Top 12 Coworking Hives Keep Seattle Buzzing
As Seattle netizens search for functional, flexible office space in the city’s skyward-jutting metro corridors, the number of co-working venues has multiplied, offering e-lancers, entrepreneurs and growing businesses alike well-appointed, community-centric locations boasting all the amenities of corporate office perks in a shared office environment.
Looking for fast […]
Cambia Health Solutions is part of an Innovation Force for Blockchain — and Cambia Grove the New Kids on the Block for Entrepreneurs
Maura Little has just finished delivering the 2018 Strategic Vision outlook for Cambia Grove — a synergistic, healthcare-focused, innovation hub and community workspace — and collaboration is front and center of the […]
Bank of America Better Money Habits® Millennial Report Finds That Young Adults in Seattle Prioritize Jobs With Personal Purpose Over Salary, but Finances Are Still a Source of Stress
Nearly three quarters of Seattle millennials believe passion is more important than salary in their career, according to the new Better Money Habits® Millennial Report released […]
Tanja Omeze, the former marketing head for Amazon Video had been appointed the Chief Marketing Officer for Seattle-based RealSelf where she will lead global marketing initiatives to increase awareness, engagement and connections among and between consumers and medical aesthetic professionals.
Recognized as the world’s largest online aesthetics marketplace and the best place to learn about cosmetic treatments and […]
When, in 2009, an online marketing industry forerunner by the name of HasOffers created what was the first mobile tracking software to attribute customer clicks and downloads to sales commissions and cash, the flame that would ignite an explosion in mobile app marketing was just a flicker.
The Google Play store was still […]
It is a well-known fact that there is more computing power in today’s iPhone than there was on the Apollo spacecraft mission that landed the first human on the moon.
To enumerate just how much power, the iPhone 6’s clock is 32,600 times faster than the best Apollo era computers and could perform instructions 120,000,000 times faster. […]
Amazon has introduced its first Small Business Impact Report highlighting new details about the millions of small and medium-sized businesses that sell their products on Amazon. Small and medium-businesses are the backbone of Amazon’s stores, providing shoppers with millions of unique products. According to the report, more than a million U.S.-based small and medium-sized businesses […]
Nordstrom has closed deals to acquire two leading retail technology companies: BevyUp, the innovators behind a digital selling tool, and MessageYes, a platform rooted in conversational commerce.
“The retail environment is changing faster than ever, but the value of service, speed, convenience and newness remain constant,” said Brian Gill, technology senior vice president at Nordstrom. […]
Apprenti™, the nation’s first registered tech apprenticeship program which launched in Seattle Washington, will expand nationally into Oregon, Michigan, California and Ohio. The apprenticeship program – which hasa been guided by the Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA) in 2016 – recruits, trains and places diverse talent into tech roles.
According to a forecast […]
In the quest for more refined marketing attributions and accurate ROI’s, marketing automation leader Marketo has announced its biggest acquisition in history with the addition of Bizible, a Puget Sound innovator in managing marketing performance. As MarTech reported, “With the acquisition, two complementary, cutting-edge analytics and technologies […]
Apple, Xbox and other tech startups, have collaborated on explaining foundational concepts including circuits and logic, or hardware and software, in a fun and digestible way.
Code.org is delighted to share a series of six short videos that teach How Computers Work. This project […]
The Internet’s biggest game distribution platform and marketplace, Seattle-based Steam, has dropped support for the blockchain-based cryptocurrency known as Bitcoin.
The parting of the ways sent a shock wave that registered on the Richer scales of both technologists and economists as Bitcoin has been experiencing a serious surge in investor interest and value.
Steam […]
by Congressman Derek Kilmer
Last week, cable news carried live the testimony of Facebook’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, before the House and Senate. The news anchors dissected his every move: “Did he really take a sip of water like that?” While the theatrics might have made for compelling television, Congress did nothing to […]
by Bob Ferguson, Attorney General, State of Washington
The most aggressive opening in chess is called the King’s Gambit. On the second move, White sacrifices a pawn that typically protects his king for a blitzkrieg assault on Black. It’s audacious. With no preparation, no careful groundwork, White signals his intent to wipe his opponent off the […]
The GIX Innovation Competition was created in 2016 to spur solutions to global challenges. GIX, the Global Innovation Exchange is a global partnership between major research universities and innovative corporations to develop leaders in innovation. The first two academic partners are Tsinghua University in China and the University of Washington, with early support from […]
Since the introduction of Microsoft HoloLens, the world’s first fully self-contained holographic computer in January 2015, Microsoft has continued to propel the Mixed Reality revolution.
Now, the complement of Windows MR partners have kicked off the 2017 holiday buying season by celebrating the availability of pre-orders for Windows Mixed Reality headsets at Microsoft stores and Microsoft.com.’
[…]
A new “Pop-in” shop at eight Nordstrom department stores across the national electronic gridiron creates a “Tron-like” shopping environment where you are the human pulse of energy tracing the silicon paths of a circuit board between different product displays and placements, each containing some very nifty gizmos for your home tech portfolio.
As Nordstrom […]
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May 24 2018
Seattle A.I. Talent and Mentors Becoming American Idols
Seattle’s emergence as a nerve center for A.I. technologies, and a remote engineering outpost for companies like Facebook and Google, have created a kind of “cerebral cortex vortex” that is vacuuming talented gray matter and a distinguished brain trust of professors, researchers and other personnel from academia.
The latest gravity well is inside Facebook and the opening of its new A.I. Lab here. At least one A.I. professor from the University of Washington has been treated like an NFL free agent or newly-minted American Idol. The brain drain from universities and nonprofit A.I. research operations, which are already struggling to retain professors and other employees, shows no signs of slowing.
“It is worrisome that they are eating the seed corn,” commented Dan Weld, a venerated computer science professor at the University of Washington who was quoted in The New York Times. “If we lose all our faculty, it will be hard to keep preparing the next generation of researchers.”
Over the last few months, Facebook has approached a number of notable researchers in Seattle. It hired Luke Zettlemoyer, a professor at the UW who specializes in technology that aims to understand and use natural human language, a critical area for a company struggling to identify and remove false and malicious content on its networks.
In the fall, Mr. Zettlemoyer told the Times that he had turned down an offer from Google that was three times his teaching salary (about $180,000, according to public records) so he could keep his post at the university. Instead, he took a part-time position at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Many researchers retain their professorships when moving to the big companies — that’s Mr. Zettlemoyer’s plan while he works for Facebook — but the professors usually cut back on their academic work. At Facebook, academics typically spend 80 percent of their time at the company and 20 percent at their university.
Facebook Seattle
Seattle’s new Facebook lab will focus on A.I. — robotics and “reinforcement learning”— a way for robots to learn tasks by trial and error. Siddhartha Srinivasa, a robotics professor at UW, said he was also approached by Facebook in recent months. At the time, it was not clear to him why the Internet company was interested in robotics.
Even with its deep pockets, Facebook faces fierce competition for talent. Mr. Allen recently endowed the Allen Institute with an additional $125 million in funding. After losing Mr. Zettlemoyer to Facebook, the Allen Institute hired Noah Smith and Yejin Choi, two of his colleagues from Montlake.
These profs also specialized in natural language processing, and both say they have received offers from multiple internet companies.
As a nonprofit think tank, The Allen Institute is paying Mr. Smith and Ms. Choi a fraction of what they were offered to join the commercial sector, but it will allow them to spend half their time at the university and collaborate with a wide range of companies, said Oren Etzioni, a former UW CSE academic who oversees the Allen Institute.
“The salary numbers are so large that even Paul Allen can’t match them,” Mr. Etzioni said. “But there are still some people who won’t go corporate.”
Other researchers believe that companies like Facebook can still align with their academic goals. Still, Ed Lazowska, the Bill and Melinda Gates professor of computer science at the University of Washington, said he was concerned that the largest internet companies were luring too many of the university’s professors into the commercial sector.
According to Lazowska, the University of Washington. along with other schools, is working on a set of recommendations for commercial companies meant to provide a way for universities and companies to share talent more equally. Mr. Lazowska added that every university should ensure that it did not become too close to one company. “We want every company to collaborate with us and to feel like they have an equal opportunity to hire our students and work with our faculty.”
Fueling what is perceived to be an AI-led future of technology, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced recently that Microsoft has acquired Semantic Machines, a “conversational AI” startup in Berkeley, Calif., to further its work in building machines that can converse naturally with humans.
Nadella took to the stage at Microsoft’s recent Build conference, to discuss the company’s aims to advance the state of voice-based virtual assistants,, from understanding and responding to commands to being able to conduct complete conversations.
With the acquisition, Microsoft will set up a “center of excellence” focused on pushing “forward the boundaries of what is possible in language interfaces,” posted David Ku, corporate vice president and chief technology officer of Microsoft AI & Research.
Ku went on to explain, “Combining Semantic Machines’ technology with Microsoft’s own AI advances, we aim to deliver powerful, natural and more productive user experiences that will take conversational computing to a new level.” – Reported by Grace Brakenhoff [24×7]
