Ideamotive Weekly Digest #4 — Software, Technology & Startups

Ready for the next collection of the best articles about coding, startups, and technology?

A proactive approach to more secure code

• Microsoft Security Response Centre claims that the majority of vulnerabilities are caused by developers who have accidentally inserted memory corruption bugs into their C and C++ code.
• Microsoft provides many tools to help write secure code like complex static analysis tools, taint analysis and constraint solvers.
• Rather than investing in more tools, they consider languages regarded as safe from memory corruption vulnerabilities.
• Rust, invented by Mozilla, was mentioned as the most promising programming language consistent with the requirements.

Microsoft invests in and partners with OpenAI to support us building beneficial AGI

• Microsoft is investing $1 billion in OpenAI .
• They’re partnering to develop a platform within Microsoft Azure.
• Microsoft wants to use AGI to solve laborious problems, like climate change.
• Instead of building a product, they plan to license some of pre-AGI technologies.

Mapping roads through deep learning and weakly supervised training

• Facebook AI engineers have developed a new method for creating accurate maps.
• The method uses fully convolutional neural networks for semantic segmentation and Weakly Supervised Training and predicts road networks from satellite imagery.
• Details of the model are available through the Map With AI
• The system was used to map roads in Thailand in Open Street Map

Virtual Reality Trends 2019

• The VR and AI Enhancement: there are many examples from Snapchats filtres to Machine Learning Microscope of Google
• Consumer Entertainment: VR headset technology, like Oculus, is becoming more and more accessible.
• Education and Training: VR can reduce employees training. The examples are Walmart and the U.S. Army.
• Travel and Tourism: VR allows experience travel destinations, explore cruise ship rooms, check venues and restaurants.
• The future of VR is to ensure users the VR experience regardless of their location.

How Deepfakes and Other Reality-Distorting AI Can Actually Help Us

• Deepfakes caused a panic when people saw possibilities of AI like swapping faces.
• Technology is constantly evolving regardless of any effort to stop it.
• The problem is not with AI, but when with believe the full story when we only know a few details.
• AI will still erode the false comforts we enjoy. The only choice is the attempt to understand it and use it.

Originally published at https://ideamotive.co on July 25, 2019.