Author Archives: Rana Shakoor Akbar

The quest to type Chinese on a QWERTY keyboard created autocomplete

The quest to type Chinese on a QWERTY keyboard created autocomplete

If Huang Zhenyu’s mastery of a complex alphanumeric code weren’t impressive enough, consider the staggering speed of his performance. He transcribed the first 31 Chinese characters of Hu Jintao’s speech in roughly 5 seconds, for an extrapolated speed of 372 Chinese characters per minute. By the close of the grueling 20-minute contest, one extending over […]

The Download: head transplants, and filtering sounds with AI

The Download: head transplants, and filtering sounds with AI

An animated video posted this week has a voice-over that sounds like a late-night TV ad, but the pitch is straight out of the far future. The arms of an octopus-like robotic surgeon swirl, swiftly removing the head of a dying man and placing it onto a young, healthy body.  This is BrainBridge, the animated […]

Splashy breakthroughs are exciting, but people with spinal cord injuries need more

Splashy breakthroughs are exciting, but people with spinal cord injuries need more

What’s exciting to me about this latest study is that the tech gave the participants skills they could use beyond the lab. And because the stimulator is external, it is likely to be more accessible and vastly cheaper. Yes, the newly enabled movements are small, but if you listen to the palpable excitement of one […]

Amazon Fire Stick Home Screen Not Loading? 9 Ways to Fix

Amazon Fire Stick Home Screen Not Loading? 9 Ways to Fix

Do you see a blank screen instead of the Home interface on your Amazon Fire Stick? There are several reasons your streaming device fails to load the main interface on your connected TV. We’ll tell you why this happens and how you can resolve the problem to resume watching your favorite shows and movies. A […]

That viral video showing a head transplant is a fake. But it might be real someday. 

That viral video showing a head transplant is a fake. But it might be real someday. 

Aging bypass What is certain is that head transplantation—or body transplant, as some prefer to call it—is a subject of growing, if speculative, interest in longevity circles, the kind inhabited by biohackers, techno-anarchists, and others on the fringes of biotechnology and the startup scene and who form the most dedicated cadre of extreme life-extensionists. Many […]

Noise-canceling headphones use AI to let a single voice through

Noise-canceling headphones use AI to let a single voice through

That complexity is a problem when AI models need to work in real time in a pair of headphones with limited computing power and battery life. To meet such constraints, the neural networks needed to be small and energy efficient. So the team used an AI compression technique called knowledge distillation. This meant taking a […]

AI is an energy hog. This is what it means for climate change.

AI is an energy hog. This is what it means for climate change.

As AI has become more integrated into our world, I’ve gotten a lot of questions about the technology’s rising electricity demand. You may have seen the headlines proclaiming that AI uses as much electricity as small countries, that it’ll usher in a fossil-fuel resurgence, and that it’s already challenging the grid.   So how worried should […]

Roku Remote App Not Connecting to TV? 9 Fixes to Try

Roku Remote App Not Connecting to TV? 9 Fixes to Try

Are you having trouble setting up the Roku remote app? Does the app fail to discover your Roku TV? Or does it detect the streaming device but won’t establish a connection? This tutorial recommends troubleshooting fixes for Roku TVs that won’t connect to the Roku mobile app. Why the Roku App Isn’t Connecting to Your […]

OpenAI’s latest blunder shows the challenges facing Chinese AI models

OpenAI’s latest blunder shows the challenges facing Chinese AI models

In fact, among the few long Chinese tokens in GPT-4o that aren’t either pornography or gambling nonsense, two are “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and “People’s Republic of China.” The presence of these phrases suggests that a significant part of the training data actually is from Chinese state media writings, where formal, long expressions are extremely […]

Join me at EmTech Digital this week!

Join me at EmTech Digital this week!

Between the world leaders gathering in Seoul for the second AI Safety Summit this week and Google and OpenAI’s launches of their supercharged new models, Astra and GPT-4o, the timing could not be better. AI feels hotter than ever.   This year’s EmTech will be all about how we can harness the power of generative AI while mitigating its […]