President Vladimir Putin on Monday granted Russian citizenship to former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, nine years after he exposed the scale of secret surveillance operations by the National Security Agency (NSA). Snowden, 39, fled the United States and was given asylum in Russia after leaking secret files in 2013 Read more…
The British pound on Monday briefly hit a record low against the dollar, extending losses after Britain’s new government on Friday announced a sweeping economic overhaul centered around tax cuts and deregulation. Citibank called the move a “huge, unfunded gamble for the U.K. economy.” The pound slumped as low at Read more…
Citing McDonald’s shelved meat-free burger trial and a 70% dip in Beyond Meat’s stock, The Guardian suggests plant-based meats may not interest Americans as much as investors thought. Getting meat eaters in the US to adopt plant-based alternatives has proven a challenge. Beyond Meat, which produces a variety of plant-based Read more…
Saul Kripke, a math prodigy and pioneering logician whose revolutionary theories on language qualified him as one of the 20th century’s greatest philosophers, died on Sept. 15 in Plainsboro, N.J. He was 81. The New York Times reports: His death, at Penn Medicine Princeton Medical Center, was caused by pancreatic Read more…
Luis Eduardo Garrido couldn’t wait to test out his colleague’s newest creation. Garrido, a psychology and methodology researcher at Pontificia Universidad Catolica Madre y Maestra in the Dominican Republic, drove two hours between his university’s campuses to try a virtual reality experience that was designed to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder and Read more…
Speech recognition remains a challenging problem in AI and machine learning. In a step toward solving it, OpenAI today open-sourced Whisper, an automatic speech recognition system that the company claims enables “robust” transcription in multiple languages as well as translation from those languages into English. Countless organizations have developed highly Read more…
James Earl Jones is stepping away from the role of Darth Vader after nearly 40 years. According to Vanity Fair, he has signed off on using archival voice recordings to recreate the iconic voice with artificial intelligence. “He had mentioned he was looking into winding down this particular character,” Matthew Read more…