Microsoft Japan Noticed 40% Boost in Productivity on a 4-Day Workweek Employees at Microsoft’s Japan division enjoyed a four-day workweek throughout August and by the end of the month, the tech giant noticed a40% rise in productivitywhen compared to the same month last year. This experiment was part of Microsoft’s “Work-Life Choice Challenge Summer 2019”. Employees got five consecutive Fridays off with pay. Also, the meetings were capped to a maximum time limit of 30 minutes....

Microsoft Stores Warner Bros. ‘Superman’ Movie on a Glass Microsoft recently collaborated with Warner Bros. to store the 1978 iconic “Superman” movie on a piece of glass made of quartz as part ofProject Silica, Microsoft’s research project. The glass measures 7.5 cm x 7.5 cm with 2-millimeter thickness and stores 75.6 GB of data along with error redundancy codes. Laser is used to encode data in the glass by creating “3D nanoscale grating layersand deformations at various depths and angles”....

NVIDIA’s AI Can Make a Video of You Dancing with One Photo Researchers at NVIDIA have developed a new AI capable of imitating the moves of a subject from a video to another person with a single input image. This technique is calledvideo-to-video synthesis. As the researchers say, Video-to-video synthesis converts an input semantic video like human poses or segmentation masks to an output photorealistic video. They have mentioned two major limitations in previous efforts for achieving this – data availability and limited generalization capability....

Tech Giants Are Making People Vulnerable to Surveillance, Says Edward Snowden In a remote speech at the annual Web Summit technology conference held in Portugal, popular NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden shared his thoughts regarding the current privacy concerns caused by major tech companies. Snowden told that major tech companies including Google, Facebook, and Amazon are making millions of people vulnerableby collecting datathat are accessible by governments. “These people are engaged in abuse, particularly when you look at Google and Amazon, Facebook and their business model....

This AI Tool Lets You Separate Vocals from Songs With Ease Have you ever found yourself surfing across the internet for finding the karaoke for a song you would love to perform and wondered if there were any easier ways to do this on your own? Well, your wishes have come true, thanks to Deezer’s new audio separation library Spleeter. With Spleeter, you can seamlesslyseparate vocals and instrumentalsfor any song you feed into it without having any in-depth knowledge of sound mixing....

This App Helps You Easily Find Your Bluetooth Earphones If you are someone like me, you probably find it difficult to locate your Bluetooth earphones at times, be it at home or work. The situation gets even worse when they’re truly wireless earphones that easily sneak behind your pillow or bedsheet. To get around this situation, there exists an app named Wunderfind that makes it easy to pinpoint your Bluetooth devices....

This iOS App Helps You Discover Songs Never Played from Your Library Choosing a song to play if you don’t have a curated playlist can often turn to be a tiresome task. If you’re one of those people who take a blind shot by pressing the Shuffle button and end up skipping a lot of tracks to find one song that suits your mood, Next is an app you should not miss out on....