GE’s Response to Automation, OpenAI’s Challenge to DeepMind, and Dealing with the Noise Floor — The Weekly Roundup

Check out the latest posts from IoT For All! Click the titles or pictures to read the full stories.

1) GE’s Response to Automation: “Brilliant Learning”

Despite Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s dismissal of automation displacing American labor, it isn’t hard to see the impact that robots and automation are already having on our workforce. From NYT’s “The Long-Term Jobs Killer is Not China. It’s Automation” to “At BlackRock, Machines Are Rising Over Managers to Pick Stocks,” automation has and will continual to seep into various facets of our job market…

Yitaek Hwang shares how GE is utilizing massive open online courses (MOOCs) and various workshops to help employees transition into the age of “3D printing, big data, robotics, digital and lean manufacturing and other advanced technologies.”

2) OpenAI’s Challenge to DeepMind & Reinforcement Learning

OpenAI’s research director, Ilya Sutskever, demonstrated that a well-known optimization technique called evolution strategies (ES) achieves strong performance on typical reinforcement learning (RL) benchmarks such as beating classic Atari games. Since ES doesn’t require the backpropagation that makes RL so computationally intensive, the system is easier to scale in distributed settings. It also works well within environments that have sparse rewards and fewer hyperparameters to tune…

Evolution Strategies might be a scalable alternative to the reinforcement learning that made DeepMind so prominent. Yitaek Hwang explains both ES and RL and why we should care.

3) It’s a Rug, It’s a Party, It’s the Noise Floor

In wireless communication, the noise floor is the total sum of signals detected in a given frequency range. It’s the white noise, the static that’s just there. Lot’s of things contribute to it: microwaves, distant thunderstorms, cosmic radiation, and your neighbor’s quadcopter drone.

Thus, if your technology is able to successfully detect signals with that noise floor, it has dealt with many of the radio frequency issues in that environment…

Michael Vedomske gives some simple analogies to explain the noise floor in wireless communication.

4) How to Deal with the Noise Floor

The first way is to pick a frequency range, or spectrum, that has as low a noise floor as possible. This requires choosing spectrum in which no other technologies are allowed to operate.

The second way wireless protocols overcome the noise floor is to increase the signal strength. This is the method I mentioned in my first post.

The third approach to dealing with the noise floor is perhaps the cleverest and most fascinating of them all…

There are three main ways to deal with the noise floor in wireless communication, let Michael Vedomske share how each works.

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