Author Archives: George Leopold

George Leopold

George Leopold has written about science and technology for more than 30 years, focusing on electronics and aerospace technology. He previously served as executive editor of Electronic Engineering Times. Leopold is the author of "Calculated Risk: The Supersonic Life and Times of Gus Grissom" (Purdue University Press, 2016).

As AI Begets IA, Whither Tomorrow’s Workers?

April 1st, 2019 (0)

Deep thinkers pondering the role of automation in the workplace are defining a new domain of appropriate—and controllable—technologies under the rubric of “intelligent automation” that promises to handle rote business processes. Proponents assert the application of IA would change ...

MIT Researchers Look to Speed Neural Net Design

March 29th, 2019 (0)

The design of a neural network architecture remains a daunting problem, requiring human expertise and lots of computing resources. The soaring computational requirements of neural architecture search (NAS) algorithms used in developing neural network frameworks make it difficult to ...

Containers Emerge as Deep Learning Tool

March 29th, 2019 (0)

Applications containers are now being tuned to specific features that can be incorporated into cloud-native enterprise apps. Amazon Web Services and GPU leader Nvidia are both offering Docker containers geared to deep learning frameworks. For example, AWS unveiled a ...

Google Brings in Outside AI Advisors

March 28th, 2019 (0)

Growing unease about the arc of AI technology is prompting companies to step back from their breakneck development efforts to consider the ethical implications of AI and how to foster responsible development of future products. The latest is AI ...

Kubernetes Adds Initial Support for Windows Containers

March 27th, 2019 (0)

The latest version of the Kubernetes cluster orchestrator moved a step closer to becoming operating-system agnostic with the addition of support for Windows Server-based workloads, reflecting ongoing efforts to expand the application container ecosystem by stabilizing management of Windows ...

Reemerging Container Security Ills Addressed

March 22nd, 2019 (0)

Concerns about the security of application containers have reemerged as the micro-services technology spreads across the enterprise. Those worries are fueled by recent reports of a “breakout” vulnerability in the container runtime known as runC. In response, providers of container ...

AI Ecosystem Coalesces Around Hardware Accelerator

March 21st, 2019 (0)

The requirement for hardware accelerators used in machine and deep learning applications along with HPC are driving efforts to establish specifications that take account for growing bandwidth and interconnect flexibility needed for emerging AI workloads. With that in mind, ...

AWS Upgrades its GPU-Backed AI Inference Platform

March 19th, 2019 (0)

The AI inference market is booming, prompting well-known hyperscaler and Nvidia partner Amazon Web Services to offer a new cloud instance that addresses the growing cost of scaling inference. The new "G4" instances, announced this week, will employ Nvidia’s ...

DARPA, NSF Pursue Machine Learning Chip

March 18th, 2019 (0)

A new U.S. research initiative seeks to develop a processor capable of real-time learning while operating with the “efficiency of the human brain.” The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency jointly announced a “Real ...

NASA Simulator Shapes Orion Spacecraft Design

March 15th, 2019 (0)

NASA is using flow simulations running on its Pleiades supercomputer to help design the agency’s next manned spacecraft, Orion. Crew safety is paramount, so NASA engineers are using the HPC cluster to simulate and visualize Orion’s launch abort system ...