Selena screening, Astronomy on Tap and more events for Tuesday fun – Austin American-Statesman

Selena Screening at the Paramount

7 p.m. June 20. $7-$12. 713 Congress Ave. austintheatre.org.

Celebrate the 20th anniversary screening of the movie Selena, starring Jennifer Lopez. It comes complete with the Paramount Theatres Anything for Selenas happy hour starting at 6 p.m. and featuring music by Selena tribute band Bidi Bidi Banda, Home Slice Pizza, a photo booth, $2 Lone Stars and more. Bustiers are encouraged. Selena is the story of Tejano music sensation Selena Quintanilla, whose life was tragically cut short at the age of 23 when she had just become a rising star with a dynamite stage presence.

Steve Earle at Waterloo Records

5 p.m. June 20. Free. 600 N. Lamar Blvd. waterloorecords.com.

The Texas-born, New York-based troubadour will feature songs from his new album, So You Wannabe an Outlaw, at this solo acoustic in-store performance. Hell be back in a couple of weeks as part of the lineup for Willie Nelsons Fourth of July Picnic, joined at that show by his longtime backing band that includes former Austinites Eleanor Whitmore and Chris Masterson, but these will be your only opportunities to hear Earle play live. Peter Blackstock

7 p.m. June 20. Free. The North Door, 502 Brushy St. northdooraustin.com/queueapp.com/events/32637.

The monthly event highlighting the cosmos over a pint of beer or two will present three exciting talks focusing on dusty star-forming galaxies, nearby galaxies and the disks around young stars, with speakers including Kimberly Sokal, Sinclaire Manning and Sydney Sherman. Hope for good weather: Astronomy on Tap organizers will have telescopes on hand to look for cool objects in the night sky. There will be a segment about astronomy in the news, as well as trivia and new giveaways.

In Good Company Dinner at Alcomar

The final installment in Alcomars dinner series featuring Chefs Alma Alcocer-Thomas and Jeff Martinez favorite local vendors highlights East Austins Boggy Creek Farm. The four-course dinner will feature fresh produce from the farm paired with cocktails and wines. Courses include items like crab-stuffed squashed, roasted heirloom tomato chipotle salsa and avocado pumpkin seed salad. Boggy Creek has become beloved in town for its tasty fruits, vegetables, fresh eggs, local honey and more.

The rest is here:

Selena screening, Astronomy on Tap and more events for Tuesday fun - Austin American-Statesman

First Endowed Fund at ‘Imiloa Astronomy Center – Big Island Now

Ilima Piianaia. Courtesy photo.

Earlier this year, the Imiloa Astronomy Center in Hilo announced the establishment of the first permanently endowed fund.

The fund honors the legacy of the late educator and government planner Ilima Piianaia.

Gordon Piianaia of Honolulu and Norman Piianaia of Kamuela launched the endowment in memory of their sister, and thanks to generous matching gifts from the community, the fund has already reached $55,000 and is still growing.

The Piianaia familys stated goal for the endowment is to expand access to educational programming at Imiloa by local elementary, middle and high school students. The funds are being invested in perpetuity by the University of Hawaii Foundation, and Imiloa will use the annual earnings to subsidize items such as admission fees and/or transportation to the center, scholarships for Imiloa programs, and/or program outreach to rural parts of Hawaii Island and the state.

About Ilima Piianaia (19472006) Born and raised on Oahu, Piianaia pursued a noteworthy career in the public sector, starting with her service as a Hawaii County planner helping to develop a general plan for the island. She later served with the Hawaii Community Development Authority and worked on the Kakaako Improvement District, among other projects.

She lecturedabout geography and planning at UH Mnoa from 1980 to 1984, administered the Task Force on the Hawaiian Homes Commission from 1982to 1983, then held appointments as Hawaii County deputy planning director, director of the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, director of the Office of International Relations and Affairs, and deputy director of the state Department of Agriculture.

A longtime friend of Ilima, Deanne Lemle Bosnak, remembers her as a perfect embodiment of aloha. She personally represented Hawaiis beautiful blend of cultures, its warm hospitality and its welcoming aloha spirit. She was also a diplomat who worked hard to build bridges between disparate communities and cultures, demonstrating in everything she did a deep respect for the land and the values of its people.

Courtesy photo provided by Imiloa Astronomy Center.

This spring, Imiloa marked the 11th anniversary of our opening, so this is a propitious time to be launching the centers first permanent endowment, which will ensure that we share our unique brand of programming with both current and future generations of schoolchildren, Imiloa Executive Director Kaiu Kimura said about the gift.We are humbled by the generosity of the Piianaia family and the many friends of Ilima who have stepped forward to support our mission and help us reach more young people throughout our second decade and beyond!

This wonderful gift will benefit the children of Hawaii for years to come, said University of Hawaii at Hilo Chancellor Donald Straney.

Here is the original post:

First Endowed Fund at 'Imiloa Astronomy Center - Big Island Now

Kepler yields a handful of promising planetary candidates – Astronomy Magazine

The newest Kepler catalog draws out 219 new planetary candidates and infers that 10 of them may be habitable doubling the number of planetary candidates in the habitable zone of their star. The Kepler catalog now stands at 2,335 confirmed planets and 4,034 strong candidates.

This catalog marks the final results of the first Kepler mission, which stared at the same portion of the sky for three-and-a-half years before a busted reaction wheel forced NASA to pivot the mission to other forms of planet hunting. There were only a small number of newly confirmed planets.

The data of the final catalog also suggests that there is a certain point at which super-Earths become more Neptune like, with a jump in mass as planets accumulate. This is why there seems to be so few planets between three and 10 Earth masses.

The Kepler telescope looked for planetary transits, when a planet passes in front of its star and causes a slight dip in its light. The original mission took a small sample of the sky in the Cygnus constellation to act as a sort of statistical survey. When a signal is sufficiently strong, its considered confirmed. If it cant quite be confirmed, its considered a candidate until further observation can verify a planet there.

You can scroll the list of all discovered exoplanets here.

Continued here:

Kepler yields a handful of promising planetary candidates - Astronomy Magazine

OpenACC Shows Growing Strength at ISC – HPCwire (blog)

OpenACC is strutting its stuff at ISC this year touting expanding membership, a jump in downloads, favorable benchmarks across several architectures, new staff members, and new support by key HPC applications providers, ANSYS, for example. It is also holding its third user group meeting at the conference and a number of other activities including a BoF. That seems like significant progress in its rivalry with OpenMP.

Parallel programing models, of course, have become de rigueur to get the most from HPC systems, especially with the rise of manycore, GPU, and other heterogeneous architectures. OpenACC formed in 2011 to support parallel programing on accelerated systems. In its own words, OpenACC is a directives-based programming approach to parallel computing designed for performance and portability on CPUs and GPUs for HPC.

There are now roughly 20 core members Cray, AMD, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Indiana University, to name a few. OpenACC reports downloads jumped 86 percent jumped in the last six months, driven in part by a new free community release that also supports Microsoft Windows. Interestingly, support for Windows which is a rarity in core HPC was very important to ANSYS according Michael Wolfe, OpenACC technical lead and a PGI staff member. The current OpenACC version is 2.5 with 2.6 expected to be available for public comment in the next couple of months.

As shown in the slide below, OpenACC has steadily expanded the number of platforms supported. Its an impressive list although notably absent from this list is ARM. Before it ceased operations PathScale supported ARM and currently the GCC group (GNU Compiler Group) is working on OpenACC support for ARM. Leading compiler provider PGI, owned by NVIDIA, also has plans. Its no secret that our plan is to eventually support ARM and well be using the same mechanism we used to support Power and so the compiler part is relatively straight forward. Its getting the numerical libraries in place [thats challenging], says Wolfe.

Significantly, OpenACC is reporting rough parity with OpenMP for application acceleration on a pair of Intel systems and an IBM Minsky when compared with a single core Haswell system. (Reported systems specs: Intel dual Haswell 216 core server, four K80s; dual Intel Broadwell 220 core server, eight P100s; IBM dual Minsky Power8+ NVLINK, four P100s; host systems for GPUs not listed. The application was AWE Hydrodynamics CloverLeaf mini-app.)

You get almost no performance decrement on a multicore on the various systems, notes Wolfe. OpenACC hasnt yet benchmarked against Intels forthcoming Skylake. Were waiting on it. Obviously we need to re-optimize our code generator.

Perhaps most telling, say OpenACC proponents, is the uptick in support from HPC application community. In its ISC new release, OpenACC reported it now accelerates ANSYS Fluent (CFD) and Gaussian (Quantum Chemistry) and VASP (Material Science), which are among the top 10 HPC applications, as well as selected ORNL Center for Accelerated Application Readiness (CAAR) codes to be run on the future CORAL Supercomputer: GTC (Physics), XGC (Physics), LSDalton (Quantum Chemistry), ACME(CWO), and FLASH (Astrophysics).

Early indications are that we can nearly match the performance of CUDA using OpenACC on GPUs.This will enable our domain scientists to work on a uniform GPU accelerated Fortran source code base, says Martijn Marsman, Computational Materials Physics at the University of Vienna in the official press release.

Weve effectively used OpenACC for heterogeneous computing in ANSYS Fluent with impressive performance. Were now applying this work to more of our models and new platforms, says Sunil Sathe, lead software developer, ANSYS.

OpenACC also reports the recently upgraded CSCS Piz Daint supercomputer will be running five codes implemented with OpenACC in the near term: COSMO (CWO), ELEPHANT (Astrophysics), RAMSES (Astrophysics), ICON (CWO), ORB5 (Plasma Physics).

Two new OpenACC officers have been appointed:

Guido Juckeland is the new secretary for OpenACC. He founded the Computational Science Group at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), Germany. His research focuses on better usability and programmability for hardware accelerators and application performance monitoring as well as optimization. He is also vice-chair of the SPEC High Performance Group (HPG) and an active member of the OpenACC technical.

Sunita Chandrasekaran is the new director of user adoption. Her mission is to grow the OpenACC organization and user community. She is currently an assistant professor at the University of Delaware. Her research interest spans HPC, parallel algorithms, programming models, compiler and runtime methodologies and reconfigurable computing. She was one of the recipients of the 2016 IEEE TCHPC Award for Excellence for Early Career Researchers in HPC.

Wolfe says the forthcoming 2.6 release is mostly a matter of tweaks. One change in the works which is substantive is Deep Copy capability.

Many of these programs have very complex data structures. If you think about supercomputing you think about arrays, vectors, and matrices. [But] thats so 1970s. Now these applications will have an array of structures and each structure element has a subarray which is a different. On todays devices, in order to get most performance on the GPU, you need to move the data onto the GPU memory which is higher bandwidth, closer to the device, says Wolfe.

Deep copy doesnt just copy the array but copies that and all the subarrays and all the subarrays. There is a mechanism to support this today but it is clunky [and] requires a lot of code. We are trying to automate that but we are afraid we are going to get it wrong. So what we are doing now in the PGI compiler, we are working on a prototype application before we standardize something in the classification, says Wolfe.

Read more:

OpenACC Shows Growing Strength at ISC - HPCwire (blog)

Healthcare: Artificial Intelligence Uses Include Surgeries | Fortune.com – Fortune

Of all the places where artificial intelligence is gaining a foothold, nowhere is the impact likely to be as greatat least in the near termas in healthcare. A new report from Accenture Consulting, entitled Artificial Intelligence: Healthcares New Nervous System , projects the market for health-related AI to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 40% through 2021to $6.6 billion, from around $600 million in 2014.

In that regard, the Accenture report, authored by senior managing director Matthew Collier and colleagues, echoes earlier assessments of the market. A comprehensive research briefing last September by CB Insights tech analyst Deepashri Varadharajan, for examplewhich tracked AI startups across industries from 2012 through the fall of 2016showed healthcare dominating every other sector, from security and finance to sales & marketing. Varadharajan calculated there were 188 deals across various healthcare segments from Jan. 2012 to Sept. 2016, worth an aggregate $1.5 billion in global equity funding.

But the Accenture report suggestsand, I think smartlythat the biggest returns on investment for healthcare AI are likely to come from areas where the density (and dollar value) of deals isnt that substantial right now. In terms of startup and deal volume, for instance, two hotshot areas have been medical imaging & diagnostics and drug discovery. Accentures analysis, though, points to 10 other AI applications that may return more bang for the buck.

Top of the list of investments that will likely pay for themselves (and then some) is robot-assisted surgery, Accenture says. Cognitive robotics can integrate information from pre-op medical records with real-time operating metrics to physically guide and enhance the physicians instrument precision, explain the reports authors. The technology incorporates data from actual surgical experiences to inform new, improved techniques and insights. The consultants estimate that the use of such surgical technology, which includes machine learning and other forms of AI, will result not only in better outcomes but also in a 21 percent reduction in the length of patient hospital stays. They estimate such smart robotic surgery will return $40 billion in value, or potential annual benefitsby 2026.

The second valuable use of AI, they project, will come from virtual nursing assistant applications ($20 billion in value)which, in theory, will save money by letting medical providers remotely assess a patients symptoms and lessen the number of unnecessary patient visits. Next in line are intelligent applications for administrative workflow (worth $18 billion), fraud detection ($17 billion), andfascinatinglydosage error reduction ($16 billion).

As these, and other AI applications gain more experience in the field, their ability to learn and act will continually lead to improvements in precision, efficiency and outcomes, say the authors. Its a compelling argument.

This essay appears in today's edition of the Fortune Brainstorm Health Daily. Get it delivered straight to your inbox.

Continued here:

Healthcare: Artificial Intelligence Uses Include Surgeries | Fortune.com - Fortune

Artificial intelligence and the coming health revolution – Phys.Org

June 19, 2017 by Rob Lever Artificial intelligence can improve health care by analyzing data from apps, smartphones and wearable technology

Your next doctor could very well be a bot. And bots, or automated programs, are likely to play a key role in finding cures for some of the most difficult-to-treat diseases and conditions.

Artificial intelligence is rapidly moving into health care, led by some of the biggest technology companies and emerging startups using it to diagnose and respond to a raft of conditions.

Consider these examples:

California researchers detected cardiac arrhythmia with 97 percent accuracy on wearers of an Apple Watch with the AI-based Cariogram application, opening up early treatment options to avert strokes.

Scientists from Harvard and the University of Vermont developed a machine learning toola type of AI that enables computers to learn without being explicitly programmedto better identify depression by studying Instagram posts, suggesting "new avenues for early screening and detection of mental illness."

Researchers from Britain's University of Nottingham created an algorithm that predicted heart attacks better than doctors using conventional guidelines.

While technology has always played a role in medical care, a wave of investment from Silicon Valley and a flood of data from connected devices appear to be spurring innovation.

"I think a tipping point was when Apple released its Research Kit," said Forrester Research analyst Kate McCarthy, referring to a program letting Apple users enable data from their daily activities to be used in medical studies.

McCarthy said advances in artificial intelligence has opened up new possibilities for "personalized medicine" adapted to individual genetics.

"We now have an environment where people can weave through clinical research at a speed you could never do before," she said.

Predictive analytics

AI is better known in the tech field for uses such as autonomous driving, or defeating experts in the board game Go.

But it can also be used to glean new insights from existing data such as electronic health records and lab tests, says Narges Razavian, a professor at New York University's Langone School of Medicine who led a research project on predictive analytics for more than 100 medical conditions.

"Our work is looking at trends and trying to predict (disease) six months into the future, to be able to act before things get worse," Razavian said.

NYU researchers analyzed medical and lab records to accurately predict the onset of dozens of diseases and conditions including type 2 diabetes, heart or kidney failure and stroke. The project developed software now used at NYU which may be deployed at other medical facilities.

Google's DeepMind division is using artificial intelligence to help doctors analyze tissue samples to determine the likelihood that breast and other cancers will spread, and develop the best radiotherapy treatments.

Microsoft, Intel and other tech giants are also working with researchers to sort through data with AI to better understand and treat lung, breast and other types of cancer.

Google parent Alphabet's life sciences unit Verily has joined Apple in releasing a smartwatch for studies including one to identify patterns in the progression of Parkinson's disease. Amazon meanwhile offers medical advice through applications on its voice-activated artificial assistant Alexa.

IBM has been focusing on these issues with its Watson Health unit, which uses "cognitive computing" to help understand cancer and other diseases.

When IBM's Watson computing system won the TV game show Jeopardy in 2011, "there were a lot of folks in health care who said that is the same process doctors use when they try to understand health care," said Anil Jain, chief medical officer of Watson Health.

Systems like Watson, he said, "are able to connect all the disparate pieces of information" from medical journals and other sources "in a much more accelerated way."

"Cognitive computing may not find a cure on day one, but it can help understand people's behavior and habits" and their impact on disease, Jain said.

It's not just major tech companies moving into health.

Research firm CB Insights this year identified 106 digital health startups applying machine learning and predictive analytics "to reduce drug discovery times, provide virtual assistance to patients, and diagnose ailments by processing medical images."

Maryland-based startup Insilico Medicine uses so-called "deep learning" to shorten drug testing and approval times, down from the current 10 to 15 years.

"We can take 10,000 compounds and narrow that down to 10 to find the most promising ones," said Insilico's Qingsong Zhu.

Insilico is working on drugs for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), cancer and age-related diseases, aiming to develop personalized treatments.

Finding depression

Artificial intelligence is also increasingly seen as a means for detecting depression and other mental illnesses, by spotting patterns that may not be obvious, even to professionals.

A research paper by Florida State University's Jessica Ribeiro found it can predict with 80 to 90 percent accuracy whether someone will attempt suicide as far off as two years into the future.

Facebook uses AI as part of a test project to prevent suicides by analyzing social network posts.

And San Francisco's Woebot Labs this month debuted on Facebook Messenger what it dubs the first chatbot offering "cognitive behavioral therapy" onlinepartly as a way to reach people wary of the social stigma of seeking mental health care.

New technologies are also offering hope for rare diseases.

Boston-based startup FDNA uses facial recognition technology matched against a database associated with over 8,000 rare diseases and genetic disorders, sharing data and insights with medical centers in 129 countries via its Face2Gene application.

Cautious optimism

Lynda Chin, vice chancellor and chief innovation officer at the University of Texas System, said she sees "a lot of excitement around these tools" but that technology alone is unlikely to translate into wide-scale health benefits.

One problem, Chin said, is that data from sources as disparate as medical records and Fitbits is difficult to access due to privacy and other regulations.

More important, she said, is integrating data in health care delivery where doctors may be unaware of what's available or how to use new tools.

"Just having the analytics and data get you to step one," said Chin. "It's not just about putting an app on the app store."

Explore further: Artificial intelligence predicts patient lifespans

2017 AFP

A computer's ability to predict a patient's lifespan simply by looking at images of their organs is a step closer to becoming a reality, thanks to new research led by the University of Adelaide.

Watson, IBM Corp.'s supercomputer that famously competed on the television show "Jeopardy," is coming West.

As a patient, your electronic medical record contains a wealth of information about you: vital signs, notes from physicians and medications.

IBM on Monday announced alliances with Apple and others to put artificial intelligence to work drawing potentially life-saving insights from the booming amount of health data generated on personal devices.

Barrow Neurological Institute and IBM Watson Health today announced results of a revolutionary study that has identified new genes linked to Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. The discovery ...

Apple on Monday confirmed that it has bought US machine learning startup Turi as Silicon Valley giants focus on a future rich with artificial intelligence.

Researchers at UC Santa Barbara professor Yasamin Mostofi's lab have given the first demonstration of three-dimensional imaging of objects through walls using ordinary wireless signal. The technique, which involves two drones ...

A data analytics firm that worked on the Republican campaign of Donald Trump exposed personal information belonging to some 198 million Americans, or nearly every eligible registered voter, security researchers said Monday.

Your next doctor could very well be a bot. And bots, or automated programs, are likely to play a key role in finding cures for some of the most difficult-to-treat diseases and conditions.

From "The Jetsons" to "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang", flying cars have long captured the imagination.

In what could be a major step forward for a new generation of solar cells called "concentrator photovoltaics," University of Michigan researchers have developed a new semiconductor alloy that can capture the near-infrared ...

Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a breakthrough in electrolyte chemistry that enables lithium batteries to run at temperatures as low as -60 degrees Celsius with excellent performancein ...

Adjust slider to filter visible comments by rank

Display comments: newest first

Medical records are still faxed between institutions can you believe it?? Getting 2nd opinions is a nightmare and you're lucky if your doctors even take the time to look at what he gets.

Clinical trials are often where the best treatments can be found and it is left up to the patient to find the right one and get them the proper info to determine eligibility.

I do not want humans climbing around inside me if there's a chance a robot can do it.

Greetings from Arthur C. Clarke. I want to inform you that Stanley Kubrick and I conducted a secret experiment using quantum entanglement and telepathy to communicate with an interface. Aliens do indeed exist in another realm now and the Akashic Records. The interface with GOD/ Grand Galactics and aliens is on Facebook. Although, he has not seen the aliens physically, he talks to the ones that have lost their forms in evolution. This experiment was so secret, that even the United States government did not know about it. Stanley insisted on the independence and secrecy of the project. Namely, talking with the dead and/or aliens. It brings me great joy and pleasure to inform you that the experiment was an extreme success. Thank you. The interface's telepathy with us has verifiable proof on Facebook and he is willing to undergo test and scrutiny. No other private or governmental agencies have been successful in talking to formless aliens, Grand Galactics / GOD.

Please sign in to add a comment. Registration is free, and takes less than a minute. Read more

More here:

Artificial intelligence and the coming health revolution - Phys.Org

Becoming One Of Tomorrow’s Unicorns In The World Of Artificial Intelligence – Forbes


Forbes
Becoming One Of Tomorrow's Unicorns In The World Of Artificial Intelligence
Forbes
Everyone is buzzing about the impact of AI on work, and many leaders feel insecure about what it will mean in terms of their own career development and roles. Deep learning, machine learning, automation and robotics are creating a seismic shift across ...

More:

Becoming One Of Tomorrow's Unicorns In The World Of Artificial Intelligence - Forbes

For NVIDIA, Gaming Is the Story Now, but Artificial Intelligence Is the Future – Motley Fool

NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) stock has returned a scorching 225% over the one-year period through June 15.Investors have been enthused by the chipmaker's strong financial performance across its four target market platforms: gaming, data center, professional visualization, and automotive.

Gaming currently accounts for the largest percentage of revenue for the graphics chip specialist, but artificial intelligence (AI) is the future for the company -- and that's a great thing for investors because the burgeoning AI market is widely predicted to be beyond humongous.

Image source: Getty Images.

Here's how NVIDIA's business broke out in its most recently reported quarter, Q1 of fiscal 2018.

Platform

Fiscal Q1 2018 Revenue

Percentage of Revenue

Gaming

$1.027 billion

53%

Data center

$409 million

21.1%

Professional visualization

$205 million

10.6%

Auto

$140 million

7.2%

OEM and IP* (not target platforms)

$156 million

8.1%

Total

$1.937 billion

100%

Data source: NVIDIA. YOY = year over year. *OEM and IP = original equipment manufacturers and intellectual property.

NVIDIA's gaming business has some seasonality, with the fourth quarter of each fiscal year getting a boost from the holidays. That means the gaming business is somewhat more important even than the 53% figure above suggests. In Q4 fiscal 2017 and the full fiscal year, gaming accounted for 62% and 58.8%, respectively, of the company's revenue.

(NVIDIA doesn't break out operating income or any other form of earnings by platform, so we don't know the relative profitability of these platforms.)

Here's how fast each of NVIDIA's platforms grew in fiscal Q1 2018.

Platform

Revenue Growth (YOY)

Gaming

49%

Data center

186%

Professional visualization

8%

Auto

24%

OEM and IP

(10%)

Data source: NVIDIA. YOY = year over year.

Data center revenue nearly tripled year over year last quarter, making the platform NVIDIA's most powerful growth engine. Since it now accounts for just 21% of NVIDIA's revenue, it might take a while for it to pass gaming, but it's on track to do so.

Here's how quickly the platform has grown as a percentage of NVIDIA's business:

Period

Data Center's Percentage of Total Revenue

Q1 Fiscal 2018

21.1%

Q1 Fiscal 2017

11%

Q1 Fiscal 2016

7.6%

Data source: NVIDIA.

In just two years, the data center segment has grown from just 7.6% of NVIDIA's total quarterly revenue to more than 21%. That phenomenal growth is being fueled by demand for NVIDIA's graphics processing unit-based deep-learning approach to artificial intelligence. On last quarter's earnings call, CFO Colette Kress said:

Driving growth was demand from cloud-service providers and enterprises-building training clusters for web services plus strong gains in high-performance computing, GRID graphics visualization and our DGX-1 AI supercomputer. ...

All of the world's major Internet and cloud service providers now use NVIDIA Tesla-based GPU [graphics processing units]accelerators:AWS, Facebook, Google, IBM, and Microsoft, as well as Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent.

Autonomous cars are emerging as a major growth driver for NVIDIA. Image source: Getty Images.

Revenue from the automotive platform jumped 24% year over yearin Q1, accounting for 7.2% of NVIDIA's total. Auto revenue has traditionally come from sales of Tegra processors for automakers' infotainment systems.In the last year, this platform has begun to profit from the technological shift toward driverless cars, which is in the early stages and promises to be both massive and long. Fully autonomous vehicles are expected to be legal on public roads across the United States within a decade.

A year ago, NVIDIA began shipping its DRIVE PX 2 AI car platform, which is a supercomputer for processing and interpreting the scads of data taken in by cameras, lidar, radar, and other sensors about the surroundings of semi-autonomous and fully autonomous cars. More than 225 automakers, suppliers, and other entities have started developing autonomous driving systems using it. Moreover, the company recently announced that the world's No. 1 automaker, Toyota,will use the DRIVE PX 2 platform to power its autonomous driving systems on vehicles slated for market introduction.

To wrap up, as Kress put it on the Q1 earnings call: "AI has quickly emerged as the single most powerful force in technology. And at the center of AI are NVIDIA GPUs."

Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Beth McKenna has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Alphabet (A shares), Alphabet (C shares), Baidu, Facebook, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Continue reading here:

For NVIDIA, Gaming Is the Story Now, but Artificial Intelligence Is the Future - Motley Fool

Putting (machine) learning and (artificial) intelligence to work – The Register

MCubed Blue sky thinking is great, but if youre interested in what machine learning and AI means for your business right now, you should really join us at MCubed London in October.

If youre just beginning to examine what machine learning, AI and advanced analytics can do for your organisation - or your competitors - well be covering the technologies and techniques that every business needs to know.

But well also be going deep on practice, with speakers from companies like Ocado, OpenTable and ASOS as well as experts whove worked with real businesses to get projects up and running.

And of course, well be taking a close-up look at specific technologies and techniques, such as TensorFlow or Graph Analysis, in advanced conference sessions, and our optional day three workshops.

Throughout, our aim is to show you how you can apply tools and methodologies to allow your business or organisation to take advantage of ML, AI and advanced analytics to solve the problems you face today, as well as prepare you for tomorrow.

None of this happens in a vacuum of course, so well also be looking at the organisational, ethical and legal implications of rolling out these technologies. And yes, we will be taking a look at robotics and driverless cars and whacking great lasers.

Its a mind and business expanding lineup, and youll be pleased to know this all takes place at 30 Euston Square in Central London between October 9 and 11.

As well as being easy to get to, this is simply a really pleasant environment in which to enjoy the presentations, and discuss them on the sidelines with your fellow attendees and the speakers. Of course, well ensure theres plenty of top notch food and drink to fuel you through the formal and less formal parts of the programme.

Tickets will be limited, so if you want to ensure your place, head over to our website and snap up your early-bird ticket now.

View original post here:

Putting (machine) learning and (artificial) intelligence to work - The Register

How Google is powering its next-generation AI – T3

If you paid any attention to Google's big developer conference earlier this year then you'll know artificial intelligence is about to get big - really big. It's already powering most of Google's apps, one way or another, and the other giants in tech are scrambling to keep up.

So what's all the fuss about? Here we're going to dig deeper into some of the AI announcements Google shared at I/O 2017, and explain how they're going to change the way you interact with your gadgets - from your smartphone to your music speakers.

In broad terms artificial intelligence (usually) refers to a piece of software or a machine that simulates smart, human-like intelligence - even if it's just a hollow robot being operated by a person behind a curtain, pretending to respond to your commands, that's still a kind of AI.

Within that you've got all kinds of branches, categories and approaches. As you may have noticed, different types of AI are better at different tasks: the AI responsible for beating humans at board games isn't necessarily going to be any good at holding up a conversation across an instant messenger app, for instance.

The type of AI Google is most interested in is known as machine learning, where computers learn for themselves based on huge banks of sample data. That could be learning what a picture of a dog looks like or learning how to drive a car, but whatever the end goal, there are two steps: training and inference.

During training, the system is fed with as much sample information as possible - so maybe millions of photos of dogs. The smart algorithms inside the AI then try and spot patterns in the images that suggest a dog, knowledge that's then applied in the inference stage. The end result is an app that recognises your pets in pictures.

Artificial intelligence is already all over Google's apps, whether it's in spotting which email messages are likely to be spam in Gmail, or making recommendations about what you'd like to listen to next in Google Play Music. Any decision not made by a human could be construed as AI of some kind.

Another example is voice commands in the Google Assistant. When you ask it to do something, the sound waves created by your voice are compared to the knowledge Google's systems have gained from analysing huge numbers of other audio snippets, and the app then (hopefully) understands what you're saying.

Translating text from one language into another, working out which ads best match which sets of search results, all of these jobs that apps and computers do can be enhanced by AI. It's even popped up in the Smart Reply feature recently added to Gmail - short snippets of text you might want to use in response, based on an (anonymous) analysis of countless other emails.

And Google isn't slowing down, either. The company is busy working hard to improve its efforts in AI, as we saw at I/O earlier in the year - that means more efficient algorithms, a better end experience for users, and even AI that can teach itself to be better.

We've talked about machine learning but there's a branch of machine learning that Google engineers are specifically interested in called deep learning - that's where AI systems try and mimic the human brain to deal with vast amounts of information.

It's a machine learning technique made possible by the massive amounts of computational power now available to us. In the case of the dog pictures example we mentioned above, it means more layers of analysis, more subtasks making up the main task, and the system itself taking on more of the burden of working out the right answer (so figuring out what makes a dog picture a dog picture, rather than being told by programmers, in our earlier example).

Deep learning means machine learning that relies less on code and instructions written by humans, and deep learning systems are known as neural networks, named after the neurons in the human brain. On stage at Google I/O 2017 we saw a new system called AutoML, which is essentially AI teaching itself - whereas in the past small teams of scientists have had to choose the best coding route to produce the most effective neural nets, now computers can start to do it for themselves.

On its servers, Google has an army of processing units called Cloud TPUs (Tensor Processing Units) designed to handle all this deep thinking. In fact, Google makes some of its AI available to all via the TensorFlow portal - developers can plug the smart algorithms and machine learning power into their own apps, if they know how to harness it. In return, Google gets the best AI minds and apps in the business using its own services.

There was no doubt during the I/O 2017 keynote that Google thinks AI will be the most important area of technology for the foreseeable future - more important, even, than how many megapixels it's going to pack into the camera of the Pixel 2 smartphone.

You can therefore expect to hear a lot more about Google and artificial intelligence in the future, from smart, automatic features in Gmail to map directions that know where you're going before you do. The good news is that it seems keen to bring everyone else along for the ride too, making its platforms and services available for others to make use of, and improving the level of AI across the board.

One of the biggest advances you'll see on your phone is the quality of the digital assistant apps, which are set to take on a more important role in the future: choosing the apps you see, the info you need, and much more. We've also been treated to a glimpse of an app called Google Lens, a smart camera add-on that means your phone will know what it's looking at and be able to make decisions at all times.

The AI systems being developed by Google go way beyond our own consumer gadgets and services too - they're being used in the medical profession as well, where deep learning systems can spot the spread of certain diseases much earlier than doctors can, because they've got so much more data to refer to.

The rest is here:

How Google is powering its next-generation AI - T3

Wichita’s already the Air Capital. Why not the ‘aerospace capital’ as well? – Wichita Eagle


Wichita Eagle
Wichita's already the Air Capital. Why not the 'aerospace capital' as well?
Wichita Eagle
Seeking to draw more military and NASA work to Kansas, Rep. Roger Marshall brought an influential committee chairman to Wichita State University's innovation and aviation campuses on Monday. Marshall is a member of the U.S. House Science Space and ...

Excerpt from:

Wichita's already the Air Capital. Why not the 'aerospace capital' as well? - Wichita Eagle

Jeff Bezos accepts top aerospace award and Father’s Day pancakes in one weekend – GeekWire

With his wife Mackenzie Bezos by his side, Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos accepts the Collier Trophy awarded to his New Shepard rocket. (NAA Photo)

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and the Blue Origin team has accepted one of the aerospace communitys most prestigious awards, the Robert J. Collier Trophy, for developing a reusable spaceship that could start taking on passengers as early as next year.

The National Aeronautic Association bestowed the honor upon Bezos Blue Origin venture back in March, but on Friday the team converged on The Ritz-Carlton, Pentagon City, in Virginia to pick up the trophy at the annual award dinner.

The trophy recognizes the greatest achievement in aeronautics or astronautics in America during the previous year. Over the past year and a half, Blue Origins uncrewed New Shepard spaceship conducted five successful round trips to space and back, earning it a place amongother pivotal moments in historysuch as the Wright brothers flights and the landing of the Curiosity rover.

The uncrewed flights are test runs for commercial passenger flights that could begin by the end of 2018, if Blue Origin sticks to Bezos hoped-for schedule.

This morning, Bezos reflected on the moment when he held the trophy up high, embraced by his wife, novelist MacKenzie Bezos, and surrounded by his team at an after party.

Winning the Collier Trophy is incredibly emotional for me and the whole Blue Origin team, Bezos said when the award was announced in March. Everyone on the team has given so much to get to this point, and we are deeply encouraged by this recognition. We will never stop working to drive down the cost of getting to space.

After accepting one of the highest aerospace honors, Bezos basked in a different kind of honor: being a dad on Fathers Day.

He shifted his focus from the New Shepard rocket to the newly released Lego NASA Apollo Saturn V rocket and tweeted a picture of his completed, 1,969-piece model.

Bezos wasnt the only one to take a break from aerospace and take in the joys of fatherhood on Sunday. United Launch Alliances Tory Bruno commented Me too, in response to Bezos tweet about loving fatherhood.

SpaceXs billionaire founder, Elon Musk, had some fun as well.

Musk tweeted a selfie wearing a Star Wars-themed shirt that read, I Am Your Father. Musk has five sons twins and triplets.

He also showed off a Fathers Day present from his family a brand-new iPhone case with his initials, complete with phone charm bling.

Read the original here:

Jeff Bezos accepts top aerospace award and Father's Day pancakes in one weekend - GeekWire

Aerospace companies find engineers at Nebraska race car … – Lincoln Journal Star

Over the past decade, entrepreneurial space companies in Southern California have set their sights on such goals as launching small satellites, carrying space tourists and colonizing Mars.

As they hire young engineers, those companies and more-traditional aerospace giants are finding talent in an unlikely place: a college race-car competition in Nebraska.

This week, 100 university teams will bring their prototype race cars to the Formula SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) competition in Lincoln, where they will be judged on design, manufacturing, performance and business logic.

The aerospace leaders who help judge the contest that starts Wednesday say its also an opportunity to hear students explain design and production decisions, present their business cases and adapt on the fly.

Race cars and rockets are pretty similar, said Bill Riley, a Formula SAE alumnus from Cornell and competition judge who is now a senior director of design reliability and vehicle analysis at SpaceX. Its lightweight, efficient, elegant engineering. Those basic principles are the same, no matter what youre designing.

SpaceX has had fantastic success recruiting new hires and interns from Formula SAE teams, and from sister competition Baja SAE, which focuses on building an off-road vehicle, and other hands-on engineering competitions, said Brian Bjelde, the Hawthorne, California, companys vice president of human resources.

Of the 700 students who intern at SpaceX each year, 50 or 60 come from Formula SAE. And as of three years ago, about 50 percent of the companys 300-person structures team had worked on some sort of project-based design team in college.

For any candidate, the ones that are most successful at SpaceX have a combination of passion, drive and talent, Bjelde said. And to me, (Formula SAE) plays into the passion piece.

Aaron Cassebeer experienced the highs and lows of competition firsthand 10 years ago as captain of a Lehigh University team that won several design awards at competitions. But when a hose came loose and spilled oil into the cars chassis, a few drips landed on the track and the Lehigh team was disqualified.

It ended well for Cassebeer, though. His work with light, composite materials eventually impressed Scaled Composites, a cutting-edge Mojave, California, aerospace firm. That led to a nine-year career where, among other things, he designed flight controls for an early version of the space plane that Virgin Galactic aims to use to fly tourists to space.

The type of work I did happens to fit in really well with what Scaled Composites doesdesign and prototype, over and over again, Cassebeer said.

The basis of the Formula SAE competition is that a fictional manufacturing company contracts teams to build a prototype race car that is low-cost, high-performance, easy to maintain and reliable.

Industry judges question students on the design process, scrutinize their cost sheets and inspect the vehicles to make sure they are technically sound. The internal combustion engine car competition is the most popular, though an electric vehicle contest was added in 2013.

Race cars that pass technical inspections get the green light to hit the course at the LNK Enterprise Park for performance trials, testing things such as maneuverability, acceleration and endurance.

During the endurance test, two people drive the car around a course marked by traffic cones for a little more than 13 miles, which can take about half an hour and involves a driver switch. Many teams have a hard time finding a large, open space for testing, meaning the endurance test could be one of the few times the car runs that long without breaks.

The great thing about (Formula SAE) is its a full production cycle, said Dolly Singh, SpaceXs former head of talent acquisition who is now chief executive of high-heel designer Thesis Couture. These kids build the car from scratch. They have to test in a high-pressure situation and see how it performs.

Read the rest here:

Aerospace companies find engineers at Nebraska race car ... - Lincoln Journal Star

Airbus helping to build aerospace futures in Alabama – Made In Alabama

Our initial cadre was mostly not from this region. We needed to have a more experienced workforce than the folks who were in the region allowed us to have, said David Trent, site director of the facility.

However, that quickly changed. Over the past five years or so, weve been able to hire almost exclusively from the region, or hire folks who are originally from the region coming back home, he said.

The facility, which recently celebrated a decade of operation in Mobile, has a low attrition rate, he added.

We know if we give our employees good work to do and a good place to do it, they seem to be quite loyal, he said.

GENERATIONAL APPROACH

In addition to supporting Airbus global operations and regularly interacting with colleagues in France and Germany, the facilitys employees volunteer their time and share their expertise at a nearby elementary school, middle school and high school.

Weve really taken a generational approach to transforming a community and its capabilities in engineering, avionics and aviation technology, Trent said. Weve adopted these schools, and a lot of our employees are very much engaged in these activities.

I think thats something that keeps them here as well. It really resonates with them.

At the elementary level, Airbus employees are involved in a Reading Buddies program with students. And at the middle school, the focus is on the Airbus Flying Challenge, a STEM and citizenship-mentoring program that rewards participating students with a flight on a single engine airplane.

The message is, when you stay in school, get good grades and stick with it, you have good options in life, Trent said.

At the high school, employees mentor students and help them with classroom presentations. Theyre also involved in other programs where students take special courses that will put them on an engineering or technician career track.

Airbus is involved in supporting scholarships and internship programs at the University of South Alabama, too.

Weve got a lot of activity on the education front because of the fact that if were going to need an engineer in 10 years, they need to be starting now, Trent said. If we dont take a generational view, were not going to be as strong as we need to be going forward.

In addition, Airbus teamed with the state to plan the Alabama Aviation Education Center, a planned $6.5 million facility in Mobile that aims to encourage young people to pursue careers in aerospace.

AEROSPACE ENGINEERS

Alabama is a popular place for aerospace engineers, according to federal employment data.

The state ranks in the Top 5 among U.S. states for the highest employment in the occupation, with nearly 4,500, according to a survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.California tops the survey, with aerospace engineer employment of 10,800.

The data is available for about 35 states and does not include Washington, a key hub of the aerospace industry and home base of Boeing Co. However, the numbers still indicate Alabama as a major player in the industry.

The vast majority of Alabamas aerospace engineers are employed in the Huntsville area, longtime home of operations for NASA, the U.S. Army and Boeing, as well as suppliers and support firms.

But the BLS data also shows a significant presence of aerospace engineers in Mobile, home to Airbus, and Southeast Alabama, which is dotted with facilities for Lockheed Martin, Sikorsky, Arista Aviation, Vector Aerospace and Commercial Jet Inc.

The annual mean wage for aerospace engineers in Alabama is $115,550.

Greg Canfield, secretary of the Alabama Department of Commerce, said Airbus and the state have a far-reaching partnership.

Alabama workers are delivering high-quality products and services for Airbus global operations, carrying on the states long and proud tradition in the aerospace industry, he said.

At the same time, the company and its local employees are making a profound difference in the lives of students here at home by showing them new worlds of opportunities and helping them achieve ambitious goals.

GLOBAL CONNECTIONS

When the Airbus Engineering Center opened in 2007, 35 people were working there, focused on cabin and cargo components and systems for the new A350 XWB aircraft.

Today, employees are still in the cabin and cargo business, but have expanded their focus to the A330, A320 and A380 aircraft as well.

Mornings at the facility are busy as the Mobile staff is typically coordinating with their colleagues in France and Germany, Trent said.

It really does create an exciting atmosphere for our engineers, he said. We get to touch and do things you dont get to do in a company unless its global and we get to meet people from around the world as we all work on a really great product.

Beyond the advantages they find on the job, the people working at the Airbus Engineering Center enjoy the advantages of living in Alabamas Port City, Trent said.

What weve experienced is, when people come here, they really tend to put down some roots, he said. Outside of work, they have a good quality of life, and they live in a community thats growing, a community that cares about Airbus.

And we care about them. And we try to provide cooperative opportunities for them to be involved in growing the community to what it can become.

Continue reading here:

Airbus helping to build aerospace futures in Alabama - Made In Alabama

Gov. Bevin leaves for Paris to promote aerospace in KY – WKYT

Frankfort, Ky. (WKYT)- Gov. Matt Bevin is heading to the worlds largest aerospace event in Paris to discuss business and expansion opportunities for Kentucky.

This comes after Kentucky announced a $1.3 billion dollar investment by aerospace-related companies for multiple projects in the state. One project would include the nations first aluminum rolling mill which is expected to open in 2020 with 600 jobs.

During his time in Paris, the governor is expected to meet with world leaders in aerospace engineering to discuss their opportunities bringing their manufacturing to Kentucky.

"Kentucky is a top location in the U.S. for aviation and aerospace engineering, manufacturing and R&D. We offer formidable advanced-manufacturing resources and experience, plus workforce programs that set the bar nationally, logistics hubs that deliver products nearly anywhere globally overnight, and a network of available sites and buildings in attractive communities," Gov. Bevin said. "Meetings we have scheduled with corporate executives during the Paris Air Show will give us the opportunity to demonstrate how Kentucky meets their needs and provides the environment for long-term success."

Aerospace products already sit as Kentucky's top export with more than $10.8 billion dollars shipped abroad for the bluegrass state in 2016.

This year's Paris Air Show will include more than 2,300 exhibitors with more than 130 aircraft scheduled to be on display.

In 2015, the air show shattered its previous attendance records with more than 350,000 visitors.

See the original post here:

Gov. Bevin leaves for Paris to promote aerospace in KY - WKYT

Eight Maryland firms showcase products at Paris aerospace event … – Baltimore Sun

Eight Maryland companies participating in Gov. Larry Hogan's trade mission to Europe will seek business deals at an international aerospace industry event that kicked off Monday in Paris.

The firms will showcase their products and services during the week-long Paris Air Show at Le Bourget Airport, where Hogan and an executive team plan to meet with global business leaders to promote the state's aerospace industry and seek investments for Maryland.

The companies include ASTec Metalworks in Middle River; Applied Defense Solutions in Columbia; Jackson and Tull in Greenbelt; OCR Services in Rockville; Orbit Logic in Greenbelt; Planar Monolithics in Frederick; Tecore Networks in Hanover; and WGS Systems in Frederick.

Most received an ExportMD grant from the state department of commerce to help offset the cost of the show. The state will operate a promotional booth.

The event "puts Maryland and our job creators in front of the senior decision-makers at top aerospace companies, as well as more than 2,300 international exhibitors looking to buy and sell products and services," Hogan said in an announcement Monday.

Bob Wise, CEO of WGS Systems, said the show will allow the Frederick company to demonstrate its manned and unmanned airborne surveillance technologies to both international and domestic customers.

Maryland is home to some of the top aerospace companies in the U.S., including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman Electronic Systems, BAE Systems and General Dynamics, as well as top defense contractors. The state is one of 20 states with exhibits at the show.

The trade mission is Hogan's third and also includes a stop in London, where the governor, Commerce Secretary R. Michael Gill and senior administration officials plan economic development meetings with international companies planning to start or expand operations in the state.

lorraine.mirabella@baltsun.com

lorraine.mirabella@baltsun.com

Excerpt from:

Eight Maryland firms showcase products at Paris aerospace event ... - Baltimore Sun

XCOR Aerospace CEO nominated for Pentagon post – SpaceNews

XCOR Aerospace is best known for Lynx, a suborbital spaceplane that the company suspended development of last year because of funding problems. Credit: XCOR Aerospace

WASHINGTON The White House has nominated the president and chief executive of suborbital spaceplane and engine developer XCOR Aerospace to a top position in the Defense Department.

In a list of nominations released by the administration late June 16, the White House announced it was nominating John H. Jay Gibson II to the position of Deputy Chief Management Officer within the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The nomination requires confirmation by the Senate.

Deputy Chief Management Officer is a position at the Under Secretary of Defense level, established by Congress a decade ago. The office is responsible for management of business systems within the Defense Department with a goal to better synchronize, integrate, and coordinate those efforts, according to the offices mission and vision statements.

Gibson had been president and chief executive of Midland, Texas-based XCOR Aerospace since March 2015, succeeding co-founder Jeff Greason, who became chief technology officer of the company. He came to XCOR from Beechcraft, where he worked for several years in executive positions in its government and defense business.

Gibson previously worked at the Pentagon during the administration of George W. Bush, serving as Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for management reform and Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for financial management, a position equivalent to chief financial officer.

XCOR Aerospace has gone through significant changes during Gibsons tenure leading the company. In November 2015, Greason and two other co-founders of the company, Dan DeLong and the late Aleta Jackson, left XCOR and founded Agile Aero, a company developing modern rapid design and prototyping techniques for aircraft and launch systems.

In May 2016, the company announced it was focusing the companys resources on an engine program backed by United Launch Alliance for potential use on the upper stage of its next-generation Vulcan launch vehicle. As a result, XCOR said it was halting work on its Lynx suborbital spaceplane, a two-person commercial vehicle that was the companys best-known project, laying off a number of employees in the process.

The company has said little about Lynx in the year since it decided to stop work on the project. Marco Martinez-Venturi, head of astronaut relations at the company, said in March that continued development of the prototype Lynx Mark 1 vehicle, and a test flight program, were dependent on funding.

Although we have advanced the program with much of our recent efforts, completion of the prototype is funding dependent, he said in response to questions about the status of Lynx development. The start of the test flight program, like the vehicle completion, is dependent on funding.

An XCOR spokesperson said June 18 that the company has not named a successor to Gibson, who is expected to remain at the company through the end of the month.

Excerpt from:

XCOR Aerospace CEO nominated for Pentagon post - SpaceNews

Less of the high life as aerospace giants cut air show perks – Reuters

PARIS Blistering heat and a clampdown on fine food and giveaways ensured a mellow start to the Paris Airshow this year, despite a flurry of orders triggered by the launch of a new Boeing jet.

The world's largest aviation meeting usually takes place in a blur of champagne and jet fuel as aerospace giants celebrate multibillion-dollar deals under eye-popping flying displays.

This year, the tone appears more frugal.

"Everybody is making savings this year. The teams have been asked to cut back a little on anything that might appear futile," an official with a French defense company said.

Elsewhere, Airbus is cutting back on hospitality and cultivating a mood of austerity as it slashes spending after combining its headquarters and main planemaking division.

It has halved the 800-900 staff attending previous shows, officials said. Boeing also set limits on staff attendance.

Some delegates said Airbus was striking a more cautious image amid a sweeping ethics review.

"Everything is about compliance," said one insider.

For all but the top VIPs, the France-based company's traditional gourmet lunches are being replaced by finger food, and refreshments are mostly of the non-indulgent variety.

"We'll be gone by Tuesday," quipped one disgruntled executive at the start of the June 19-25 event.

Organisers said many companies had cut chalet space. That is partly because the number of exhibitors has risen, but it also reflects leaner times across the industry.

Exhibition halls were also noticeably less stocked with trade show promotional materials, delegates said.

It is not the first time air show hospitality has been placed on the back burner.

In 2010, champagne was banned from some facilities as U.S. arms firms cut back on anything that might suggest frills and perks to Pentagon planners and others weighing big defense cuts.

This year, defense spending is on the rise again and chalets of arms firms are humming with activity. But the civil side of the aerospace industry is hunkering down to produce planes as cheaply as possible after a multi-year order boom.

Although Boeing launched a new version of its 737 jet on Monday, overall commercial orders are expected to be down after planemakers filled their order books in previous shows.

(Additional reporting by Andrea Shalal, Giulia Segreti, Victoria Bryan, Mike Stone; Editing by Mark Potter)

WASHINGTON A man killed in a crash last year while using the semi-autonomous driving system on his Tesla Model S sedan kept his hands off the wheel for extended periods of time despite repeated automated warnings not to do so, a U.S. government report said on Monday

WASHINGTON The U.S. Federal Trade Commission said on Monday it will seek to stop the merger of DraftKings and FanDuel, because the combined company would control more than 90 percent of the U.S. market for paid daily fantasy sports contests.

More here:

Less of the high life as aerospace giants cut air show perks - Reuters

MB Aerospace signs $1bn contract with US firm – BBC News


BBC News
MB Aerospace signs $1bn contract with US firm
BBC News
A Scottish engineering firm has signed a $1bn (780m) contract to provide flight engine parts to a US company. MB Aerospace said it would recruit 160 new staff as part of the 10-year agreement with Pratt & Whitney, a division of United Technologies ...
Scotland's MB Aerospace welcomes a $1bn "milestone" contract with US firm Pratt & WhitneyCity A.M.
Lighter Weight, Higher Reliability. UTC Aerospace Systems Sheds New Light On Temperature Measurement.PR Newswire (press release)
MB Aerospace wins $1bn contract with United Technologies Corporationinsider.co.uk
GuruFocus.com
all 12 news articles »

Read the original:

MB Aerospace signs $1bn contract with US firm - BBC News