Artificial neural networks also need sleep 💤
Artificial neural networks also need sleep 💤
#48 2022 | Sparkmate
How are you and your teams doing? 🦾
Here’s what we’ve put together for your weekly Spark News:
Entangled photons in quantum: Explained 🔆
Find the right teammates with AssessFirst 👯♂️
Artificial neural networks also need sleep 💤
First lab-grown meat that gets FDA approval 🍗✅
Writing the Hardware Startup Playbook: Feedback wanted! 💥
💙 NEWS FROM OUR MATESEntangled photons in quantum: Explained 🔆
Last month, the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger, all whom have made groundbreaking experiments with entangled photons (where 2 particles behave like a single unit even when they are separated). Entangled photons are a fundamental component for testing the foundations of quantum mechanics, and for modern quantum technologies such as teleportation! 🤯
So how does it all work? Our mate (and former professor of some of the Sparkmates!) Dr. Christophe Couteau will hold an introductory course on quantum photonics tomorrow from 2-4PM CET - just sign up to get the link and join! He’ll also cover the project PhotonHub Europe and show you all the training sessions by experts from leading competence centres across the continent 🎉
🤸♀️ FUN PRODUCT WE LOVEFind the right teammates with AssessFirst 👯♂️
Many of you have asked us how we measure cultural fit with candidates who apply to join our team - and one of our favorite tools is AssessFirst! It’s a supporting tool we use to find potential in candidates, as well as have a clearer, unbiased view of how they think, their motives and personalities.
Features:
Develop your ideal candidate profile. They’ve built hundreds of categories of predictive models so you can easily define the right profile for each of your open positions. You can use their AI-supercharged, customized, or benchmark models for different roles!
Set up recruitment campaigns. Their integrated campaign system is designed to streamline your internal and external recruitment operations, all within the AssessFirst app.
Assess your candidates. Gather thousands of behavioural data points related to each individual’s talent and potential.
Single out the best. One simple click on our Magic Button instantly shortlists the candidates that perfectly match all your expectations.
Ensure the best team fit. Their highly powerful affinity algorithms were engineered in-house to predict the capacity of individuals to get along and work together productively.
Get management insight. Our tailored suggestions for managing each of your candidates will provide valuable insight for successfully integrating them into the team.
Who it’s for: Any team who wants to build and maintain a strong culture
Price: It’s not cheap 😬 Starts at £230 / month, until you need full candidate assessments - where the Professional package is at £520 / month. They have a 14-day trial if you’d like to give it a shot first!
💭 TECH FOOD FOR THOUGHTArtificial neural networks also need sleep 💤
We all know the importance of sleep: it gives you a better mood, strengthens your heart, restores your immune system, and improves mental functions such as your memory. Turns out, even artificial neural networks also need “sleep” to function better!
These artificial neural networks, like human brains, can sometimes fail - like “catastrophic forgetting”:
So researchers from the University of California tried imitating natural neural systems by sending information in “spikes” at specific times rather than continuously.
And when the networks were trained on a new task but with sporadic, offline intervals that mirrored sleep, they would replay previous “memories” without requiring prior training data = proving the networks could still learn continuously like humans and animals!
🌱 TECH FOR SUSTAINABILITYFirst lab-grown meat that gets FDA approval 🍗✅
Startups around the world have focused on wide ranges of lab-grown, cultivated meats: from beef, chicken and salmon to tuna. It’s an industry that’s raised billions of dollars in funding - but still hasn’t been able to enter markets.
It’s only just gotten the green light in the US 2 weeks ago, when company Upside Foods got approval from the FDA on their chicken, made of real animal cells grown in labs instead of requiring the slaughter of live animals.
A huge milestone for the industry! But they’re not quite ready to sell to the public yet: Their facilities need a grant of inspection, and the food itself will also need a mark of inspection before it enters the US market - which will take shorter than the FDA process that resulted in the approval! So, we might be able to taste and switch to lab-grown chicken sooner than we think. Would you?
💥 WHAT’S ON @ SPARKMATEWriting the Hardware Startup Playbook: Feedback wanted! 💥
We have been continuously building and reiterating the ultimate Hardware Startup Playbook these past few weeks: It’s our way of giving back. Sharing our learnings from 100+ entrepreneurs we’ve worked with, and from being in the trenches for years.
We’re working on creating new chapters for it, and refining the current ones as well.
Are you a hardware startup founder / are thinking to be one? Go ahead and check it out - we’d love to hear your feedback! Just drop your email below and you’ll get access to it (and a bunch of other resources we’ve put together)👇
Exciting things are happening every day ⚡️ Follow us on social media to stay tuned!