Dublin To Be Facebook HQ

By Digital Trends Staff Updated October 25, 2009

Ireland has been developing a reputation as a tech center for several years, and that received a big boost yesterday with the news that social networking site Facebook has selected the nation’s capital, Dublin, as the site for its new international headquarters. And no, it’s nothing to do with the Guinness.

According to the company, the new HQ will be home to both sales and technical operations covering Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

COO Sharyl Sandberg said:

"The talent pool in Dublin is world-class and recruiting local talent will help us better understand the needs of local users and the regional dynamics that, in turn, can give us better insight into what features matter most."

Earlier this year IBM announced that Dublin would be the home for a major new cloud computing center.

Digital Trends Staff

Digital Trends has a simple mission: to help readers easily understand how tech affects the way they live. We are your…

Web

Facebook’s new privacy tool convinced me to delete my account

facebook hacked

For years, my Facebook account has practically sat dormant. It's a nostalgic relic of the past that lets me occasionally walk down the memory lane of my life’s first two decades. But it's also a weak link in my digital privacy. I've known for years that Facebook is constantly watching, studying me as I wander through the web. Still, I never gathered up the courage to delete my account and burn it to the ground once and for all. Until last week, that is.
The final nail in the Facebook coffin
A few days ago, I found myself staring wide-eyed at the rundown of all the nearly 1,400 websites and apps that have gathered data on me and shared it with Facebook. I was looking at the Off-Facebook Activity tool, one of the recent additions to Facebook’s suite of security options for users that I had fortuitously stumbled upon. Moments later, my cursor was hovering over the Delete Account button.

Facebook knows a lot about you. After the countless controversies and privacy “bugs,” you probably already knew that. What most people are not familiar with, however, is the vast network of third parties that has enabled Facebook to invade nearly every app you use, and become the data superpower it is today.

Web

Facebook’s new A.I. takes image recognition to a whole new level

facebook ai image recognition new takes to a whole level

“Hit me,” says Morpheus. “If you can.” Neo adopts a martial arts fighting pose, then launches a furious flurry at his mentor, flailing at him with high-speed strikes. Morpheus blocks every attempted attack effortlessly. The scene is, of course, the training sequence from 1999’s The Matrix, a movie that blew minds at the time with its combination of artificial intelligence-focused storyline and cutting-edge computer graphics.

More than 20 years later, the scene is being used as part of a Facebook demo to show me some of the company’s groundbreaking A.I. image recognition technology. On the screen, the scene plays out as normal. Almost. While Morpheus and the background are exactly the same, the 2D footage of Keanu Reeves has been transformed into a 3D model. Although this particular “pose estimation” demo is pre-rendered, Andrea Vedaldi, one of Facebook’s A.I. experts when it comes to computer vision and machine learning, said that such transformations can be rendered in real time.

Web

Black workers at NASA reflect on Mary Jackson’s legacy — and what must come next

Mary Jackson at NASA Langley

NASA recently announced that it would be renaming its headquarters in Washington, D.C. after Mary W. Jackson, the trailblazing first Black female engineer at the space agency made famous by the film Hidden Figures.

Current NASA staff say that she remains an inspiration in both the day-to-day operations and the broader overarching goals of the agency. Digital Trends spoke to three senior figures at NASA about Jackson's legacy and how her influence is shaping the agency into something better for all humanity.
A pathfinder in engineering
Jackson, who died in 2005, was an influential figure at NASA, working on some of the agency's biggest challenges, including the Apollo moon landing. Along with other towering figures such as Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughan, both of whom also worked at NASA Langley in Virginia, she was one of many Black women working at NASA in the 1950s who formed an integral part of the agency's work.