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Blockchain can be tough to explain. The game-changing distributed network and immutable ledger technology has the potential to change the foundation of the internet, and underpins everything from cryptocurrencies to smart contracts. So, for all of you who would rather not read thousands upon thousands of words to wrap your head around the subject, watching this five-minute video will get you up to speed. In it, IBM (one of the leading blockchain-as-a-service tech giants), decentralized application startup Blockstack, and some Lego helpers break down how a blockhain works, why it's important, and how it's being used to revolutionize everything from global food supply chains and conflict diamond tracking to re-defining the internet as we know it. SOURCE

Every day, Facebook performs some 4.5 billion automatic translations — and as of yesterday, they’re all processed using neural networks. Previously, the social networking site used simpler phrase-based machine translation models, but it’s now switched to the more advanced method. “Creating seamless, highly accurate translation experiences for the 2 billion people who use Facebook is difficult,” explained the company in a blog post. “We need to account for context, slang, typos, abbreviations, and intent simultaneously.” The big difference between the old system and the new one is the attention span. While the phrase-based system translated sentences word by word, or by looking at short phrases, the neural networks consider whole sentences at a time. They do this using a particular sort of machine learning component known as an LSTM or long short-term memory network. The benefits are pretty clear. Compare these two examples from Facebook of a Turkish-to-English translation. Th...