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Flowers are erupting in the California desert, covering dry, hard soil with a profusion of poppies, brittlebrush, dune evening primrose, and desert sunflowers. It’s a gorgeous sight to see, and hundreds of people are flocking to witness nature’s glory for themselves.
But if you’re a bloom-seeker, choose your destination carefully. While many of southern California’s deserts are awash in color after this winter’s intense rainfall, not all deserts are going through the same vibrant transformation.
Death Valley, for example, isn’t looking particularly lively this year. But tourists are still flocking there with floral fantasies.
“If you’re coming to Death Valley looking for flowers you’re going to be disappointed,” says Linda Slater, Chief of Interpretation at Death Valley National Park. “There are almost no flowers in Death Valley this year.”
That’s a stark contrast from last year, when desert gold flowers blanketed the park for 30 miles, creating a glorious display that garnered national attention and actually inspired the first use of the term ‘super bloom’.
This year, Slater has had to disappoint many people who—inspired by news reports of gorgeous blooms in other desert areas—have made the long trek out to Death Valley only to find that there are no flowers easily accessible or nearby.
“Death valley is still a beautiful place to come in the spring, even if the flowers aren’t spectacular this year. The weather is wonderful. But if you’re looking for flowers, please go somewhere else.” Slater says.
But all hope is not lost. The disappointed tourists should try heading further south on their next trek. Flowers are blooming in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, and so many people are stopping to take pictures of the orange blanket of poppies near Lake Elsinore that it’s causing traffic jams.
Precipitation patterns are to blame for the decorative discrepancy between the dry areas. While California was pummeled with storms this winter, the rainfall was not distributed evenly. Parts of southern California got soaked, but Death Valley remained characteristically bone dry.
The remarkable desert flowers that people admire are typically annuals, meaning they only live for a single season. And they want to make their short lifespans count. Seeds lie in wait in the desert soil for years—even decades—waiting for the right conditions before they start to germinate.
Super bloom coming 2 CA after drenching rains. Best place to see it #anzaborrego Desert State Park – seeds dormant for 30 yrs coming 2 life chúng tôi Belinda Waymouth (@BelindaWaymouth) March 10, 2023
In order to bloom, Slater says, flower seeds need to get regular waterings by winter storms over the course of a season. That helps the seeds sprout and grow. This doesn’t have to be much. In an area that only gets about 2 inches of rainfall a year, even a quarter inch of rain or less every month is enough to keep the cycle going once a good soaking (half an inch) has gotten the process started. While Death Valley did get some rain later in the season, it didn’t get enough early on to entice the seeds to throw off their protective shields and start growing.
If the rains are properly distributed and the temperatures are just right—warm, but not hot enough to bake all that moisture right back into the air—the tiny seedlings can reach their full potential.
So how super is a super bloom? Usually, everything falls into place about once a decade. Before the 2023 bloom that took social media by storm, Death Valley had dressed up like a garden only a few times in the past few decades—once in 2005 and once in 1998—so it was really right on schedule.
But there are no hard and fast rules on timing. Depending on location and rainfall patterns, the United States could see multiple ‘super blooms’ over the course of a few years—if different deserts happen to hit the jackpot at different times, like Death Valley last year, and Anza-Borrego Desert State Park this year. Or we could have a dry spell and go through a wildflower drought for years as well.
Either way, these flowers won’t last long. If you’re interested in checking out the blooms for yourself, be prepared, and maybe call the place you’re interested in visiting before you hit the road. There’s even a wildflower hotline set up in California to help you out.
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Deep Learning For Image Super
This article was published as a part of the Data Science Blogathon
Introduction(SR) is the process of recovering high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) images. It is an important class of image processing techniques in computer vision and image processing and enjoys a wide range of real-world applications, such as medical imaging, satellite imaging, surveillance and security, astronomical imaging, amongst others.
ProblemImage sup -resolution (SR) problem, particularly single image super-resolution (SISR), has gained a lot of attention in the research community. SISR aims to reconstruct a high-resolution image ISR from a single low-resolution image ILR. Generally, the relationship between ILR and the original high-resolution image IHR can vary depending on the situation. Many studies assume that ILR is a bicubic downsampled version of IHR, but other degrading factors such as blur, decimation, or noise can also be considered for practical applications.
In this article, we would be focusing on supervised learning methods for super-resolution tasks. By using HR images as target and LR images as input, we can treat this problem as a supervised learning problem.
Exhaustive table of topics in Supervised Image Super-Resolution
Upsampling MethodsBefore understanding the rest of the theory behind the super-resolution, we need to understand upsampling (Increasing the spatial resolution of images or simply increasing the number of pixel rows/columns or both in the image) and its various methods.
1. Interpolation-based methods – Image interpolation (image scaling), refers to resizing digital images and is widely used by image-related applications. The traditional methods include nearest-neighbor interpolation, linear, bilinear, bicubic interpolation, etc.
Nearest-neighbor interpolation with the scale of 2
Nearest-neighbor Interpolation – The nearest-neighbor interpolation is a simple and intuitive algorithm. It selects the value of the nearest pixel for each position to be interpolated regardless of any other pixels.
Bilinear Interpolation – The bilinear interpolation (BLI) first performs linear interpolation on one axis of the image and then performs on the other axis. Since it results in a quadratic interpolation with a receptive field-sized 2 × 2, it shows much better performance than nearest-neighbor interpolation while keeping a relatively fast speed.
Bicubic Interpolation – Similarly, the bicubic interpolation (BCI) performs cubic interpolation on each of the two axes Compared to BLI, the BCI takes 4 × 4 pixels into account, and results in smoother results with fewer artifacts but much lower speed. Refer to this for a detailed discussion.
Shortcomings – Interpolation-based methods often introduce some side effects such as computational complexity, noise amplification, blurring results, etc.
2. Learning-based upsampling – To overcome the shortcomings of interpolation-based methods and learn upsampling in an end-to-end manner, transposed convolution layer and sub-pixel layer are introduced into the SR field.
and the green boxes indicate the kernel and the convolution output.
Transposed convolution: layer, a.k.a. deconvolution layer, tries to perform transformation opposite a normal convolution, i.e., predicting the possible input based on feature maps sized like convolution output. Specifically, it increases the image resolution by expanding the image by inserting zeros and performing convolution.
Sub-pixel layer – The blue boxes denote the input and the boxes with other colors indicate different convolution operations and different output feature maps.
s2 times channels, where s is the scaling factor. Assuming the input size is h × w × c, the output size will be h×w×s2c. After that, the reshaping operation is performed to produce outputs with size sh × sw × c
Super-resolution FrameworksSince image super-resolution is an ill-posed problem, how to perform upsampling (i.e., generating HR output from LR input) is the key problem. There are mainly four model frameworks based on the employed upsampling operations and their locations in the model (refer to the table above).
1. Pre-upsampling Super-resolution –
We don’t do a direct mapping of LR images to HR images since it is considered to be a difficult task. We utilize traditional upsampling algorithms to obtain higher resolution images and then refining them using deep neural networks is a straightforward solution. For example – LR images are upsampled to coarse HR images with the desired size using bicubic interpolation. Then deep CNNs are applied to these images for reconstructing high-quality images.
2. Post-upsampling Super-resolution –
To improve the computational efficiency and make full use of deep learning technology to increase resolution automatically, researchers propose to perform most computation in low-dimensional space by replacing the predefined upsampling with end-to-end learnable layers integrated at the end of the models. In the pioneer works of this framework, namely post-upsampling SR, the LR input images are fed into deep CNNs without increasing resolution, and end-to-end learnable upsampling layers are applied at the end of the network.
Learning Strategieserror and producing more realistic and higher-quality results.
Pixelwise L1 loss – Absolute difference between pixels of ground truth HR image and the generated one.
Pixelwise L2 loss – Mean squared difference between pixels of ground truth HR image and the generated one.
Content loss – the content loss is indicated as the Euclidean distance between high-level representations of the output image and the target image. High-level features are obtained by passing through pre-trained CNNs like VGG and ResNet.
Adversarial loss – Based on GAN where we treat the SR model as a generator, and define an extra discriminator to judge whether the input image is generated or not.
PSNR – Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) is a commonly used objective metric to measure the reconstruction quality of a lossy transformation. PSNR is inversely proportional to the logarithm of the Mean Squared Error (MSE) between the ground truth image and the generated image.
In MSE, I is a noise-free m×n monochrome image (ground truth) and K is the generated image (noisy approximation). In PSNR, MAXI represents the maximum possible pixel value of the image.
Network DesignVarious network designs in super-resolution architecture
Enough of the basics! Let’s discuss some of the state-of-art super-resolution methods –
Super-Resolution methodsSuper-Resolution Generative Adversarial Network (SRGAN) – Uses the idea of GAN for super-resolution task i.e. generator will try to produce an image from noise which will be judged by the discriminator. Both will keep training so that generator can generate images that can match the true training data.
Architecture of Generative Adversarial Network
There are various ways for super-resolution but there is a problem – how can we recover finer texture details from a low-resolution image so that the image is not distorted?
The results have high PSNR means have high-quality results but they are often lacking high-frequency details.
Check the original papers for detailed information.
Steps –
1. We process the HR (high-resolution images) to get downsampled LR images. Now we have HR and LR images for the training dataset.
2. We pass LR images through a generator that upsamples and gives SR images.
3. We use the discriminator to distinguish HR image and backpropagate GAN loss to train discriminator and generator.
Network architecture of SRGAN
Key features of the method –
Post upsampling type of framework
Subpixel layer for upsampling
Contains residual blocks
Uses Perceptual loss
Original code of SRGAN
conventional residual networks.
Check the original papers for detailed information.
Some of the key features of the methods –
Residual blocks – SRGAN successfully applied the ResNet architecture to the super-resolution problem with SRResNet, they further improved the performance by employing a better ResNet structure. In the proposed architecture –
Comparison of the residual blocks
They removed the batch normalization layers from the network as in SRResNets. Since batch normalization layers normalize the features, they get rid of range flexibility from networks by normalizing the features, it is better to remove them.
The architecture of EDSR, MDSR
In MDSR, they proposed a multiscale architecture that shares most of the parameters on different scales. The proposed multiscale model uses significantly fewer parameters than multiple single-scale models but shows comparable performance.
Original code of the methods
So now we have come to the end of the blog! To learn about super-resolution, refer to these survey papers.
The media shown in this article are not owned by Analytics Vidhya and is used at the Author’s discretion.
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Don’t Do This On Facebook: A Guide For Marketers
Are you planning to market your brand on Facebook? You better follow the rules, or you’ll be out, and you’ll be out fast.
A robust social platform for business marketing, Facebook is one of the monsters of the social media realm.
With a considerable amount of users of all ages, all of whom have varied interests, it’s easy to find your niche target audience. But you better not mess up.
Facebook is proud of their community standards and the action they are willing to take.
For instance, the platform has a strong stance against hate speech – throughout Q3 of 2023, they took action on 22.1M pieces of hate speech content.
Yes, you want to stay on their good side. You also want to ensure your Facebook marketing works to drive sales.
However, there’s no need to worry. As long as you follow my guide with a few simple rules for marketing on Facebook, you’ll be good to go.
Facebook Is Vital For MarketersYou want to stay on Facebook – marketing on the social media platform is crucial.
Why? Because Facebook is, without a doubt, a ringleader when it comes to social media.
Based on statistics from 2023, Facebook reaches 59% of social media users. That’s over half of the population on social media.
You Need A Guide To Facebook These DaysAlthough Facebook can help you see great success if you approach it correctly, not doing so could result in quick failure.
In this article, I’ve compiled a list of unacceptable errors you could run into on Facebook and what to do instead.
The 5 Worst Things You Can Do On FacebookIt’s simple to slip up, especially if you’re new to Facebook.
Are you worried about messing up? I’m here to help put your mind at ease – here’s what not to do on Facebook.
Avoid these missteps, and you’ll be well on your way to a prosperous Facebook marketing campaign.
1. Overpost Or OvershareFirst of all, overposting or sharing content is going to be annoying to your audience. While you want to post on a regular schedule, you can’t make it seem like spam. Facebook also hates spam.
Generally, post to Facebook no more than one to two times per day, maybe a few more depending on your business. Anything excessive could be seen as spam, however, which could get your account disabled.
Be especially careful of bulk posts that contain promotional messaging – Facebook automatically considers this spam.
2. Try To Promote Your Business Without PayingFacebook has also banned any promotional cover art. A.k.a., cover art that features a sales flyer or CTA (Call to Action) within the picture.
A CTA could include a request for users to go to the company’s website, make a purchase, or download the company’s app. Facebook gives you CTA buttons within your page now anyway, so there’s no point in adding one to your cover art as well.
Here’s a look at the CTA buttons:
3. Have Too Broad An AudienceHere, we’ve come to what some endearingly call “lazy targeting.” Although you may not get in trouble with Facebook over it, lazy targeting can be an effortless way to tank your marketing strategy goals.
What I’m talking about is not putting enough effort into determining your ideal target audience. Facebook gives you some fantastic tools to narrow down to the specific audience you’re trying to reach — you’re shooting yourself in the foot if you don’t use them.
Whether you realize it or not yet, your company has a niche: your marketing strategy should focus on it.
Not doing so will result in many views from bored users who have little to no interest in your brand simply because they’re nowhere near to being your target audience.
Spend time researching your target audience: what they like, what they do, and how they act.
Honing in on specific economic factors, interests, and activities of your audience will help you reach only the people who are likely to interact with you, like Intrepid Travel does.
4. Post Bad Images Or ContentWhen I say don’t post bad images or content, I mean two things:
Don’t Post Low-quality Photos
This is a great way to make your company look unprofessional. If you post grainy, unclear photos, it will lower your page’s image.
Facebook pages that either post low-quality visuals or use them in their profile are likely to be disregarded.
Make Sure Your Content Is Appropriate
Facebook has taken a tough stance on the content it considers appropriate – it is vital to ensure you’re following their community standards. Not only will you ensure your page doesn’t stay up if you violate them, but it will also paint your business in a bad light.
Facebook won’t tolerate content that contains:
Hate speech.
Violent or graphic content.
Child nudity or sexual exploitation.
Bullying or harassment.
It’s pretty straightforward: just don’t break the laid-out rules and post pretty content.
Intrepid Travel does an excellent job at increasing engagement by posting captivating images from around the world – it’s no surprise they have over half of a million followers.
5. Incorrectly Used CTAThe most important thing to note here is to make your CTA crystal clear.
It must always, plainly and clearly, state where it will lead and the actions the user will be expected to take. If you don’t follow that rule, Facebook will take action against your account.
Don’t overuse your CTA, either. A tip to help keep your audience from getting overwhelmed: it’s key not to try and do too many things simultaneously.
While Facebook gives you up to seven CTA buttons on your Facebook page, that doesn’t mean you should use every single one.
Finally, make sure you do use a CTA or two. It’s essential to do it correctly but failing to use any type of CTA at all is worse than a bad one. It means potential consumers have nowhere to go once they’ve found you.
What To Do InsteadI’ve talked a lot about what not to do on Facebook. But what should you do instead? The answers make sense when you think about it.
If you’re looking to completely revamp and need even more tips on creating the best Facebook page for your business, we’ve written about it before.
Maintain A Regular ScheduleInstead of posting sporadically, or on the other hand, posting so much it looks like spam, follow a maintained schedule.
Posting at least once a day is ideal. However, if that isn’t feasible, try to post a few times a week.
If you’re too busy to post every day, try using plugins or software like Semrush, which posts to Facebook automatically for you – it will make your life much easier.
Pay For Ads Define Your Target AudienceCrucial to the heart of all marketing strategies, not just those on Facebook, defining your target audience allows you to decide who you want to interact with.
Narrow down exactly who you want to market to using Facebook’s tools, such as their Audience Insights, and you can find people who have aligned interests.
Use Beautiful ImagesPeople love pretty things, especially beautiful images. Gorgeous content will encourage your audience to engage with your posts.
Nearly everyone these days has a phone (or some other device) with a camera that has the capability of capturing gorgeous visuals. There’s no excuse – make sure the pictures you post are well-designed, on-brand, and give a viewer pleasing aesthetics.
Use CTAs To Your AdvantageUsing a compelling CTA or two is vital to driving not just page views but sales.
A CTA tells your audience where to go next and is what will ultimately drive engagement in the end. After all, you’re trying to turn your audience into consumers.
On the SEJ Facebook page, the CTA is a “Sign Up” button – the link takes you to sign up for the newsletter.
Figure out what the primary goal for your Facebook page is before trying to decide on a CTA. Knowing what you really need will help laser your focus on the right one.
Marketers, Don’t Mess Up On FacebookMarketing on Facebook can be nerve-wracking, and maybe it should be, just a little bit. If Facebook decides to kick you from the platform, you’re out for good.
Also, if you don’t know some basic marketing skills, you’ll be doomed to stale strategies.
Luckily, it’s not too hard to avoid getting on Facebook’s wrong side if you can follow a few straightforward rules. Knowing what to avoid is the first step – you’ve got that covered.
Now use your knowledge of what to do instead, and don’t just keep yourself from falling. Fly instead!
More Resources:
Featured image: Irina Strelnikova/Shutterstock
Overwatch’S Super Bans Are Great News For (Non
Overwatch’s Super Bans are great news for (non-cheating) gamers
Blizzard is taking a heavy-handed approach on a number of levels. First off, they’re not just banning people and leaving it at that. Instead, they have taken to shaming those who have been caught. Just check out this list of more than 1500 players in China who have been permanently banned from the game.
When a player gets banned from most games, this means that the account itself is banned. Nothing prevents you from buying a new copy of the game, and making a new account to begin the process once again. At least that’s been the case with nearly every other online game. However, Blizzard seems to be taking things much further.
There are seedier parts of the internet where hackers go to discuss their methods for hacking. I won’t link to them here, but they can be found if you look hard enough. But on some of these forums, lots of users are getting upset because despite buying a fresh copy of the game, they are still getting banned.
Some users have gone above and beyond to try and fool Blizzard into letting them play the game again. Among the things tried include changing the MAC address, changing CPU ID in the registry, changing BiosDate in the registry, and using a VPN. Despite doing all of these things, users are still getting their new accounts banned. Here’s a screenshot provided by PC Gamer, from one such person:
This is the first time I’ve heard of a company taking such drastic measures to ban cheaters and hackers. Many of the people complaining have stated that they stopped cheating/hacking after the first ban. And it’s easy to feel sorry for people that have paid for new copies of the game and pinkie-sworn to not cheat anymore. However, I think Blizzard’s new Super Bans are completely justified.
There are other games out there where people enjoy trying to create new hacks, and will burn through account after account, just to see how long they can get away with the next new thing. In these cases, the bans are only good, so long as the person behind them doesn’t have the cash to shell out for another copy of the game. Once they do, they might be good to hack and cheat for days, weeks, or even months, depending on how good the next hack they find or create is.
With the fear of a Super Ban, many users who might consider installing a hack probably won’t. After all, if you have to choose between getting to having god-like powers for a while and possibly never playing again, or just playing the game like everyone else, they’ll choose the latter. So the Super Ban works as a good method of deterring the average player.
But the Super Bans also may serve another purpose. There are plenty of people out there that will spend their time and effort trying to create hacks that they can distribute, and sometimes even sell to other players. If their machines are compromised after just one test, they won’t be able to continue developing their programs that help players cheat. Until a method is discovered to clean a computer that has been Super Banned, cheat creators will be out of business.
Blizzard may be taking a heavy-handed approach to protecting Overwatch players. However, what they’re doing is in the best interest of the players at large, and that’s good business. Games that get overran with cheaters often stop being fun for the community, and drift into obscurity. Overwatch has been fun so far, and I’d like to see it continue to grow in the absence of hackers and cheaters.
How To Plan When You Don’t Know What To Plan For
Using the guide below, take a first step toward planning for next year. Start with items that you can control.
Remind yourself that you are resilient. Your students are resilient. Be confident that you can be present for your students no matter what. When you are intentional about building in flexible components from the start of the year, students’ experiences will be better.
With so much outside our control, there are a few things teachers can do now. Set up your classroom to operate in all ways: face-to-face, remote, and blended (a combination of both). Know that you’re likely to use all these methods at some point next year.
As teachers, we’re planners—it’s just who we are. But how do we plan when we don’t know what to plan for? During a recent professional development session with a local district, the number one question teachers asked me was what next year would look like. The truth is: We don’t know what’s coming our way. Even with glimpses of plans, no one really knows what’s coming.
Build a Communication Plan
Chances are that you experienced communication challenges at some point last year. Reflect on those challenges.
Keep in mind that your online learning environment should support your face-to-face instruction—and your face-to-face instruction should support your online learning environment. When they complement each other, both are stronger.
Organize content into chunks: units, modules, or weeks.
Create structure inside these chunks.
Keep the structure consistent.
Include all elements of instruction inside a chunk (preassessment, inquiry, instruction, practice, assessment).
Once your online content is organized, think about how you can combine your online chunks with your face-to-face instruction. In The Perfect Blend, Michele Eaton provides excellent daily and weekly checklists that work to keep students and teachers organized and bolster the learning in both spaces.
Constantly Evaluate Your ToolboxAfter completing a chunk, reflect on the digital tools you used. Ask yourself: Did I have the right tools for the task? Were students able to meet instructional objectives?
When we use the wrong tool, we know immediately: The objective falls flat. So we move on—quickly. When we use the right tool, the tool is invisible. It’s easy and intuitive, and it enhances instruction. We want to use it again. Review your toolbox, deleting tools that don’t work well for you and your students. Keep in mind that a tool that may be right for your colleague may not be right for you or your classroom—and that’s OK.
Plan Activities to Build Relationships in Any SpaceTo help students build peer relationships online, give them a real reason to be present.
Build a positive classroom community by integrating digital citizenship lessons, and rework your online meetings to offer authentic learning experiences that build relationships. Assigning team roles can engender a sense of purpose, and bringing in guests can help students make real-world connections.
The best relational activities are ones that allow students to shine as individuals. You might have students build an “All About Me” Pinterest board or Google slide and/or create a class scavenger hunt, and then review the results as a group.
Design Discovery Activities for Key Technology ToolsA discovery activity allows students to learn how to use a tool before tackling content learning and also allows teachers to have conversations about expectations from the start.
A discovery includes three parts: a teacher-led tutorial on how to use the tool, an outline of expectations for both students and instructors, and a low-stakes task in which students can practice using the tool.
Inside a discovery, make sure you allow room for conversation; in this process of students talking to each other and to you, you can preemptively solve any problems before deploying the tool.
If you don’t know where to start, begin by listing the top three tools you use in your classroom. Next, plan a discovery for each tool. Then think about where you can embed your discoveries into your instruction.
Create Routines That Are Consistent Across All SpacesWhether online or face-to-face, build a consistent routine for students with opportunities for choice and self-pacing.
Here’s a routine for any environment:
Check announcements.
Complete morning check-in.
Open module and begin first task.
Once built, illustrate these processes with graphic organizers like process maps. Post these inside your LMS and physical classroom and attach them to announcements. Most important, minimize change as much as possible—students need consistency now more than ever.
With so much uncertainty about what next year looks like, it’s easy to be overwhelmed. Start with the pieces you have control over.
Apple Looking To Design Its Own Chips
Recent signs indicate that Apple may be looking to design computer chips for its own devices as early as next year. With its own chips, the company could potentially create Apple-only features, but — perhaps more importantly — it could also keep Apple’s product plans secret from its competitors, according to The Wall Street Journal.
There’s also the concern that technology developed for Apple by a third-party could be sold to Apple’s competitors. That’s not an uncommon event, and already happened with the Merom chip Intel developed for the MacBook Air. Intel also introduced another reduced-size processor shortly after the MacBook Air debuted in 2008. Apple may also be concerned that any customizing it does on existing chip designs from third-party suppliers could be shared with other companies, according to the Journal.
We’ve heard rumblings for some time that Apple could be going after its own chip designs. Last April, Apple bought P.A. Semi a chip designer that makes “energy-efficient processors based on the Power architecture that Apple used in its Macintosh computers for many years before adopting Intel’s x86 chips.” When Apple acquired P.A. Semi, many analysts discounted the notion that Apple would design its own chips. The analysts pointed to Apple’s relationship with Intel — the current supplier of Mac processors — as being very strong and that Apple was merely buying talent to customize chip design for future Apple products and not to design its own chips.
Since then there have been other signs of Apple’s interest in computer chips: in December 2008 the company picked up a 3.6 percent stake in Imagination Technologies, a graphics chip maker; and Apple recently hired Bob Drebin as a Senior Director. Drebin has a long history in the computer chip industry, serving as Engineering Director for the graphics card maker ATI Technologies until that company was bought out by Advanced Micro Devices, when he became the chief technology officer of AMD’s Graphics Products Group. The Journal says Apple also recently hired Raja Koduri, another former technology officer at AMD.
Apple is also currently on a hiring spree for top chip-making talent. The company has listed several job openings on its Web site that have to do with chip design, including a posting for an SOC SW Test Development Engineer, which lists the engineer’s main responsibility as “verifying the functional correctness and optimizing the coverage of Apple developed silicon.” The Journal reports that Apple has also listed several jobs on the professional social network LinkedIn, and Apple representatives recently took part in a job fair for engineers whose jobs will soon disappear at Spansion Inc. Spansion, a flash memory chip maker, in February announced plans to lay off more than 3000 employees and then in March Spansion filed for bankruptcy.
While Apple is looking to pull in chip-making talent, the company isn’t immune to the current recession. In March, a rumor came out that layoffs at Cupertino were imminent, then earlier this week it was discovered that Apple had reduced its retail staff by more than ten percent.
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