han’s group codesigned two components needed for “tiny deep learning” — the operation of neural networks on microcontrollers. One component is TinyEngine, an inference engine that directs resource management, akin to an operating system. TinyEngine is optimized to run a particular neural network structure, which is selected by MCUNet’s other component: TinyNAS, a neural architecture search algorithm.
System-algorithm codesign
Designing a deep network for microcontrollers isn’t easy. Existing neural architecture search techniques start with a big pool of possible network structures based on a predefined template, then they gradually find the one with high accuracy and low cost. While the method works, it’s not the most efficient. “It can work pretty well for GPUs or smartphones,” says Lin. “But it’s been difficult to directly apply these techniques to tiny microcontrollers, because they are too small.”
So Lin developed TinyNAS, a neural architecture search method that creates custom-sized networks. “We have a lot of microcontrollers that come with different power capacities and different memory sizes,” says Lin. “So we developed the algorithm [TinyNAS] to optimize the search space for different microcontrollers.” The customized nature of TinyNAS means it can generate compact neural networks with the best possible performance for a given microcontroller — with no unnecessary parameters. “Then we deliver the final, efficient model to the microcontroller,” say Lin.
To run that tiny neural network, a microcontroller also needs a lean inference engine. A typical inference engine carries some dead weight — instructions for tasks it may rarely run. The extra code poses no problem for a laptop or smartphone, but it could easily overwhelm a microcontroller. “It doesn’t have off-chip memory, and it doesn’t have a disk,” says Han. “Everything put together is just one megabyte of flash, so we have to really carefully manage such a small resource.” Cue TinyEngine.
The researchers developed their inference engine in conjunction with TinyNAS. TinyEngine generates the essential code necessary to run TinyNAS’ customized neural network. Any deadweight code is discarded, which cuts down on compile-time. “We keep only what we need,” says Han. “And since we designed the neural network, we know exactly what we need. That’s the advantage of system-algorithm codesign.” In the group’s tests of TinyEngine, the size of the compiled binary code was between 1.9 and five times smaller than comparable microcontroller inference engines from Google and ARM. TinyEngine also contains innovations that reduce runtime, including in-place depth-wise convolution, which cuts peak memory usage nearly in half. After codesigning TinyNAS and TinyEngine, Han’s team put MCUNet to the test.
MCUNet’s first challenge was image classification. The researchers used the ImageNet database to train the system with labeled images, then to test its ability to classify novel ones. On a commercial microcontroller they tested, MCUNet successfully classified 70.7 percent of the novel images — the previous state-of-the-art neural network and inference engine combo was just 54 percent accurate. “Even a 1 percent improvement is considered significant,” says Lin. “So this is a giant leap for microcontroller settings.”
The team found similar results in ImageNet tests of three other microcontrollers. And on both speed and accuracy, MCUNet beat the competition for audio and visual “wake-word” tasks, where a user initiates an interaction with a computer using vocal cues (think: “Hey, Siri”) or simply by entering a room. The experiments highlight MCUNet’s adaptability to numerous applications.
“Huge potential”
The promising test results give Han hope that it will become the new industry standard for microcontrollers. “It has huge potential,” he says.
The advance “extends the frontier of deep neural network design even farther into the computational domain of small energy-efficient microcontrollers,” says Kurt Keutzer, a computer scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, who was not involved in the work. He adds that MCUNet could “bring intelligent computer-vision capabilities to even the simplest kitchen appliances, or enable more intelligent motion sensors.”
MCUNet could also make IoT devices more secure. “A key advantage is preserving privacy,” says Han. “You don’t need to transmit the data to the cloud.”
Analyzing data locally reduces the risk of personal information being stolen — including personal health data. Han envisions smart watches with MCUNet that don’t just sense users’ heartbeat, blood pressure, and oxygen levels, but also analyze and help them understand that information. MCUNet could also bring deep learning to IoT devices in vehicles and rural areas with limited internet access.
Plus, MCUNet’s slim computing footprint translates into a slim carbon footprint. “Our big dream is for green AI,” says Han, adding that training a large neural network can burn carbon equivalent to the lifetime emissions of five cars. MCUNet on a microcontroller would require a small fraction of that energy. “Our end goal is to enable efficient, tiny AI with less computational resources, less human resources, and less data,” says Han.
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Fans petition for LeVar Burton to be next ‘Jeopardy’ host
‘I appreciate all y’alls love and support!’
A petition has been launched by fans of Jeopardy!, calling for LeVar Burton to host the long running game show following the death of Alex Trebek.
Burton is best known for hosting the PBS classic Reading Rainbow, as well appearing in the Star Trek franchise and starring in the classic TV drama Roots.
At the time of this post, the petition has nearly 50,000 signatures.
Read More: Alex Trebek, long-running ‘Jeopardy!’ host, dies at 80
“Between hosting 21 seasons of the educational Reading Rainbow, playing the brainiac engineer Geordi La Forge on Star Trek: the Next Generation, and filling the roll of Kunta Kinte in the ever important mini-series Roots, LeVar Burton has inspired and shaped the minds of several generations of trivia-loving nerds,” the petition states. “This petition is to show Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. and producer Harry Friedman just how much love the public has for Burton, and how much we’d all love to see him as the next host of Jeopardy!”
Burton shared the link to the petition on his Twitter page, writing “Even if nothing comes from it, I can’t tell how much I appreciate all y’alls love and support!”
theGRIO previously reported, “Jeopardy!” debuted on NBC in 1964 with Art Fleming as emcee and was an immediate hit. It lasted until 1975, then was revived in syndication with Trebek.
Read More: ‘Jeopardy’ contestant confuses Chaka Khan for ‘What is Shaka Zulu?’
Trebek presided over the beloved quiz show for more than 30 years. He died Sunday at his home in Los Angeles after a battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 80.
“Jeopardy!” made him famous. He won five Emmys as its host, and received stars on both the Hollywood and Canadian walks of fame. In 2012, the show won a prestigious Peabody Award.
“Alex wasn’t just the best ever at what he did. He was also a lovely and deeply decent man, and I’m grateful for every minute I got to spend with him,” tweeted “Jeopardy!” champion Ken Jennings. “Thinking today about his family and his Jeopardy! family — which, in a way, included millions of us.”
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The post Fans petition for LeVar Burton to be next ‘Jeopardy’ host appeared first on TheGrio.
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