Four short links: 11 May 2016
Homemade Pancreas, Piracy as Freemium, Amazon Deep Learning, and Object Skeletons
- Homemade Pancreas (WSJ, paywall) — More than 50 people have soldered, tinkered, and written software to make such devices for themselves or their children. The systems—known in the industry as artificial pancreases or closed loop systems—have been studied for decades, but improvements to sensor technology for real-time glucose monitoring have made them possible.
- Jeff Veen Interviewed — I remember being in a meeting one time with the CEO of Adobe and the Head of Sales, and the CFO, all these people, and talking about strategy and stuff, and somebody was talking about piracy and pirates. And I said, “You know, instead of calling them pirates, why don’t we just call them future customers?” Just silence in the room. You know, because they look at the numbers and it’s like it’s an extra billion dollars in revenue that’s going to piracy. And I’m like, “Yeah, well you could also call that our freemium model.”
- Amazon DSSTNE — DSSTNE (pronounced “Destiny”) is an open source software library for training and deploying deep neural networks using GPUs. Good to see big companies still open-sourcing things. I see a lot of posts to engineering blogs (Netflix, for e.g.) talking up their proprietary tech, which is a little like bragging about your plumbing.
- Object Skeletons Through Deep Learning — convolutional neural network to identify the skeleton of objects in images. Imagine being able to feed short bits of video into software and get back a 3D model. This is a part of that dream. Source available.
