According to official customs data released on Monday, China’s chip imports fell 12.4% in September, continuing a decline amid tensions with the US and an ongoing chip shortage. Recently, US officials ordered Nvidia to stop exporting computing chips for AI work to China.
According to the data, the country imported 47.6 billion units of chips during September 2022, compared with 54.3 billion units in September last year. The data was expected to be released earlier this month. However, it was delayed by the Communist Party Congress.
The data shows an ongoing downward trend for chip imports. In the initial nine months of 2021, China imported 417.1 billion chips, down by 12.8% year-on-year. Chip imports to China increased in 2021 as tensions between the US and China over technology policy surged, and a global chip shortage made many companies in China stockpile supplies.
Additional data from the National Bureau of Statistics indicates that domestic chip output in September decreased by 16.4% year-on-year to 26.1 billion units. During the initial nine months of this year, total output fell 10.8% to 245 billion units.
Achieving self-sufficiency for China’s chip industry remains a key policy priority for Beijing, especially as Washington continues to target the progress of China’s semiconductor sector, with the latest being a set of sanctions announced by the Biden administration earlier this month.
The sanctions have caused big overseas-based chip manufacturing equipment companies to cease supplying chips to key Chinese companies. These include Yangtze memory Technologies Co (YMTC), Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), and advanced artificial intelligence chip makers.
Meta, L’Oréal, and French business school HEC Paris are joining hands to launch a startup acceleration program to boost creativity in the metaverse.
The program will support at least five startups specializing in mixed reality, avatar creation, portability in user experience, 3D production, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), token economy, or other domains related to the metaverse and Web3. Startups do not have to be related to the beauty industry specifically.
It will be located in the Meta space within Station F, which is in the 13th arrondissement of Paris. It is considered the world’s most extensive startup campus. Applications for the same are open until 20 November.
A jury of HEC, Meta, and L’Oréal members, along with investors, will select the startups in December. The program will run from January 2023 to June 2023. Selected applicants will be offered mentorship along with access to investors and experts.
Some experts believe the hype around NFTs and Web3 is waning following the crypto crash earlier this year. However, luxury, beauty, and fashion brands continue to invest in new projects.
L’Oréal also plans to extend its existing technologies to the new space. In 2018, L’Oréal acquired the AR beauty company Modiface. In 2021, L’Oréal and Meta announced a platform integration that utilized Modiface to bring AR-powered makeup try-ons to the social media platform Instagram. The companies were convinced that acquiring Modiface would be a competitive advantage when they entered Web3 and the metaverse.
Graphics chip giant Nvidia is probing the graphic card reports that have had caused power cables burns or melts for some users.
A Reddit user shared details of RTX 4090 card issues, including some pictures, which show burn damage on a new adapter cable. The connection on the graphic card was also damaged, according to The Verge. Replying to the same thread, another Reddit user showed similar damage to an Asus RTX 4090 card power connector.
Bryan Del Rizzo, Nvidia spokesperson, said they are investigating the issue. “We are in touch with the first owner and will reach out to the other for more information,” he added.
There are concerns that when the 12VHPWR power connector, intended for new ATX 3.0 power supplies, is twisted in a specific way, it can cause problems. Earlier, a YouTuber warned about the new connector by calling it dangerous.
A senior technical marketing manager at Nvidia, Brandon Bell, replied in an email that people are worried about issues that do not exist.
The solutions to these issues might be to avoid Nvidia’s power adapter altogether or be very careful about how you position or bend it. It’s a bulky adapter supplied with RTX 4090 cards and needs up to four 8-pin power connectors.
The increasing demand for food products is driving farmers and agro companies to find newer ways to increase production and reduce waste. To address the issue, experts are turning to digital interventions and artificial intelligence to find viable solutions, which are steadily emerging as a part of the agriculture industry’s technological evolution. AI-powered solutions have been enabling farmers to improve efficiencies. It is also enhancing quantity, quality, and ensuring faster go-to-market for crops. And in this arena, Cropin is one name that has been leveraging digital tools and artificial intelligence to benefit the agriculture landscape.
Cropin is a global ag-ecosystem intelligence provider whose suite of products assists stakeholders in the agroecosystem, including even financial services providers, to adopt and drive digital strategy across their agricultural operations. Using cutting-edge technologies like machine learning, artificial intelligence, and remote sensing, Cropin creates an intelligent, interconnected data platform. Cropin helps organizations digitize their operations from farm to fork and leverage near real-time farm data as well as actionable insights to make effective decisions.
The Initial Idea
Cropin was founded by Krishna Kumar, Co-founder, and CEO, along with his childhood friend Kunal Prasad who is currently the COO of the company. “In 2010, we saw massive distress in the agriculture sector that was real and had to be addressed. We found an opportunity to impact society and the world at large by building a technology solution for the agriculture sector,” said Kumar. Though there have been several technological advances in farming, by 2010, the sector had not yet reaped the benefits of various new technological advances in data science and artificial intelligence that could give a boost to the agriculture industry. This lack of initiative inspired the founders to come up with the idea of making this industry data-driven and democratizing data for all the key stakeholders in the value chain with their services.
Digitizing the Farm Landscape
Cropin builds products that enable its customers to digitize their farming practices and allow multiple data sources to connect with farm data. The company unifies disparate data sources across the farming process, allowing agro-industry players to derive and act on critical agri-intelligence. Cropin builds a single, holistic view of the risks and opportunities across the crop value chain.
Recently, Cropin announced the launch of Cropin Cloud, the world’s first purpose-built industry cloud for agriculture. Cropin Cloud is a multi-tenant, scalable, flexible, secure, and intelligent platform enabling development agencies, governments, agri-businesses, and allied industries to boost digital transformation across the agro-industry. “Cropin Cloud is an integrated platform of applications for digitized, contextual, and clean data pipelines for enhanced decision-making through data analytics as well as globally proven crop and geography-agnostic, crop-specific machine learning models,” explained Cropin’s CEO.
Within the Cropin Cloud, Cropin Apps are the solutions that help streamline farm data capture, management, as well as other complex field operations involved during seed production, seeds strain tracking/trialing across generations, crop protection, nutrition development for row crops, horticulture and plantations. The application platform comprises an integrated portfolio of mobile apps and web solutions that one can choose from. These include:
Cropin Grow
Cropin Grow is a farm monitoring and management solution to help you geotag your farms, digitize farm/farmer records, share advisory, monitor crop productivity, improve farm efficiency, and boost field officer productivity. It enables geotag farm plots for area audit and helps crop health management by monitoring crop performance for yield predictability. It can also set pest as well as disease alerts and manage alerts/activity logs.
Cropin Connect
Cropin Connect is a seamless communication solution connecting growers, agri-businesses, and field officers to help digitize grower activities. It can monitor plots easily, record task progress, raise alerts to get instant advice, gather farmer feedback, and market services to farmers. It also has multiple language support and a simplified user interface.
Cropin Trace
Cropin Trace is a QR code-enabled farm-to-fork traceability solution to track and meet quality benchmarks. It eliminates counterfeiting and ensures that everyone involved in bringing food to our table is recognized and rewarded. Cropin enables end-to-end traceability and facilitates customizable, weatherproof, and tamper-proof labels.
Collecting Data with Cropin Data Hub
Cropin Data Hub enables easy management as well as allows access to structured and unstructured agri-data sources for raw and processed incoming data pipelines. Cropin Data Hub addresses this by structuring agri-data through an agri-object model, which enables it to interface with all agri-data sources such as in-field farm management apps, IoT devices and drones, mechanization data from farming equipment, remote sensing satellite information, and weather advisory sources.
The Cropin Data Hub also has pre-built advanced data frameworks designed to solve the most common and constantly challenging problems in agriculture remote monitoring, such as cloud-free satellite imagery, boundary-detection of farm plots, and segmentation of land use. It enables combining enterprise, agronomy, and remote field data with Cropin’s Crop Intelligence models/datasets to surface significant insights for the business, while sparing the need to expend critical resources on re-inventing the wheel. The three steps involved in the process are:
Collect: Aggregating data from various sources across applications, IoT devices, weather and earth observation data, amongst others.
Clean: Processing data inputs with meta-data to solve for search and query needs.
Contextualize: Making contextual custom reports/visualizations available on OLAP for easy access and use.
Dynamic Decision-making with Cropin Intelligence
Cropin Intelligence is enabling dynamic decision-making on and off the field through the actionable predictive insights generated by their mature machine learning models. Cropin has built several contextual deep-learning models to solve diverse challenges agri-stakeholders face while managing day-to-day operations. Cropin has 22 AI models that give you a head-start crop detection, yield estimation, irrigation scheduling, water stress detection, harvest date estimation, pest/disease prediction, nitrogen uptake, change detection, and plot score, among others.
Technological Revolution for the Future of Agriculture
“Cropin is at the focal point of its journey, where we see the global agriculture industry immensely benefit from its innovation. For instance, Cropin Cloud will enable the client partners with the power to achieve the unprecedented productivity in agriculture through specificity, speed, and agility. We began this journey by studying, learning, and structuring data generated by the complex global agri-ecosystem. Growing practices mapped to different agroclimatic zones for different crop varieties helped us build the world’s most extensive Crop Knowledge Graph,” said Krishna Kumar while elaborating on the future prospects.
A Knowledge Graph is a reusable, flexible data layer used for answering complex queries across data silos. These graphs create supreme connectedness with contextualized data, organized and represented in the form of graphs. Built to capture the constantly changing nature of knowledge, they easily accept new data, definitions, and requirements. Cropin’s Crop Knowledge Graph is crop-agnostic and geography-agnostic, so its benefits are immediately available to the entire spectrum of agriculture data needs. “This is the beginning of a new era of possibilities for technology-enabled solutions for real agriculture problems,” said Kumar.
“Over the years, we have analyzed how different crop varieties behave in different environments and climatic conditions when treated differently through varied practices. The edge in our solutions comes from the unparalleled experience and learnings gathered from 500+ crops and 10,000+ varieties grown in 92 countries managed via their solutions. And these numbers keep growing every day as Cropin continues to add and manage new crops, new geographies or solve new crop challenges faced by this industry,” said Kumar.
Cropin’s experience demonstrates that data science can enable the industry to understand risks better, maximize revenue, and optimize costs by making every farm asset traceable, predictable, and sustainable in a connected agriculture ecosystem.
From Top of the Agro World
Being founded in 2010, the company’s first milestone was the launch of SmartFarm (now Cropin Grow). According to Krishna Kumar, this solution addressed the industry pain point of building a standard operating procedure for managing every farm asset and enabling the Agri ecosystem to produce high-quality, traceable, nutritious, and sustainable food systems.
The second milestone in their journey was building the platform to be crop-agnostic as well as location agnostic so that anyone can deploy it in any country or continent and contextualize it to local crops, climate conditions to scale. “The biggest hurdle in this was localization (India has 30-40 different languages, for example). However, today our platform is crop and location agnostic,” said Kumar.
When scaling the product deployment in more than 50 countries, Cropin thought of building intelligence on top of the Agri data assets created over a period of time. This was the 3rd milestone where the company built proprietary AI/ML models when Cropin had generated trillions of datasets consisting of more than 350 crops and 5,000 varieties from 52 countries. They also built a small team intending to see what customers could learn from all the data.
The fourth feat is the launch of Cropin Cloud, which is “the world’s first intelligent agriculture cloud,” according to Kumar. Moreover, Cropin has partnered with over 250+ organizations globally to digitize over 16 million acres of farmland and enrich the lives of nearly 7 million farmers while building intelligence for over 500 crops and over 10,000 crop varieties in over 92 countries.
Apple has reportedly told its suppliers to cut back on production this year after anticipating reducing demands for new iPhone14 models. The California-based tech company is planning to decrease production by six million units.
The tech firm is looking to produce almost 90 million handsets for the period, almost the same level as last year and coherent with Apple’s original forecast this summer. Apple had previously told its suppliers to be prepared for a 7% increase in orders.
The demand has been more for iPhone 14 pro models as compared to the entry-level ones. This has forced suppliers to focus the production capacity on the premium versions. Apple’s shares went down about 4% following reports of cuts in production plans this year.
Apple announced that it began making its new iPhone 14 much sooner in India than it was anticipated as it takes some of its production away from China. Apple worked with Taiwan-based Foxconn Technology Group, its most crucial production partner, with the goal of assembling iPhones in Chennai almost two months after its global launch.
Apple’s move to diversify the supply chains comes in response to rising tensions between China and the US over Taiwan and trade. Recently, US Officials ordered Nvidia to stop exporting computing chips for AI work to China. JP Morgan analysts said Apple expects to move around 5% of iPhone production to India this year. They also predicted that 25% of all iPhone production will be in the South Asian region by 2025.
Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), on Friday, posted the proceedings of its Q2 FY 2022-23 earnings call on the metaverse. This is the first time in corporate India that a company has used metaverse to engage with its stakeholders.
The RIL metaverse was produced in collaboration with GMetri, a no-code metaverse creation platform. To access it, one doesn’t need to wear AR/VR headgear.
The metaverse contains nearly an hour of results commentary, where Group Joint CFO V. Srikanth covers consolidated financials and business summary, Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd (RJIL) President Kiran Thomas covers Jio Platforms and digital services, and RJIL Head of Strategy Anshuman Thakur covers Jio digital services/financials. It also features Senior Vice President, E&P, Sanjay Roy, covering Hydrocarbons – Exploration & Production and Strategy and Business Development head Gaurav Jain covering Reliance Retail.
Using it, analysts worldwide tracking the company can toggle with graphics and slides placed on different screens through the multiple buckets in the presentation of the results. They can also download the RIL Q2 22-23 media release and the media and analyst call transcript in PDF formats. The RIL metaverse also features a special section containing quotations from RIL Managing Director and Chairman Mukesh Ambani.
The metaverse is a virtual space built with the idea of immersing users within the online experience, mainly via virtual and augmented reality, while enabling them to interact with each other virtually. Due to its ongoing evolution, the term ‘metaverse’ currently has no single definition.
Automation in industrial engineering defines fast, reliable processing, designing, implementing, and maintaining industrial systems and products. Automation allows one to carry out complex tasks in industries by strengthening and rapidly processing them daily, as premium products need premium attention while manufacturing. It makes tasks easier with reliable and cutting-edge technology. As the demand for consistent, perfect, and safe solutions from industrial automation is rising, Industrial automation companies are coming up with innovations and state-of-art products. Here is a list of the top 10 industrial automation companies in 2022.
1. Siemens
Siemens is one of the top engineering companies based in Munich, Germany, with branch offices in over 100 countries. It is a German multinational conglomerate company and the largest industrial manufacturing company in Europe. Siemens’ objective is to create technology that will add real value to customer needs, from resource-efficient factories, resilient supply chains, and smarter buildings and grids to cleaner and more comfortable transportation. The company believes in standing for reliability, engineering quality, and innovation. It is a pioneer in infrastructure, energy solutions, automation, and the software industry. In 1867, Siemens’ founder Werner von Siemens supervised the set up of the first telegraph line between London and Calcutta, which started the partnership of Siemens in India. The company’s primary production is in the industries of infrastructure, energy, and automobile, including turbo compressors, steam turbines, high-voltage switchgear (circuit breakers, disconnectors, and gas-insulated switchgear), switchboards, and remote monitoring systems (RMS), and more. Siemens combines the real and digital worlds to empower their customers in transforming their industries and markets with digitization and IoT energy-efficient production.
2. ABB Ltd
ABB Ltd (ASEA Brown Boveri Limited) is one of the top automation companies in India that mainly focus on robotics, heavy electrical equipment, and automation technologies. The company values a more productive and sustainable future and implements the idea by transforming society and industry. ABB Ltd is a Swiss multinational corporation headquartered in Zürich, Switzerland, which has been in business since 1988. The company was established when Allmänna Svenska Elektriska Aktiebolaget (ASEA) merged with Brown Boveri & Cie. Also, ABB Ltd ranked 341st in the Fortune Global 500 list of 2018 and has been recorded as a global fortune 500 for 24 years. The production of the company is popular among various industries, including aluminum, automotive, buildings, infrastructure, cement, chemical, data centers, energy efficiency, food and beverage, OEM and panel builders, and oil and gas. To date, ABB has established offices in over 100 countries and has 105,000 employees, as reported in 2021.
3. Mitsubishi Electric
Mitsubishi Electric is a Japanese multinational electronics and electrical equipment manufacturing company established in 1920. It is a core company of the Mitsubishi group, a Japanese autonomous multinational group of companies. Japan is always ahead in the technology and development department with numerous innovative ideas, and Mitsubishi Electric reflects the same. The company has proposed and worked on many more innovations than any other top industrial automation company. The innovations of Mitsubishi include micro working robots, Ceiling-mounted horizontal-type robots, compact SCARA robots, and vertical-type and horizontal-type robots. In 2021, the company reported the financial results for fiscal of a net profit of 193.1 billion yen. Mitsubishi Electric provides reliable factory automation solutions along with a consideration of the next generation of manufacturing via its advanced engineering techniques. The company is a supplier of controllers, drive products, visualization, industrial robots, processing machine, and power monitoring products to many industrial automation companies. Additionally, Mitsubishi supplies to other automation companies like T.Vs and fighter jets.
Emerson Electric Co is an American multinational corporation based in Ferguson, Missouri, U.S., and counts in the Fortune 500 companies list. It was established by John Wesley Emerson in 1890, which services focus on electrical equipments and still stands tall among the automation companies in 2022. The company is one of the top automation manufacturers, providing automation services to empower and strengthen industries. Emerson says, “We help customers in the world’s most essential industries solve the biggest challenges of modern life.” It has around 200 production plants worldwide to provide services to industrial, commercial, and consumer markets. The automation solutions Emerson provides measurement instrumentation, solenoids & pneumatics, control & safety systems, asset management, operations & business management, and even more. Then, these automation solutions, in collaboration with automation businesses, develop complete solutions for the customers according to their industry experience. The Emerson company has two core business platforms, automation solutions, and commercial & residential solutions, which help to easily identify and confront challenges in a complex and unpredictable marketplace.
5. Rockwell Automation
Rockwell Automation is an American industrial automation company founded in 1903 and headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S. The company is associated with the brands Allen-Bradley, FactoryTalk software, and LifecycleIQ services and is the biggest organization in the American market. Rockwell focuses on architecture and software segments in the production line and delivers automation solutions to customers across the globe with offices in over 100 countries. It is a fortune 500 company and reported financial results in fiscal 2021 with global sales at $7 billion. The company’s tagline is “Innovation, productivity, and sustainability starts here,” and its most advanced automation technologies provide world-class automation solutions among the top industrial automation companies. Rockwell Automation provides various products, including advanced process control, condition monitoring & I/O, distributed control systems, human-machine interface, industrial sensors, manufacturing execution systems, and more. However, the major production of the company is software segments, automation systems, and construction execution systems.
6. Honeywell Automation India Ltd
Honeywell Automation India Ltd (HAIL) is a leading integrated automation and software solution provider based in Hadapsar, Pune. It was established in 1984 as a joint venture of the Tata Group and Honeywell for manufacturing, design, and engineering facilities. HAIL is one of the leading industrial automation companies in India and is a fortune India 500 company. It has offices across India in 20 locations, including Bengaluru, Chennai, Dehradun, Delhi, Gurugram, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Madurai, Mumbai, Pune, and Vadodara. Honeywell has three state-of-art manufacturing facilities and four global technology development and innovation centers. It is a pioneer company in process automation control in the field of aerospace engineering. Additionally, Honeywell provides process, software, and building solutions with environmental and combustion controls.
7. Schneider Electric
Schneider Electric is a French multinational company that offers both software and hardware focusing on energy management and digital automation systems. It is a fortune global 500 company that was established in 1836 and based in Rueil-Malmaison, France. Along with being a top industrial automation company, it is a research company too, and the parent company of Square D, APC, and others. The company combines energy technologies, real-time automation, software, and services to provide state-of-art products to homes, buildings, data centers, infrastructure, and industries. The various products of Schneider Electric include Tricones – a safety system, DCS – EcoStruxure Foxboro, industrial communication, interface, measurement and control relays, sensor and RFID system, and so on. As the company’s mission is to be the digital partner for sustainability and efficiency, they develop connected technologies and solutions to manage energy and process in safe and reliable ways. Recently, Schneider was highlighted for its innovation with EcoStruxure, which will modernize the monitoring and management of complex and hybrid infrastructure.
Yokogawa Electric Co. is a Japanese multinational electrical engineering and software company which is based in Tokyo, Japan, and founded in 1915. The company operates in information technologies, industrial automation, test, control, and measurement. Yokogawa has some popular and state-of-art products such as production control systems, test and measurements, pressure transmitters, oxygen analyzers, and more. Its Indian partner group, Yokogawa India Limited (YIL), was established in 1987 and stands today as a comprehensive solutions provider of enterprise technology solutions and holds an honorable position among the top industrial automation companies. YIL has built the global engineering center and manufacturing center in Bengaluru, Karnataka, and has a solid marketing and service network over India.
The three smart control systems Yokogawa have are PLC (programmable logic controller), DCS (distributed control system), and SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition), which perform great and ease the automation process. Additionally, Yokogawa has brought some innovations in the field of industrial automation, these are synaptic business automation, OpreX, and CENTUM VP. Synaptic business automation allows enterprises to automate industrial processes and factory management. OpreX enables users to transform and digitalize their businesses. And CENTUM VP is a factory automation security architecture that consists of field control stations, a control network, and human-machine interfaces.
9. Omron Automation
Omron Automation is one of the leading industrial automation companies that creates, sells, and services integrated automation solutions. It is a Japanese electronics company based in Kyoto, Japa, and was established in 1933 by Kazuma Tateishi. Although the primary business of Omron accounts for the manufacturing and sale of automation components, equipment, and systems, Omron is widely popular for its medical devices. These medical devices include digital thermometers, blood pressure monitors, and nebulizers. In 2007, the company had a milestone when it became one of the earliest producers of automated teller machines with magnetic stripe card readers, known as the IEEE Milestone. Omron has a lot to offer with the manufacture and sale of various automated equipment and systems. Some of its products are sensors (E3NC, E32-LT11N, etc.), switches (pushbutton, indicators level switches, etc.), relays (G2RV-SR and G7SA), control components, safety components (OS32C, F3SG-SR/ PG series), and more.
10. Danahar Industrial Ltd
Danahar Industrial Ltd is an American multinational science and technology innovator corporation headquartered in Washington D.C., U.S. The company is a fortune 500 which was established in 1984, constituting an idea of discrete manufacturing businesses. Then, with the adaptation of kaizen, the Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement, Danahar was transformed into the Danahar Business System (DBS). And today, the company is committed to helping clients solve their complex challenges and improving their quality of life. Danahar provides its services and products to transform the fields of life sciences, diagnostics, and environmental and applied solutions. The company designs, manufactures and markets professional, medical, industrial, and commercial products and services innovatively. The innovations include globally helping scientists to understand chronic disease and infection by working at the molecular level and developing new therapies. The company ensures the freshness and safety of food, pharmaceuticals, and consumer goods. And to provide important tools and software for clinicians to improve diagnosis and enhance patient care.
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been the most promising AI algorithms in recent years. These are one of the newest fields in machine learning, reaching new heights for their malleable applications in computer vision, data science, or any domain. There are numerous applications for the large-scale, effective production of GANs images, which are used to solve various image-to-image translations. Now, let’s talk about generative adversarial networks (GANs) and the top GANs images produced in image generation projects.
What is Generative Adversarial Network?
A generative Adversarial Network is a generative modeling approach. GAN takes two neural networks to compete in the form of a zero-sum game to give predictions more accurately. These two neural networks are called the generator and the discriminator, which enables an unsupervised learning module. Unsupervised learning is a learning algorithm that learns patterns from untagged data. Similar to mimicry in evolutionary biology, the neural network is expected to learn and find hidden patterns or data groupings in the data. GAN is a class of machine-learning models introduced by Ian Goodfellow and his colleagues in 2014.
The GANs became popular among researchers quickly because of their property to generate new data with the same statistics as the input training set. It can be applied to images, videos, textual data, and more, proving useful for semi-supervised, fully supervised, and reinforcement learning. The base idea of a GAN is to have an indirect training approach via a generator and discriminator. The generator is a convolutional neural network that works to fool the discriminator by artificially producing outputs. And the discriminator is a deconvolutional neural network responsible for telling how realistic the input seems, which gets updated dynamically.
The research with GAN has been at its peak since it was introduced as the innovations of GAN follow great success in computer vision. The most popular GAN architectures are CycleGAN, StyleGAN, pixelRNN, text-2-image, DiscoGAN, and IsGAN. Various real-world applications of GANs deal with images, audio, videos, and text data, including realistic image generation, improving the quality of photographs, audio synthesis, transfer learning, and many more. In recent times, there has been a tremendous success in the production of GANs images, including Deepfake Apps, and with some more fine-tuning, GANs will give state-of-art results.
Image generation and image synthesis are one of the most important aspects of GANs application which can be applied in many fields. The few projects mentioned below are one of the best GANs images produced in the last few years.
Anime Characters
GANs are changing the way of generating realistic anime characters and bringing out the potential of complex GAN architecture to build entire anime series with the help of AI. In the paper “Towards the Automatic Anime Characters Creation with Generative Adversarial Networks,” Yanghua Jin and his team trained and used GAN to generate the faces of anime characters or Japanese comic book characters in 2017. The outcome of the project was remarkable, which led people to conduct more experiments on the image generation of faces of anime characters and the generation of pokemon characters. Many GAN models are used to generate cartoon characters, such as DCGAN, StyleGAN, and so on.
Fake Human Faces
Facial recognition has many use cases, and the development has been in progress for the last couple of years, where researchers are using different techniques and facial recognition datasets to train models. Researchers need massive datasets of human faces to understand the recognition process, and the generation of fake human faces helps these projects. NVIDIA researchers published a paper, “Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation,” in 2018, where they proposed a new training methodology for GANs operating on the generation of feasible human face photographs. The paper’s outcome is so realistic-looking that it can fool anyone easily. Additionally, the paper presented the generation of objects and scenes as well.
Image Style Transfer
Image style transfer is an interesting technique in computer vision that combines two images. This technique consists of a model taking two images, called content and reference images, and the output is a whole new image containing the object of the content image and the style of the reference image. Here by style, it means brush strokes, colors, and textures of the image. Researchers are still trying to find the best ways and use cases of style transfer. This technique is included in the image-to-image translation and is also known as domain adaptation. There are many research work on image style transfer using GANs, and most have produced good results. A remarkable study is the paper “P²-GAN: EFFICIENT STYLE TRANSFER USING SINGLE STYLE IMAGE.” Zhentan Zheng and Jianyi Liu put forth a novel patch permutation GAN (P²-GAN), which proves efficient in learning stroke styles from paintings or single style images. The paper concludes with an effective and precise P²-GAN network simulating the expected stroke style and avoiding the difficulty of collecting image sets with the same style.
Text-to-Image (text-2-image) Synthesis
Generating realistic images is challenging, but using GANs makes the process a reality rather than theories. Although we got problems with image-to-image generation or translation, the synthesis of text-to-image realistic images using GANs is more complex and difficult. The process of synthesis needs a strong GAN structure along with the base images provided. There are many papers on the task which have computed impressive outcomes. In 2016, Han Zhang and his team from the Chinese University of Hong Kong presented “StackGAN: Text to Photo-realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks,” explaining the use of GANs. Mainly, the StackGAN to generate realistic photographs from textual data of simple objects such as birds and flowers. Also, the paper “Generative Adversarial Text to Image Synthesis” and “TAC-GAN – Text Conditioned Auxiliary Classifier Generative Adversarial Network” present the study of generating realistic images through text-to-image synthesis with the help of GANs.
Image-to-Image Translation
Image-to-image translation includes many tasks, such as the translation of semantic images to photographs, satellite photographs to google maps, black and white photographs to color, and more. Many papers have been published demonstrating the use of GANs for image-to-image translation, and one of the popular papers is “Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks” by Berkeley AI Research group in 2016. This paper has an investigational approach toward conditional adversarial networks if they serve as a general-purpose solution to image-to-image translation problems. They use a unique pix2pix approach for various image-to-image translation tasks. Additionally, the paper titled “Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks” presents the famous CycleGAN and a set of impressive image-to-image translation cases like translation from photograph to artistic painting style, photographs from summer to winter, and translation of horse to zebra.
List of top Generative Adversarial Networks Images
These are the top images made by GANs from research papers for image generation using GANs. The list consists of GANs images produced in the papers mentioned earlier and a few other interesting papers with significant outputs.
1. Cartoon Face Images
Credit: Towards the Automatic Anime Characters Creation with Generative Adversarial Networks
The image shown is from the anime character faces generation project in the paper “Towards the Automatic Anime Characters Creation with Generative Adversarial Networks.” The image is generated with the fixed noise part and random attributes. For more information, check out the paper.
2. Forged Face Images
Credit: Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation
The image shown is made by GAN from the paper “Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation.” The GANs image shown is the images generated using the CelebA dataset with high resolution.
The image shown is made by GAN from the paper “Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation.” The GANs image shown is the images generated using the CelebA dataset with high resolution.
Credit: A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks
This GANs image is from a famous paper, “A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks,” which is associated with the generation of the Flicker Faces HQ dataset. The paper studies an alternative generator architecture for GAN with some style transfer literature. The image presented here includes the images synthesized by mixing two latent codes at various scales. And each subset of styles controls meaningful high-level attributes of the image.
This GANs image is from a famous paper, “A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks,” which is associated with the generation of the Flicker Faces HQ dataset. The paper studies an alternative generator architecture for GAN with some style transfer literature. The image presented here includes the images synthesized by mixing two latent codes at various scales. And each subset of styles controls meaningful high-level attributes of the image.
3. Artificial Flower Images
Credit: Text-to-Image-to-Text Translation using Cycle Consistent Adversarial Networks
The text-2-image synthesis is a topic of interest for many researchers. Here the image shown is the GANs image from the paper “Text-to-Image-to-Text Translation using Cycle Consistent Adversarial Networks,” which is a result of GAN trained with cycle loss and frozen weight of image captioning network. Check out the paper for a better understanding.
The text-2-image synthesis is a topic of interest for many researchers. Here the image shown is the GANs image from the paper “Text-to-Image-to-Text Translation using Cycle Consistent Adversarial Networks,” which is a result of GAN trained with cycle loss and frozen weight of image captioning network. Check out the paper for a better understanding.
4. Artificial Bird Images
Credit: StackGAN: Text to Photo-realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks
As mentioned above, the paper “StackGAN: Text to Photo-realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks” provides a significant output in text-2-image synthesis. The GANs image here is the image generated by StackGAN, which is very photo-realistic.
5. Drawing Real Objects and Vice-versa
Credit: Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks
As mentioned in the image-to-image translation, the paper “Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks” has one of the best GANs images generated to date. Here, the above image is the result of CycleGAN on paired datasets used in pix2pix.
As mentioned in the image-to-image translation, the paper “Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks” has one of the best GANs images generated to date. Here, the above image is the result of CycleGAN on paired datasets used in pix2pix.
6. Fake Paintings
Credit: Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks
The image shown is from the paper “Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks” and is the collection style transfer II, showcasing the successful style transfer into the artistic styles of Monet, Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Ukiyo-e. The paper has also applied methods to solve image-to-image translation problems and can be improved in the future.
The image shown is from the paper “Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks” and is the collection style transfer II, showcasing the successful style transfer into the artistic styles of Monet, Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Ukiyo-e. The paper has also applied methods to solve image-to-image translation problems and can be improved in the future.
7. Altering Photographs
Credit: P²-GAN: EFFICIENT STYLE TRANSFER USING SINGLE STYLE IMAGE
This is a GANs image from the paper “P²-GAN: EFFICIENT STYLE TRANSFER USING SINGLE STYLE IMAGE.” It shows a comparative image of the style transfer from a single style image using various methods, including JohnsonNet, TextureNetIN, MGAN, and P²-GAN.
This is a GANs image from the paper “P²-GAN: EFFICIENT STYLE TRANSFER USING SINGLE STYLE IMAGE.” It shows a comparative image of the style transfer from a single style image using various methods, including JohnsonNet, TextureNetIN, MGAN, and P²-GAN.
The new era of connectivity has resulted in producing massive amounts of data globally, and we need data centers to handle it. Data centers centralize IT operations and hardware for data distribution, processing, storage, and more. According to the United States International Trade Commission, a report in 2021 revealed that there are over 8,000 data centers around the world. And the majority of data centers are located in six countries, including the US, the UK, Germany, China, Canada, and the Netherlands. For a decade, Government and corporate organizations have been spending hundreds to billions on the construction of data centers in light of the data industry’s rapid expansion. Some data center operators believe that the bigger is better. Here is a list of the largest data centers in the world that will help us determine how much of this is accurate. The list includes the world’s biggest data centers that have been established and are currently operational.
1. China Telecom – Inner Mongolia Information Park
The Inner Mongolia Information Park is the world’s largest data center, with 10,763,910 (10.7 million) square feet, and sits on the Beijin-Tianjin economic circle radiation belt. The data center is owned by China Telecom Corporation Limited, which contains a cloud computing data center, call centers, a data warehouse, offices, and living quarters. Additionally, the data center secures over 50% market share in the Chinese data center market. China Telecom is one of the largest providers of integrated telecommunication services around the world. The company was established in 2012, headquartered in Hong Kong, China, and now has a presence in 41 countries and regions. It offers a high-performing global network for international carriers, overseas customers, and multinational enterprises with the vast resource of 47 submarine cables, 95T in intercontinental capacity, and 230 points-of-presence (PoPs) spread worldwide. China Telecom provides a wide range of services, including a portfolio of high-quality, integrated communications solutions, broadband, internet data centers, multi-domestic MVNO (mobile virtual network operator), ICT services, global IoT connectivity service, and more.
2. China Mobile – Hohhot Data Center
The Hohhot Data Center is part of the Inner Mongolia Information Park, contributed by China Mobile International Limited (CMI). CMI is a subsidiary of China Mobile, a Chinese state-owned mobile telecommunications company. The CMI company was established in 2010 to provide better services in the demanding international telecommunications market. Along with the support of China Mobile, CMI has turned to a trusted partner delivering comprehensive international telecom services and solutions. As the telecom needs to transfer and process massive data, the company invested in the Hohhot Data center, one of the world’s largest data centers. The data center is spread over 7,750,015 (7.5 million) square feet that consist of numerous modules which expand the already giant facility and provides concentrated network management, enterprise services, and research and development innovations, including TD-LTE 4G networking and cloud computing.
3. Switch – The Citadel Campus
The Citadel Campus Data Center is one of the prime data centers owned by Switch, located in Tahoe Reno, Nevada. The data center acquires 7.2 million square feet and has up to 650 MW of power using only renewable energy. With its innovative design, development, and mission-critical operations, Switch has one of the world’s largest data centers, the Citadel Campus data center. The data center has its fiber network, a proprietary tri-redundant UPS power system, and a 24×7 DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack mitigation platform. Switch is a global technology and data center service provider founded in 2000 by Rob Roy that develops and operates SUPERNAP data center facilities. Also, the company provides co-location, telecommunications, cloud services, and content ecosystems. Switch empowers the ideas of intelligence and sustainable growth of the Internet and has raised industry standards for data center design, construction and operation to a level of Tier 5 Platinum or Tier Elite.
Utah Data Center (aka Bumblehive) is the first intelligence community comprehensive national cyber security initiative (IC CNCI) data center built under the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States Intelligence Community. It was built to support the intelligence community’s efforts to monitor, strengthen, and protect the nation. The data center scales around 1.1 million square feet in Utah, the United States and serves as the massive data repository for the NSA. Although the data capacity size of the Utah data center is classified, it will expand in the future and claims to have an ultimate capacity of alottabytes. Additionally, the data center is powered by massively code-breaking supercomputers and uses NSA’s PRISM data, which makes it the most powerful data center in the world.
5. Digital Realty – Lakeside Technology Center
Digital Realty’s Lakeside Technology Center is a data center located in Chicago, Illinois, which is one of the largest data centers in the world. The data center was built in 1917, covering an area of 1.1 million square feet, and it uses 53 generators and 8.5 million gallons of coolant annually, a unique cooling for buildings. The industrial strength of the data center is 100MW, provided by four fiber vaults and three electric power feeds. Digital Realty Trust, Inc, a real estate investment trust, owns the data center and serves tech giants like IBM and Facebook. The trust operates in over 225 data center sites worldwide, including Asia, the United States, Europe, Canada, and Australia. Digital Realty is riding the waves of digital transformation by innovating ideas around data and introducing a PlatformDIGITAL, where companies and data come together despite any size. The platform has embarked on a new initiative around data where businesses, partners, and creators can go faster, invent, and expand globally.
6. Tulip Data Center
Tulip Data Center, or Tulip Data City, is one of the largest data centers in the world, located in Bangalore, India. The data center was built in 2012 and was over 1 million square feet owned by Tulip Telecom Ltd, an Indian telecommunications service provider. It was set up in collaboration with IBM to support the connection for the 2,000 locations Tulip has reached within India. The data center has four towers, each tower consists of seven floors, of which five are assigned as data center space, and the rest are housing facilities. In total, the four towers houses 20 enterprise modular data centers and, at full capacity can have the industrial strength of 100MW power. The design of the data center is aimed at getting Seismic Zone 4 specifications and the widest range of physical security features, video camera surveillance, and security breach alarms. Over the past decade, some of the top data centers in India have been built, and more hyper-scale data centers are planned by tech giants like Microsoft and AWS.
Metro Data Center is a mega data center campus owned by Quality Technology Services (QTS), a leading provider of data center solutions, and is located in Atlanta, Georgia. The facility is spread over 990,000 (0.99 million) square feet consisting of buildings with the support of 46 generators and 24 independent UPS systems. Two discrete substations in the data center help achieve electrical redundancy and power three on-site 40MVA (megavolt ampere) transformers. The data center has an automated management system controlling the critical power system and an automated control system operating air temperature, humidity, and water pressure. Metro Data Center is the biggest data center among the 25 data centers under QTS company. QTS is a real state investment trust company that has a diverse footprint spamming more than 7 million square feet of QTS Mega Data Centers. The company dedicates to providing hardened, redundant, flexible, and scalable hybrid colocation and hyper-scale data center solutions along with innovative software-driven data centers and network services.
8. SDC – Integrate Seattle
Integrate Seattle is a flagship data center of Sabey Data Centers (SDC) located in Seattle, Washington State. The data center has a high-performance design and is built upon the foundations of sustainability, security, and durability. It has a Tier III standard with hydroelectric power and reliable features, including up to 1500kW of critical power per suite, electrical backup systems, 2.5MW capacity generators, and aggregate power of over 90MVA through redundant feeds. Overall, Integrate Seattle has every deployment need, such as low-cost renewable power, efficient cooling, robust connectivity, operational excellence, convenient location, and room to grow. The data center is one of the biggest data centers in the world under SDC. SDC company is the longest-lived multi-tenant and a leading provider of data centers around the world. The company owns, develops, and operates all of its data centers with its large financial partners. SDC is known for its commitment to client satisfaction, for which they provide every service, including design, construction, commission, operation, and support.
Waymo, a company that develops autonomous vehicles, has been testing its vehicles in Phoenix and San Francisco for some time now, as well as offering customers in the Phoenix area free rides. In the upcoming months, the company plans to introduce self-driving robotaxi service in major districts of Los Angeles. The self-driving technology division of Alphabet Inc. is now focused on three markets.
Since 2019, Waymo has occasionally visited Los Angeles to map neighborhoods, including downtown, Miracle Mile, Koreatown, Santa Monica, Westwood, and West Hollywood. According to the new suggested plans, more than a dozen Waymo autonomous cars would initially be in Los Angeles before expanding from there. This week, Waymo will begin rolling out a fleet of electric Jaguar I-Pace SUVs with laser lidar units, cameras, radar, and other sensors that will initially exclusively carry Waymo staff.
Saswat Panigrahi, the chief product officer at Waymo, stated that the company would start public testing after it has gathered the necessary approvals and feedback. He opted not to disclose the number of vehicles involved in the new initiative or the launch date for a paid transportation service for the general public.
The Los Angeles metro area, which has a population of over 13 million people, presents a lucrative business opportunity since it is the third-largest ride-hailing market in the United States and could be worth US$2 billion in 2022. Waymo is teaming with regional organizations Mothers Against Drunk Driving’s California chapter and Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition in the lead-up to its eventual launch.
Waymo opens the driverless ride service to the general public in the US city of Los Angeles
The expansion into a third city happens as predictions for the widespread use of self-driving cars become less optimistic, including critics questioning the future of the Alphabet company. According to Waymo, Los Angeles is still far bigger and more complicated than the places where it has previously worked.
In terms of geography, San Francisco is much more congested, which is one of the reasons robotaxi firms have been testing there, although Phoenix is typically regarded as having superior planning and road signs.
On the other hand, Los Angeles has a more intricate network of municipal streets and highways; not all are in good condition or have obvious markers. Additionally, it is thought that the traffic situation is far worse than in San Francisco. Waymo still has to win approval from two regulatory organizations, the California Public Utilities Commission and the California Department of Motor Vehicles, which govern autonomous car testing and deployment.
Testing of autonomous vehicles—both with and without safety operators—is governed by the California Department of Motor Vehicles. Companies wishing to test AVs without a human driver at the wheel must get a driverless testing permit. A deployment permit is the final step with the Department of Motor Vehicles.
The California Public Utilities Commission has “drivered” and “driverless” permits that allow businesses to provide rides in their self-driving cars. Waymo needs a license from the California Public Utilities Commission in order to charge for rides.
Waymo has joined its rival Motional, an autonomous vehicle initiative developed jointly by Aptiv and Hyundai, in operating in Los Angeles County. Motional teamed up with Uber Eats to start performing limited driverless food deliveries in Santa Monica in May of this year.
