Saturday, June 30, 2018

IoT AI: Watch with Alexa



Take Alexa with you everywhere you go with this sleek smartwatch – BGR

"Seamleasly integrated with Alexa, Amazon’s cloud-based voice service. Just tap and ask Alexa, to enjoy thousands of skills on the go, such as hearing the latest news, weather and traffic reports, check sport scores, and much more.
Connect tastefully blends the longevity of an analog watch with smartwatch convenience – lasting 3-5 days on a single charge and up to 2 years on analog. Supports iOS 8/android 4.0.3 and later"


Amazon.com: GUESS Men's Stainless Steel Connect Smart Watch - Amazon Alexa, iOS and Android Compatible, Color Black (Model: C0001G5): Watches
$199

AI book: Life 3.0 & Cloud FPGA customizable HW



podcast interview with MIT Physicist Max Tegmark on Life 3.0: What We Do Makes a Difference
@ Singularity.FM

Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Max Tegmark: 9781101946596: Amazon.com: Books

The concept is interesting:

  • Life 1.0: improvements by evolution, random changes & natural selection
  • Life 2.0: improvements by learning: chancing "software" 
  • Life 3.0: improvements by design: intentional optimizing of "hardware" 
While for human and other live biological species this concept is still a challenge,
for "cloud based" computers this is already a reality!

Besides options to select HW for the task, such as faster IO, more memory, GPU,
they also offer FPGA: modifiable processors, where microcode can be changed to optimize for specific tasks, such as database, web servers, AI etc, it is possible to speed up 10 or more times.


Amazon and Microsoft already offer such option on their clouds:


Inside the Microsoft FPGA-based configurable cloud
"Azure Accelerated Networking... The bandwidth between two VMs inside Azure, even with a 40-gigabit network adapter on each VM, is only around 4Gbps per second; with FPGA-accelerated networking, that goes up to 25Gbps, with five to ten times less latency"



For Google FPGA optimization seems to be not sufficient:
they prefer complete custom HW design, in particular for AI tasks. 

"Google's answer: FPGAs are much less power efficient than ASICs due to their programmable nature. The TPU has an instruction set, so as TensorFlow programs change or new algorithms are developed they can run on the TPU."

Periodic Table of DevOps Tools

Periodic Table of DevOps Tools


12-Factor Web Apps

"The twelve-factor app is a methodology for building software-as-a-service (web) apps:"

The Twelve-Factor App

Twelve-Factor App methodology - Wikipedia


Stack Overflow for Teams



for some things it may be better than Slack or MS Office Teams...

Stack Overflow for Teams

"Stack Overflow for Teams is a private, secure home for your team’s questions and answers. No more digging through stale wikis and lost emails—give your team back the time it needs to build better products."