Report calls for algorithmic transparency and education to fight fake news

 A report commissioned by European lawmakers has called for more transparency from online platforms to help combat the spread of false information online. Read More
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TV Time, the TV tracking app with over a million daily users, can now find your next binge

 With TV programming now spread out across a variety of services beyond traditional network TV, it can be hard to know what to watch next and what’s popular, given how much great content there is to choose from. An app called TV Time is helping with that, by allowing TV fans to track shows they’re watching, discover new programs, and socialize with fellow fans following each episode. Read More
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10 Exciting iPhone Education Apps for Kids

In a little more than a decade, the combination of the iPhone and apps have transformed so many parts of our lives. From social networks and communication to games and much more, the iPhone has made learning, play, and everything in between easier and more enjoyable. One area that’s seen huge change is education. Thanks to the iPhone’s slim form factor, easy to use software, and touchscreen, even toddlers can use the smartphone to learn while having fun. Since there’s a plethora of education software available to download from the App Store, we’re highlighting 10 great titles for kids of...

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What Is Proprietary Software? 5 Ways It Beats Open-Source Software

Have you given any thought to the way the software on your computer is designed? If you bought your PC in person, chances are it’s running proprietary software: software that’s typically created for profit, for which you can’t edit the source code yourself. When you agree to a lengthy End User License Agreement when installing a new program, you’re likely installing proprietary software. Why is most of the software we encounter on Windows, macOS, and our smartphones proprietary? Well, there are certain advantages to this style of software creation and distribution that lead many developers to see it as the...

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One of These Smart Email Tools for Gmail Can Fix Your Inbox

Like most people, you probably spend a sizeable chunk of your total internet time per day managing emails. Have you ever wondered if there’s an easier method than what you’re doing now? Fortunately, there is, and it involves using a tool for efficient email management. Some are free, but others are premium options. We’ll look at three of each below and see which ones are worth using. Note: All these tools work in your browser, and some also have mobile apps. 1. Sortd Sortd turns your Gmail messages into organized lists. It does this with a “smart layer” that resides...

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Semantic Image Segmentation with DeepLab in Tensorflow

Posted by Liang-Chieh Chen and Yukun Zhu, Software Engineers, Google Research

Semantic image segmentation, the task of assigning a semantic label, such as “road”, “sky”, “person”, “dog”, to every pixel in an image enables numerous new applications, such as the synthetic shallow depth-of-field effect shipped in the portrait mode of the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL smartphones and mobile real-time video segmentation. Assigning these semantic labels requires pinpointing the outline of objects, and thus imposes much stricter localization accuracy requirements than other visual entity recognition tasks such as image-level classification or bounding box-level detection.

Today, we are excited to announce the open source release of our latest and best performing semantic image segmentation model, DeepLab-v3+ [1], implemented in Tensorflow. This release includes DeepLab-v3+ models built on top of a powerful convolutional neural network (CNN) backbone architecture [2, 3] for the most accurate results, intended for server-side deployment. As part of this release, we are additionally sharing our Tensorflow model training and evaluation code, as well as models already pre-trained on the Pascal VOC 2012 and Cityscapes benchmark semantic segmentation tasks.

Since the first incarnation of our DeepLab model [4] three years ago, improved CNN feature extractors, better object scale modeling, careful assimilation of contextual information, improved training procedures, and increasingly powerful hardware and software have led to improvements with DeepLab-v2 [5] and DeepLab-v3 [6]. With DeepLab-v3+, we extend DeepLab-v3 by adding a simple yet effective decoder module to refine the segmentation results especially along object boundaries. We further apply the depthwise separable convolution to both atrous spatial pyramid pooling [5, 6] and decoder modules, resulting in a faster and stronger encoder-decoder network for semantic segmentation.

Modern semantic image segmentation systems built on top of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have reached accuracy levels that were hard to imagine even five years ago, thanks to advances in methods, hardware, and datasets. We hope that publicly sharing our system with the community will make it easier for other groups in academia and industry to reproduce and further improve upon state-of-art systems, train models on new datasets, and envision new applications for this technology.

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the support and valuable discussions with Iasonas Kokkinos, Kevin Murphy, Alan L. Yuille (co-authors of DeepLab-v1 and -v2), as well as Mark Sandler, Andrew Howard, Menglong Zhu, Chen Sun, Derek Chow, Andre Araujo, Haozhi Qi, Jifeng Dai, and the Google Mobile Vision team.

References

1. Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation, Liang-Chieh Chen, Yukun Zhu, George Papandreou, Florian Schroff, and Hartwig Adam, arXiv: 1802.02611, 2018.
2. Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions, François Chollet, Proc. of CVPR, 2017.
3. Deformable Convolutional Networks — COCO Detection and Segmentation Challenge 2017 Entry, Haozhi Qi, Zheng Zhang, Bin Xiao, Han Hu, Bowen Cheng, Yichen Wei, and Jifeng Dai, ICCV COCO Challenge Workshop, 2017.
4. Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets and Fully Connected CRFs, Liang-Chieh Chen, George Papandreou, Iasonas Kokkinos, Kevin Murphy, and Alan L. Yuille, Proc. of ICLR, 2015.
5. Deeplab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs, Liang-Chieh Chen, George Papandreou, Iasonas Kokkinos, Kevin Murphy, and Alan L. Yuille, TPAMI, 2017.
6. Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation, Liang-Chieh Chen, George Papandreou, Florian Schroff, and Hartwig Adam, arXiv:1706.05587, 2017.

Deals, Deals, and More Deals! Check Out Today’s Best Bargains

Looking for an SSD, thumb drive, or SD card? In the market for a Macbook? Want an Echo? Check out today’s best deals for all these and more! PNY 120GB 2.5” Sata III Internal Solid State Drive PNY CS900 120GB 2.5” Sata III Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) - (SSD7CS900-120-RB) PNY CS900 120GB 2.5” Sata III Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) - (SSD7CS900-120-RB) Buy Now At Amazon CDN$ 56.80 Looking to upgrade to an SSD? You can get this 120GB PNY model for its all-time low price right now. An SSD is easily one of the most noticeable upgrades you...

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Apple Maps shows you the nearest bike-sharing stations

 Apple has signed a partnership with Ito World to add bike-sharing data in Apple Maps in over 175 cities across 36 countries. The feature is now live and helps you find the nearest station by typing “bike sharing” in the search bar or the name of the service. Once again, Apple chose to integrate an existing data set instead of putting together this data in-house. Ito World has… Read More

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Clarifai rolls out an on-premise visual search tool for businesses

 Clarifai has traditionally been known as a web-based visual search tool that developers can integrate into their services. But as more and more businesses start to get onto the service, with their own specific demands — like getting them in-house — the New York-based startup has to grow up a bit. Today, the company is starting a few early steps to do just that. After raising $30… Read More

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Clarifai rolls out an on-premise visual search tool for businesses

 Clarifai has traditionally been known as a web-based visual search tool that developers can integrate into their services. But as more and more businesses start to get onto the service, with their own specific demands — like getting them in-house — the New York-based startup has to grow up a bit. Today, the company is starting a few early steps to do just that. After raising $30… Read More
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Raspberry Pi Media Center: How to Install Kodi on Raspbian

You want to turn your Raspberry Pi into a media center, but you also need it for other tasks? Perhaps you’re using your Pi for programming, or playing Minecraft. It might have a role as a general project machine, meaning you need regular access to Raspbian. One solution to this might be to keep several microSD cards at hand, each with different operating systems installed. You might have one with Raspbian ready to run, another with a retro gaming distro, and a third with OSMC, openELEC, or LibreELEC. These are the three Kodi-based Raspberry Pi distributions, and the most common...

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The Best Torrent Clients to Replace uTorrent

If you’re one of over 100 million uTorrent users, you should immediately upgrade to the latest version of the BitTorrent client. In November 2017, Google’s Project Zero identified a vulnerability, which BitTorrent Inc. (the company that owns and develops uTorrent) patched just in the nick of time. While the patch was only deployed to the Beta version at first, it has progressed to the Stable version in the meantime. It’s not the first time that uTorrent came under pressure. Criticized for bundling bloatware and containing annoying banner ads, one of their biggest faux-pas yet was revealed in 2015: uTorrent bundled...

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How Infolio Can Help Your Team Collaborate Like Never Before

Shouldn’t collaboration be easy? While you’ll find lots of great collaboration apps, it’s rare that one does everything. Before long, you end up with half a dozen apps that nobody can properly keep track of. There’s a better way, and Infolio is here to deliver it. Let’s see how this collaboration tool rolls together the most important features without hassle. Infolio Overview Want to know how easy Infolio is? Head to the Infolio homepage and click the Try Without Registration button, and you’ll load right into an example workspace. This gives you a great look at everything Infolio offers at...

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Your iPhone Is a Hotspot! Here’s How to Use It

Smartphones don’t just allow us to access the internet wherever we go. They can also bring the internet to our other devices too. While tethering plans were once expensive, the rise of fast mobile internet has seen prices fall and data speeds increase. It’s now possible to work from pretty much anywhere, on any device, provided you have a cellular connection. Today we’ll look at how to share your internet connection from your iPhone to other devices via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and good old USB. What Is a Mobile Hotspot? A mobile hotspot is a way to share your smartphone’s internet...

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Philips releases outdoor connected Hue lighting

 Philips Hue products are going outside. Available for purchase this summer in the U.S., the lighting company has a range of new outdoor lighting products extending the world of Internet of Things to the great outdoors. These products mark an important change for the Internet of Things world. As WiFi range and consumer demand increases, products such as these will become more available. Soon… Read More

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Copyleft vs. Copyright: 3 Key Concepts You Need to Know

Copyright infringement is one of the biggest problems of the internet age. Never before has it been easier to infringe on intellectual property rights, and never before has it been harder to prevent others from stealing one’s hard work. As a creator, you need to protect your intellectual property: photographers should copyright photos and images, software developers should use proper software licenses, bloggers should issue DMCA takedown notices, etc. But that can be quite a headache, especially if you’re prolific and your work is popular. Which is why many creators are adopting copyleft instead. Here’s everything you need to know...

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Platform power is crushing the web, warns Berners-Lee

 On the 29th birthday of the world wide web, its inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has sounded a fresh warning about threats to the web as a force for good, adding his voice to growing concerns about big tech’s impact on competition and society. Read More
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How to Compare Lightroom Edits to the Original Image

One of the reasons Lightroom is such a powerful photo editing tool is its non-destructive nature. You can make a ton of edits to a photo, export the image as a new copy, and quickly reset all those changes with just one click of a button. And it also makes it easy to compare your edited photo to your original. There are two main ways you can view your comparison. Method 1: Side-by-Side Comparison In the first method, you have three different view options. To start editing your photo, go to Lightroom’s Develop tab. Once you’ve made some edits, you...

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The Hassle-Free Way to Unsubscribe From Any Email Newsletter

Most people get way too much email. But most of the unwanted junk doesn’t come from friends. Instead, you probably receive dozens of automated newsletters, coupons, and other such nonsense every day. Deleting these all the time is a big chore, so why not cut them off at the source and unsubscribe? Rather than unsubscribing manually (which sometimes only confirms for spammers that your address is in use), you can use a handy tool called Unsubscriber to do the work for you. Here’s how it works. The Best Way to Unsubscribe From Email Newsletters Head to Unsubscriber’s website and you’ll...

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How to Change Your Facebook Password

When was the last time you changed your Facebook password? Although there are pros and cons of changing your password too frequently, using the same password as when you created your account eight years ago is definitely not best practice. Let’s try another one. In addition to Facebook, how many other sites, accounts, and web portals share the same password? Again, if you answered anything more than “zero,” you’re not following the advice of security experts. Whether you’ve been hacked, you’re worried about getting hacked, or you just want to boost your online security, now could be a good time...

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