The Dutch and the Finnish are doing their part in shedding the dystopian sci-fi rep that AI gets usually. These European nations often show up on the top when it comes to initiatives that take the human aspect seriously. Now they are at it again. Amsterdam and Helsinki are making moves to make sure that transparency of AI applications is established. Not only that but these cities want their citizens to play an active role going forward. In what can be a more sci-fi sounding announcement, quantum computing industry leader DWave opens up their tech for business applications making it the first to do so. There is more to news, thanks to Google and find out why in this week’s top news brought to you by Analytics India Magazine.

NVIDIA And VMware Announce Partnership

VMware and NVIDIA are coming together to offer an end-to-end enterprise platform for AI along with a new architecture for data center, cloud and edge; services that use NVIDIA’s DPUs. “We are partnering with NVIDIA to bring AI to every enterprise; a true democratization of one of the most powerful technologies,” said Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware.

The full stack of AI software available on the NVIDIA NGCTM hub will be integrated into VMware vSphere, VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware Tanzu. This in turn will help accelerate AI adoption across the industru and allows enterprises to deploy AI-ready infrastructure across the data centers, cloud and edge.

News Publishers To Get A Billion Dollar Back Up

On Thursday, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai announced that they would be sparing $1 billion for enabling high quality journalism. In a blog post penned by Pichai, underlined Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Google’s News Showcase features the editorial curation of award-winning newsrooms to give readers more insight on the stories that matter, and in the process, helps publishers develop deeper relationships with their audiences. Google has already signed partnerships for News Showcase with nearly 200 leading publications across Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, the U.K. and Australia and will soon be expanding to India, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Quantum Computing Gets A Commercial Touch

On Tuesday, D-Wave Systems, the Canadian quantum computing company announced the general availability of its next-gen quantum computing platform that flaunt new hardware, software, and tools to enable and accelerate the delivery of in-production quantum computing applications. The company stated that the platform is available in the Leap quantum cloud service and includes the Advantage quantum system, with more than 5000 qubits and 15-way qubit connectivity. In addition to this, there is an expanded hybrid solver service that can run problems with up to one million variables. Together, these services enables users to scale to address real-world problems with enabling businesses to run real-time quantum applications for the first time.

Facebook’s PyTorch Boards Google’s TPUs

The PyTorch has announced that developers can leverage its libraries on Cloud TPUs. The XLA library, SAID pYtoRCH, has reached general availability (GA) on Google Cloud and supports a broad set of entry points for developers. It has a fast-growing community of researchers from MIT, Salesforce Research, Allen AI and elsewhere who train a wide range of models accelerated with Cloud TPUs and Cloud TPU Pods.

According to PyTorch, the aim of this project was to make it as easy as possible for the PyTorch community to leverage the high performance capabilities that Cloud TPUs offer while maintaining the dynamic PyTorch user experience. To enable this workflow, the team created PyTorch / XLA, a package that lets PyTorch connect to Cloud TPUs and use TPU cores as devices. 

Github Rolls Out Code Scanner

Github announced that the code scanning option, CodeQL is now generally available to all developers. With this new option developers get prompts  It scans code as it’s created and surfaces actionable security reviews within pull requests and other GitHub experiences you use everyday, automating security as a part of your workflow. This helps ensure vulnerabilities never make it to production in the first place.Code scanning is powered by CodeQL—the world’s most powerful code analysis engine and will enable developers to use the 2,000+ CodeQL queries created by GitHub and the community, or create custom queries to easily find and prevent new security concerns.

Amazon Wants You To Pay With Your Palm

No two palms are alike. That’s the idea behind Amazon One, a new service by the e commerce giant which allows customers to pay with their palm. Contactless payments were all the rage this pandemic and Amazon wants to step up their technology at one of their stores. All you need is a credit card, your mobile number, and of course, your palm. Once you’re signed up, you can use your palm to enter, identify, and pay where Amazon One is available. Governments around the world started to ease the restrictions for public spaces like malls and stadiums and services like Amazon One might see a huge rise in demand because touching surfaces is so 2019!

 Putting Smart In Smart Cities

On Monday, Amsterdam and Helsinki launched AI registries to detail how the respective governments use algorithms to deliver services. AI Register is a window into the artificial intelligence systems used by these cities through the register, citizens can get acquainted with the quick overviews of the city’s artificial intelligence systems or examine their more detailed information based on your own interests. They can also give feedback and thus participate in building human-centred AI.