Smart homes can’t always depend on the Internet

Jared Newman of FastCompany recently noted that buying into a smart home ecosystem is somewhat analogous to selecting a holy grail in the Temple of the Sun. Choose poorly, he says, and everything crumbles. “Maybe it’s time to devise a better way, one that doesn’t involve a round-trip to the Internet just to turn on your connected light bulbs,” he opined.

Ed Sperling of Semiconductor Engineering recently noted that rightsizing chip architecture has become more complex in recent years. Essentially, rightsizing is a method of targeting chips to specific application needs – ensuring sufficient performance, while minimizing power and cost. “[Rightsizing] has been a topic of conversation across the semiconductor industry for years because as power becomes a bigger issue, improving the efficiency of designs by limiting the compute resources is a big opportunity,” he explained.

A team of researchers is developing a system that will ultimately be capable of automatically describing a series of images based on the feelings such pictures might evoke. “Captioning is about taking concrete objects and putting them together in a literal description,” Margaret Mitchell, a Microsoft researcher who is leading the research project, told PhysOrg. “What I’ve been calling visual storytelling is about inferring conceptual and abstract ideas from those concrete objects. A picture is worth 1,000 words. It’s not just worth three tags.”

Rambus has joined the RISC-V Foundation as a founding member. The organization is dedicated to managing and promoting the adoption of the RISC-V hardware architecture standard throughout the semiconductor market. With this announcement, Rambus joins a coalition comprising dozens of major industry players, including Google, Oracle, Western Digital and BAE Systems.