Presented by Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. Developers and companies are starting to see the major benefits of moving from centralized computing processes to decentralized ones as the cloud computing age approaches an end and edge computing takes center stage, says Jilei Hou, senior director of engineering at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “One of the fundamental aspects of edge computing we’re working on is platform innovation, and how to offer the most efficient and effective processing tools to provide a scalable, supportive impact on the industry,” Hou says. Qualcomm AI Research, an initiative of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.,has an ambitious goal: to lead AI research and development across the whole spectrum of AI, particularly for on-device AI at the wireless edge. The company wants to be a vanguard in making on-device applications essentially ubiquitous.…

Alphabet's annual shareholder meeting concluded with predictable results: every shareholder proposal was voted down despite protesting workers and increasingly pointed criticism.At Google parent company Alphabet's annual meeting Wednesday, shareholders advocated for a number of proposals meant to address numerous issues at the company, from sexual harassment and diversity, to the company's policies regarding China and forced arbitration. As with Facebook's recent shareholder meeting, there was also a proposal to limit Alphabet's power by breaking up the company.  And, as with Facebook, these shareholder proposals had no chance of passing since Google's two founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, control a majority of the most powerful shares. While that much was expected, attendees at this year's meetings were met with protestors, some of whom were contract workers demanding better working conditions.…

Elon Musk, a noted Twitter user and someone who probably says “waifu” out loud without a hint of irony, is all about video games this week. The Tesla founder has apparently taken a break from not admitting or denying SEC allegations to put a video game in the dashboard of the company’s electric cars. And you know how I love video games, so I’m very excited about all of this. But the one thing I love more than video games is leveraging them to better target the key male 18-to-34 demographic. The reason this works is because Musk obviously loves video games. You can tell because he tweets fan art of 2B from Nier Automata and then has a meltdown when people ask him to credit the artist. Who among…

The pearl-clutchers at the MTA have a big, sex toy-shaped problem on their hands.Dame, which makes precisely engineered sex toys for women, is suing New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) for rejecting its advertising campaign.  "The vague and sexist reasons behind the MTA's refusal to show our ads are not only barring many businesses like ours from growing their companies, but their censorship is a violation of First Amendment rights," Alexandra Fine, CEO and co-founder of Dame Products, told Mashable.   The lawsuit claims that while the "MTA has previously welcomed advertisements that celebrate human sexuality," its rejection of Dame's female pleasure-centric campaign is a violation of the company's right to free speech, due process, and equal protection under the law. The Dame-MTA showdown is a microcosm of what other…

Researchers from Nvidia, the University of Toronto, and the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Toronto have devised a way to more precisely detect and predict where an object begins and ends. This is knowledge that can improve inference for existing computer vision models and labeling training data for future models. In experiments by researchers, Semantically Thinned Edge Alignment Learning (STEAL) is able to improve the precision of the state-of-the-art CASENet semantic boundary prediction model by 4%. More precise recognition of the boundaries of an object can have applications for computer vision tasks ranging from image generation to 3D reconstruction to object detection. STEAL can be applied to improve existing CNNs or boundary detection models, but researchers also believe it can help them more efficiently label or annotate data for…

Just to let you know, if you buy something featured here, Mashable might earn an affiliate commission. Deals on Dell laptops, Lenovo IdeaPads, and more this week. Image: walmart/mashable photo composite By Dylan HaasMashable Deals2019-06-17 20:01:54 UTC Maybe you haven’t heard, but today is National Apple Strudel Day, which means you should definitely go out and enjoy one (or a few) of the delicious treats with your work buddies on this slow Monday afternoon.  What’s better than an apple strudel, though? How about an Apple laptop. If you’re full of strudel and still have some cash to blow, we think you should check out these awesome deals on laptops and tablets that we pulled together for this week. Included on our list are savings on MacBooks, Lenovo IdeaPads, Dell laptops,…

In 2015, my startup, Front, decided to make its product roadmap public, and it was one of the best decisions we’ve ever made.  We’d managed our internal roadmap on Trello for a couple of years when Trello released the function to make any board public. I’m obsessed with efficiency and this seemed like an extremely efficient way to get customer feedback, so we jumped on the opportunity. And we weren’t alone – others who moved to a public product roadmap (either on Trello or independently) include Buffer, Intel, and Jira, just to name a few. We received a lot of love from customers and peers for the decision. But as with anything worth doing, it came with some challenges: It’s time consuming to keep a well-maintained roadmap, customers have full…

Genius is, well, genius. The company recently accused Google of lifting song lyrics from its site, reports the Wall Street Journal. How did Genius know Google was stealing? In 2016, Genius made a few changes to the punctuation in its song lyrics. Sometimes, it used a straight apostrophe. Other times, a curly one.  Genius did this in a very specific sequence because (are you ready for this?) when "the two types of apostrophes were converted to the dots and dashes used in Morse code, they spelled out the words 'Red Handed.'" That's how Google was caught, according to Genius.  Google denied stealing any lyrics. Instead, it claimed, the lyrics that show up in the "information panels" that pop up in a Google search are from licensed partners. Genius, however, says it…

The film Avengers: Endgame has made about $2.7 billion at the box office so far this year. It is behind only Avatar (which made about $2.8 billion in 2009) in worldwide box office receipts. And that is why it’s a big deal that Square Enix, maker of the Final Fantasy and Lara Croft games, showed off the upcoming Marvel game, The Avengers, during its Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) event in Los Angeles. And that amounts to a lot of pressure for Noah Hughes, creative director of Crystal Dynamics, the Square Enix-owned studio that, along with Eidos Montreal, is making the game for May 15. I spoke with Hughes about the game, including the complaint from Marvel fans that the game won’t use the likenesses of the famous actors who play the Avengers in…