KiCad is undeniably the hacker favourite when it comes to PCB design, and we’ve built a large amount of infrastructure around it – plugins, integrations, exporters, viewers, and much more. Now, [Stargirl Flowers] is working on what we could call a web viewer for KiCad files – though calling the KiCanvas project a “KiCad viewer” would be an understatement, given everything it aims to let you do. It will help you do exciting things like copy-pasting circuits between KiCad and browser windows, embed circuits into your blog and show component properties/part numbers interactively, and of course, it will work as a standalone online viewer for KiCad files!

Continue memorizing “KiCanvas Helps Teach And Share KiCad Projects In Browsers” →

San Francisco – February 7, 2023 – Machine learning platform maker MindsDB today announced a $16.5M Series A investment from Benchmark.

MindsDB said the platform was built to speed up the process of building AI-powered applications. With more than 13,000 GitHub Stars and 70+ technology and data integrations, MindsDB has become one of the fastest growing developer platforms, according to the company.

“Over the past 20 years, we’ve seen important revolutions in the world of SaaS, from the rise of web applications, to the growth of mobile apps. Now, it’s time for the next revolution in the world of technology: the reinvention of all the systems we use on a daily basis, like email, calendars, CRMs, ERPs, CMSs, telehealth, office documents, etc, all with AI capacities at their core.” said Jorge Torres, co-founder and CEO of MindsDB. “This reality is rapidly changing the way we interact with technology and with MindsDB, developers can rapidly create the next wave of AI-centered applications that will transform the way we live and work.”

This new investment follows MindsDB’s latest integrations with Hugging Face and OpenAI, which allow anyone to easily bring state-of-the-art natural language processing and generative AI models into their database with only a few lines of SQL. With Hugging Face, developers can access pre-trained NLP models and apply them to their own data for use cases such as advanced text classification, sentiment analysis, emotion detection, translation, and more. With the OpenAI integration, developers can customize to their data the power of cutting edge generative AI models including GPT-3, Codex, and DALL·E.

Benchmark is known to invest in, and work alongside, entrepreneurs building startups into transformational companies. The firm has also been recognized for its commitment to open source with investments including Confluent, Elastic, Cockroach Labs, Docker, Airbyte, Clickhouse, MySQL, TimeScaleDB, Red Hat, and many others. Benchmark General Partner Chetan Puttagunta is joining the board of directors, bringing his deep expertise and track record as an early investor and board member in open source leaders including Elastic, Mulesoft (acquired by Salesforce for $6.5B), and MongoDB.

“Today, there’s tremendous interest in the developer community to implement and integrate machine learning into their applications, but the process is complicated and expensive,” said Chetan Puttagunta, general partner at Benchmark. “MindsDB is enabling developers from small startups to the biggest enterprises in the world by enabling developers to quickly and efficiently run ML models of their choosing with the database of their choosing. This approach has already made MindsDB the de facto choice for developers, and I’m thrilled to work alongside Jorge and Adam and the rest of the MindsDB team.”

The Digital Governance Council and Data Collaboration Alliance have announced the public release of Zero-Copy Integration, which is a Canadian standard that provides a framework for meeting strict data protection regulations and dealing with the risks related to data silos and copy-based data integration. 

The Zero-Copy Integration framework establishes the following principles: data management via a shared data architecture, data sharing via access-based data collaboration, data protection via universal access controls set in the data layer, data governance via data products and federated stewardship, prioritization of data-centricity and active metadata, and prioritization of solution modularity. 

It supports a project-by-project approach to reducing data silos and avoiding “rip and replace” approaches that don’t factor in existing IT investments. 

Zero-Copy integration is ideal for developing new applications, predictive analysis, digital twins, customers 360 views, AI/ML operationalization, workflow automations, and legacy system modernization. 

Currently the Digital Governance Standards Institute is working on plans to advance the standard in international standards organizations. 

“By eliminating silos and copies from new digital solutions, Zero-Copy Integration offers great potential in public health, social research, open banking, and sustainability,” said Keith Jansa, CEO at the Digital Governance Council. “These are among the many areas in which essential collaboration has been constrained by the lack of meaningful control associated with traditional approaches to data sharing.”

Inside the beating heart of many students and a large number of learners lies an inner cheat.  To get passing grades, every effort will be made to do the least to achieve the most. Efforts to subvert the central class examination are the stuff of legend: discreetly written notes on hands, palms and other body parts; secreted pieces of paper; messages concealed in various vessels that may be smuggled into the hall.

In the fight against such cunning devilry, vigilant invigilators have pursued such efforts with eagle eyes, attempting to ensure the integrity of the exam answers.  Of late, the broader role of invigilation has become more pertinent than ever, notably in the face of artificial intelligence technologies that seek to undermine the very idea of the challenging, individually researched answer.

ChatGPT, a language processing tool powered by comprehensive, deep AI technology, offers nightmares for instructors and pedagogues in spades.  Myopic university managers will be slower to reach any coherent conclusions about this large language model (LLM), as they always are.  But given the diminishing quality of degrees and their supposed usefulness, not to mention running costs and the temptations offered by educational alternatives, this will come as a particularly unwelcome headache.

For the student and anyone with an inner desire to labour less for larger returns, it is nothing less than a dream, a magisterial shortcut.  Essays, papers, memoranda, and drafted speeches can all be crafted by this supercomputing wonder.  It has already shaken educational establishments and even made Elon Musk predict that humanity was “not far from dangerously strong AI.”

Launched on November 30, 2022 and the creative offspring of AI research company OpenAI, ChatGPT is a work in progress, open to the curious, the lazy and the opportunistic. Within the first five days of launching, it had 1 million users on the books.

It did not take long for the chatbot to do its work.  In January, the Manchester Evening News reported that a student by the name of Pieter Snepvangers had asked the bot to put together a 2,000-word essay on social policy.  Within 20 minutes, the work was done.  While not stellar, Snepvangers was informed by a lecturer that the essay could pass with a grade of 53.  In the words of the instructor, “This could be a student who has attended classes and has engaged with the syllabu of the unit.  The content of the essay, this could be somebody that’s been in my classes.  It wasn’t the most terrible in terms of content.”

On receiving the assessment from the lecturer, Snepvangers could only marvel at what the site had achieved: “20 minutes to produce an essay which is supposed to demonstrate 12 weeks of learning.  Not bad.”

The trumpets of doomsday have been sounded.  Beverly Pell, an advisor on technology for children and a former teacher based in Irvine, California, saw few rays of hope with the arrival of the ChatGPT bot, notably on the issue of performing genuine research.  “There’s a lot of cheap knowledge out there,” she told Forbes.  “I think this could be a danger in education, and it’s not good for kids.”

Charging the barricades of such AI-driven knowledge forms tends to ignore the fundamental reality that the cheat or student assistance industry in education has been around for years.  The armies of ghost writers scattered across the globe willing to receive money for writing the papers of others have not disappeared.  The website stocked with readily minted essays has been ubiquitous.

More recently, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, online sites such as Chegg offer around the clock assistance in terms of homework, exam preparation and writing support. The Photomath app, to take another striking example, has seen over 300 million downloads since coming into use in 2014.  It enables students to take a picture of their maths problems and seek answers.

Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun is also less than impressed by claims that ChatGPT is somehow bomb blowing in its effects.  “In terms of underlying techniques, ChatGPT is not particularly innovative.”  It was merely “well put together” and “nicely done.”  Half a dozen startups, in addition to Google and Meta, were using “very similar technology” to OpenAI.

It is worth noting that universities, colleges and learning institutions constitute one aspect of the information cosmos that is ChatGPT.  The chatbot continues to receive queries of varying degrees of banality.  Questions range from astrology to suggest gift ideas to friends and family.

Then come those unfortunate legislators who struggle with the language of writing bills for legal passage.  “When asked to write a bill for a member for Congress that would make changes to federal student aid programs,” writesMichael Brickman of the American Enterprise Institute, “ChatGPT produced one in seconds.  When asked for Republican and Democrat amendments focused on consumer protection, it delivered a credible version that each party might conceivably offer.”

What are the options in terms of combating such usurping gremlins?  For one, its gratis status is bound to change once the research phase is concluded.  And, at least for the moment, the website has a service that occasionally overloads and impairs responses to questions users may pose.  To cope with this, OpenAI created ChatGPT Plus, a plan that enables users to access material even during those rocky fluctuations.

Another relevant response is to keep a eager eye on the curriculum itself.  In the words of Jason Wingard, a self-professed “global thought leader”, “The key to retaining the value of a degree from our institution is ensuring your graduates have the skills to change with any market.  This means that we must tweak and adapt our curriculum at leastevery single year.”  Wingard’s skills in global thought leadership do not seem particularly attuned to how university curricula, and incompetent reformers who insist on changing them, function.

There are also more rudimentary, logistical matters one can adopt.  A return to pen and paper could be a start.  Or perhaps the typewriter.  These will be disliked and howled at by those narcotised by the screen, online solutions and finger tapping.  But the modern educator will have to face facts.  For all the remarkable power available through AI and machine related learning, we are also seeing a machine-automated form of unlearning, free of curiosity.  Some branches off the tree of knowledge are threatening to fall off.

The integration streamlines communication efforts for franchise brands that use FranConnect and communicate with customers via Text Request.

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn., Feb. 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Text Request, the industry-leading business messaging platform, announced today an integration with FranConnect.

FranConnect is a leading franchise management software. With a large swath of its customers operating in the franchise space, Text Request developed the FranConnect integration to provide a more seamless experience for expanding franchise brands, and for franchisees looking to connect with their customers via text message. Users of the integration can now take advantage of the following features, whether they're using FranConnect CRM, FranConnect Sales, or both:

• Conversation Sync will push messages from Text Request into FranConnect's contact pages.

• Contact Sync will pull contacts from FranConnect into the Text Request contact list.

• Workflows allow customers to create text message triggers to automatically text new leads as they come into FranConnect.

"Text Request was born out of necessity, and this sentiment holds true for all of the enhancements, integrations, and updates we've released along the way," said Text Request CTO, Rob Reagan. "We set out each day to make things easier for our customers — and for their customers — and providing a new and improved experience for those in the franchise space is one more way we're achieving that goal."

Customers using both Text Request and FranConnect can enable the integration, and customize their settings, from the Integrations section inside their Text Request account.

For more information on the integration, visit textrequest.com/integrations/franconnect. For more details on Text Request, or to see a demo, visit textrequest.com/demo.

About Text Request

Text Request is the business texting platform built to ignite customer engagement. We've crafted plug-and-play messaging solutions to your everyday communication problems, so you can cut through the noise and connect with customers anytime, anywhere. See how we help at textrequest.com.

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SOURCE Text Request

If you zoom into the screen you are memorizing this on, you’d see an extremely fine pattern of red, green, and blue emitters, probably LEDs of some kind. This somewhat limits the resolution you can obtain since you have to cram three LEDs into each screen pixel. Engineers at MIT, however, want to do it differently. By growing thin LED films and sandwiching them together, they can produce 4-micron-wide LEDs that produce the full range of color, with each color part of a vertical stack of LEDs.

To put things in perspective, a standard TV LED is at least 200 microns across. Mini LEDs measure upwards of 100 microns, and micro LEDs are the smallest of all. A key factor for displays is the pitch — the distance from the center of one pixel to the center of the next. For example, the 44mm version of the Apple Watch has a pitch of around 77 microns. A Samsung Galaxy 10 is just over 46 microns.  This is important because it sets the minimum size for a high-resolution screen, especially if you are building large screens (such as when you build custom video walls (see the video below for more about that).

For example, consider a 4K screen with 3840×2160 pixels. If you can only do a 0.1mm pitch, your monitor will have to be at least 16 inches wide. A 4K TV with a 75-inch screen needs a 432 micron pitch, but to make a 24-inch screen with the same resolution requires 138 microns. While that means it is easier to make a large high-resolution display, it is harder to view the large screen up close. This can be a problem for computer monitors or VR headsets.

But imagine if these new LEDs would allow, say, 10 micron pitch. Then you could pack a 4K screen into a bit more than an inch and a half! VR headsets could easily be 4K if this were possible.

So far, the team has made a single multicolor pixel. Of course, they want to continue to produce a true array. Some of the overhead of that will reduce the pixel density, but it still could offer impressive results.

If you want to read more about microLED technology, [Maya] can help with that. Until this new tech goes mainstream, OLED is still the one to beat. You can actually make your own.

A recent study from the Institute of English Language and Literature at Freie Universität Berlin has shown that using codified gestures as a teaching method may make it easier for children and adolescents to understand the grammar rules of a foreign language. Researcher Natasha Janzen Ulbricht has been investigating how different hand gestures can contribute to procedural learning during language lessons.

Her study focused on grammatical morphemes, the smallest unit of language that carries meaning, such as the plural {-s} and possessive {-s}. This innovative teaching method was tested in a primary school classroom. Tests carried out after the lessons showed that learners found it easier to internalize grammar rules and were able to apply these rules more readily when gestures which distinguish between grammatical morphemes were used as a learning aid.

The results of the study suggest that this teaching method should be further developed and refined. It also recommends that this approach be included in training programs for language teachers. The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE in February 2023.

Approximately one third of children and adolescents in Germany attend a school where the main language spoken is not their first (or only first) language. This makes it all the more necessary that additional support is provided to help students learn the language and understand its grammar. Gestures could be a useful tool in this respect.

"We have neurocognitive data that support the idea of gestures being closely related to spoken language and evidence that gestures support memory when learning a language," explains Janzen Ulbricht. "Just as written notes can act as memory aids, gestures can provide a stable physical reference for language learners—even though speech is inherently ephemeral."

Words and sentences rely on units of meaning and grammatical elements, known as "morphemes." Janzen Ulbricht says that one of the challenges in acquiring languages in school lies in correctly arranging these units and being able to "predict" the next element in a given context. Codified gestures could help young learners of English who struggle with grammatical morphemes, such as the plural {-s} and possessive {-s} understand what they hear and Boost the predictions they make.

"Gestures offer a means of visually differentiating between grammatical morphemes that differ in meaning but sound the same," says Janzen Ulbricht. Since instructional gestures can be used independently of any given first language, teaching gestures may be particularly useful when teaching multilingual students.

Natasha Janzen Ulbricht is a researcher in English didactics and applied linguistics at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research explores how communicative movements can be used as a teaching tool in the classroom. She is also a specialist in training English language instructors and has hands-on experience in educating teachers in Germany, Zambia, and the US.