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Orange Pi has been making single-board computers to compete with the Raspberry Pi for years, but now it's going after the Raspberry Pi 400 keyboard computer.

As Liliputing reports(Opens in a new window), Orange Pi announced the Orange Pi 800(Opens in a new window) keyboard computer, which just like the Raspberry Pi 400, offers a complete personal computer squeezed inside a keyboard housing. All you need to do is add a display and power.

The Orange Pi 800 uses a six-core Rockchip RK3399 (dual-core ARM Cortex-A72 and quad-core Cortex-A53) complete with an ARM Mali-T860MP4 GPU, 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM, 64GB of eMMC storage, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 5.0. On the outer casing you'll find two USB 3.0 ports, a single USB 2.0 ports, MicroSD card slot, HDMI, VGA, 26-pin IO interface, a Type-C power port, combined headphone and MIC port, and a speaker. Cooling is handled using a piece of heat-conducting silicagel, so there's no fan spinning inside.

The keyboard is capable of running a couple of displays at up to 4K resolution. It includes support for Chromium OS as well as Orange Pi OS(Opens in a new window), which is based on Arch Linux. This keyboard computer should therefore work very well with other Linux distributions, especially considering the Rockchip RK3399 has been around for six years now.

Orange Pi hasn't released pricing or availability yet, but its website shows a currently dead link for the keyboard being sold via Amazon. As the Raspberry Pi 400 sells for $70 and has a very similar spec, we should expect the Orange Pi 800 to cost roughly the same when it does appear.

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Orange Pi 800 Offers the Raspberry Pi 400 Keyboard Some Fresh Competition - PCMag

Molly White has been making stands on principle since her early teens. Now her scrutiny of crypto is earning her national acclaim.

The Washington Post recently profiled White as the cryptocurrency worlds biggest critic. Via her website, Web3 is Going Just Great, White investigates and exposes scams and other questionable practices in the opaque and largely unregulated industry.

Molly White is a gem of Northeastern University, a Northeastern student posted on Reddit, a social media aggregation website, in response to the Post story.

It feels important to me to make information available to people, especially when other groups are trying to present a very different and I think unrealistic story, says White, a 2016 Northeastern graduate in computer science. Especially with crypto, I see a lot of real people being hurt by itpeople who dont have the money that they can lose who were sold the dream of financial freedom, or a ticket out of having to work two jobs, and then getting put in even more desperate situations.

Cryptocurrencies, which can be circulated digitally without government oversight, are vulnerable to volatile price swings as well as unreliable (and sometimes predatory) traders. White devotes her site to web3the blockchain foundation for cryptocurrenciesin recognition that everyday people are being exploited by outlandish investment schemes.

It feels like, as someone who is able and willing to do the research, that I have an obligation to do it, she says.

Born and raised in Maine, White was drawn to Northeastern by the promise of co-ops. She participated in two of them at HubSpot in Cambridge, Massachusetts, leading to six years of full-time employment as a software engineer before she left the company last month.

She began developing an online presence in her early teens as an editor and writer at Wikipediafirst about music, and later in praise of women scientists.

I discovered that anyone could edit Wikipedia when I was 13, White says. I have this sort of weird brain: I really enjoy documenting and archiving and collecting information. And I also have always been very passionate about free and open knowledge and access to information. I became a pretty active editor in high school and then continued to do it through college and afterwards.

After the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump, Whites focus shifted to the alt-right, which exposed her to online vitriol and prepared her for the blowback that she has endured more recently from the crypto industry. She says she experienced online harassment as a result.

Its unpleasant sometimes, she says. Theres also a gender aspecteven before I started to edit in those topic areasof being a visible woman on the internet with opinions that tended to draw a fair amount of attacks. So I wish it was different.

She has found that those attacks have strengthened her resolve.

Im a very stubborn person by nature, she says. Being harassed online, or targeted in some ways, tends to make me angry that its happening, but also more determined to stick with it. I do what I can to minimize it and to protect myself and my family, but it feels important to continue doing what Im doingeven more so when there are people who try to stop it.

Her resilience is a family trait of which she is proud.

It was not a surprise to my family to have another stubborn daughter, White says, laughing.

White sees her efforts as part of a larger movement.

How can we move the web in a better direction? she asks. I think a lot of people look at me and think shes a crypto critic, she wants to stop crypto, she wants to tamp [innovation] down.

But White says she shares a lot of the same goals as some of the people who are working in the web3 spacefreedoms that include access to information and online communities around shared goals.

I worry that crypto and web3 are moving us in the opposite directionof limiting access to information and to communities, and financializing a lot of the interactions that we have online, she says. My goal is to open the web and make it a better place. Thats really the drive more than the hope to stop crypto.

Soon, she says, she will renew her less-famous career as a software engineer because writing software is my favorite thing.

But shell continue to watch over the crypto industry on behalf of those who are being exploited by it.

I just try to keep doing what I feel is impactful and helpful, White says. I imagine that will continue to be the goal, regardless of what shape it takes at any given point.

For media inquiries, please contact media@northeastern.edu.

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'Gem of Northeastern,' Molly White Takes on Crypto - News @ Northeastern - Northeastern University

Doctoral student Emily First and Professor Yuriy Brun of the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) at UMass Amherst received a Distinguished Paper Award from the Association for Computing Machinerys special interest group on software engineering (ACM SIGSOFT) at the 2022 International Conference on Software Engineering in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on May 23.

Their winning paper, Diversity-Driven Automated Formal Verification, introduces Diva, their tool to automatically generate proofs for the formal verification of software. Diva is the first to break the one-third barrier in formal verification, fully automatically proving 33.8% of the properties normally proven manually by software engineers, as evaluated by the researchers on a large benchmark of open-source software projects. Diva, funded by the National Science Foundation and an Amazon Research Award, expands on their previous proof synthesis tool TacTok, which was co-created with Arjun Guha, now at Northeastern University.

Formal verification of softwareproving that software does exactly what it is supposed to dois crucial when developing high-stakes systems, like those involved in aerospace or medical equipment, where the outcomes must be 100% correct. This process involves using interactive theorem provers (ITP) such as Coq, which are designed to allow for writing of software and of proofs of theorems about the software. Because writing proofs by hand is often prohibitively difficult, developers sometimes make use of tools like TacTok, or solver-based approaches like CoqHammer, to automatically generate them.

Diva, which stands for Diversity in Verification, learns a diverse set of models of what human-written proofs look like, and then generates new proofs for new software fully automatically using those models The key to Divas success is the diversity of the models, says Brun. By varying the learning parameters and data inputs, Diva generates many models. While one model may synthesize one kind of proof, another may synthesize another kind of proof. Together, these models can prove 68% more theorems than our prior tool, TacTok, and 77% more than ASTactic, another state-of-the-art proof synthesis tool.

Unlike TacTok and ASTactic, which also use existing proofs to learn a model, Diva uses an army-of-models approach, with numerous models attempting to guide proof synthesis for each theorem independently. Weve observed that when a model is going to prove a theorem, it often does so early on in its search, explains First. To ensure were spending computational resources on the right models and proving theorems as quickly as possible, we limit the amount of time each model gets to run before moving on to the next one, cycling back as necessary.

As the researchers explain, Divas cycling approach resulted in a 97% decrease in time required to prove a theorem, on average. Diva contributes to the suite of available tools that automatically generate proofs for the formal verification of software, providing access to an additional 11% of theorems that had not previously been provable by existing tools, according to their analysis of a benchmark over 10,000 theorems.

Diva is open-source and publicly available on GitHub. Brun, together with Talia Ringer, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Alex Sanchez-Stern, a postdoctoral researcher at UMass Amherst, recently received a $1 million grant from the DARPA PEARLS (Proof Engineering, Adaptation, Repair, and Learning for Software) program.

With the new funding from DARPA, we are leading an effort to improve automated formal verification even more, by learning more-complete models of proofs, improving the proof synthesis process, and applying these ideas to repairing proofs that break when software evolves, Brun says. Our project, titled PLATO: Enriched Tactic Prediction Models for Proof Synthesis & Repair, has already shown that augmenting models with information about identifiers, such as variable names, can further improve proof synthesis.

First is a doctoral student working with Brun in the Laboratory for Software Engineering Research (LASER) at CICS. Her research lies at the intersection of software engineering, programming languages, and machine learning, with a specific focus on creating tools to automatically generate proofs of software correctness. She received a bachelors in mathematics and computer science from Harvey Mudd College in 2017 and a masters in computer science from UMass Amherst in 2020.

Bruns current research focuses on software engineering and systems security, creating techniques to automate improvements in system quality, reliability, and performance. He has received numerous awards and recognitions, including an NSF CAREER award in 2015 and the IEEE TCSC Young Achiever in Scalable Computing Award in 2013. In 2019, he was elected an ACM Distinguished Member. He joined the CICS faculty in 2012. He received his doctorate in computer science from the University of Southern California in 2008.

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First, Brun Receive ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award for Automating Formal Verification - UMass News and Media Relations

American higher education has many of the same strengths and weaknesses as the United Statessentrepreneurial, market-driven system of health care.

Institutions of higher learning, like health care providers, vie aggressively for resources, prestige, and customers (whether patients or students) within highly competitive marketplaces. Extreme stratification, in reputation and resources, characterizes both the health care and higher education sectors.

Institutional competition, in turn, strongly incentivizes colleges and universities to take steps to stand out in highly visible ways that enhance their standing and status. Its no surprise that campuses compete with one another in terms of facilities, amenities, breadth of programs, andeven food.

But intense competition also discourages most schools from radically diverging from established norms lest they narrow their appeal by appearing eccentric, odd, or struggling. At first glance, American higher education appears to be extraordinarily diverse, consisting of liberal arts colleges, research-oriented institutions, public and private, urban and rural campuses, religious colleges, military academies, seminaries, technology institutes, commuter and residential campuses, and online providers. All true.

Yet most campuses share certain common elements, including credit hours, fixed-length terms, standardized start dates, distribution requirements, department-based majors, letter grades, and more.

Conformist pressures, however, create opportunities for alternative providers who target unmet needs and underserved markets. In medicine, these includes urgent care centers, for-profit emergency rooms, boutique and concierge practices, and specialized clinics and treatment facilities. In higher education, alternatives to business as usual include the mega online providers, such as Western Governors, Southern New Hampshire, and Coursera, various boot camps and skills academies, and industry certifications that aim to serve those who find the opportunities provided by traditional colleges and universities too costly or time-consuming, or insufficiently career-focused.

The top health centers and higher education institutions have acquired richly deserved reputations for excellence and innovation. Yet in both sectors, significant numbers of potential beneficiaries remain poorly served. Indeed, the free-for-all higher education marketplace has transformed the GI Bill, which once offered an international model for the democratization of access to higher education and colleges ability drive upward social mobility, into a funnel that channels all too many veterans into for-profit institutions with exceedingly poor outcomes.

Highly entrepreneurial, marketized systems of higher education and healthcare are exceedingly vulnerable to scams. In the absence of rigorous oversight and regulation, quacks and charlatans exploit opportunities for profit. Higher educations counterpart to overtreatment, over prescription, and over diagnosis in the health realm are the many masters and certificate programs and other certificate offerings with uncertain or even negative payoffs, in clear violation of the gainful employment rules that are supposed to ensure that graduates attain incomes that allow them to repay their debts.

Ina recent article inEdSurge, Jeffrey R. Young reminds us about a prescient 1997 essay by the late David Noble, a noted historian of science and technology, who condemned the rise of digital diploma mills, online institutions more interested in enrolling as many students as possible at the lowest possible cost than in providing a quality education or a degree with genuine value in the job market.

These institutions, Noble argued, had abandoned a collegiate ideal that rested uponstudents close interaction with professors in favor of a model that rested on the mastery of a fixed body knowledge and skills.

But the larger problem that Noble identified the commodification of higher education was not confined to online providers with their narrow curricula, cookie cutter courses, and alternate staffing models. In the brave new world of higher education that has emerged over the past quarter century, colleges and universities are, first and foremost, credential providers and commercial enterprises.

Their students are customers and human capital to be developed. Faculty members and departments are incentivized to be as entrepreneurial as possible. Campuses are increasingly valued politically as drivers of local economies and of regional economic development and as incubators of basic and applied research. Learning, far from being developmental or transformational process, is increasingly viewed as transactional and equated with passing the requisite number of courses.

Is it possible to break free from the commodification of higher education, or is American higher education trapped in a Weberian iron cage, in which campuses are prisoners of a system that values throughput, efficiency, rational calculation, and bureaucratic control above learning?

After all, isnt a college education supposed to be the very opposite of a commodity, stressing instead intellectual seriousness, mentoring, community, dialogue, discovery, and personal growth?

My own view is that it is indeed possible to provide a transformational, developmental, relationship-rich education within the matrix of todays highly bureaucratized institutions. Many institutions already do this for honors students. But unfortunately, these programs, which feature designated faculty members, dedicated advising, special seminars, rich research opportunities, and a wealth of co-curricular and extra-curricular activities, are confined to a small subset of the undergraduate population.

How can we scale such opportunities? Here are a few suggestions.

1.Empower a number of individual faculty members to organize cohorts with a thematic focus.In exchange for overseeing a community of learners and offering a special credit-bearing seminar, provide those faculty members with a modest stipend and student engagement funds.

2. Create a wide variety of cohorts to serve students with differing interests.Some cohorts might emphasis research, and not just laboratory research, but qualitative and data driven and archival research. Other cohorts might focus on community service, civic engagement, or the arts. Still others might be career-focused, emphasizing business, computer science, healthcare fields, including nursing, law, public policy, and technology. Then there might be cohorts that are maker and project oriented. The goal is to embed as many undergraduates as possible in a community of interest.

3.Recognize active participation in a cohort program with a special designation on the students transcript.Students deserve to be rewarded for taking part in a cohort program and their involvement in the activities needs to be institutionally acknowledged. A transcript notification recognizes their programmatic engagement.

4.Expand opportunities for students to interact with faculty.Students who build educational relationships with faculty members outside the classroom are more successful academically. Plus professors who know students personally are able to write stronger letters of recommendation.

Lunches or informal group meetings are great ways for undergraduates to get to know a faculty member outside a classroom setting and learn about graduate school and opportunities for research, internships, and scholarships. The payoff far exceeds the modest cost.

5.Showcase undergraduates research and creative achievements.Celebrate faculty-supervised undergraduate research and arts projects with poster sessions, brief (two- or three-minute) oral presentations, and student and faculty panels. A showcase offers students a chance to communicate the importance of their research and creativity to a broad audience. It also gives them an opportunity to polish their presentation skills and bolster their resumes as they prepare to apply for jobs or graduate school. Above all, this event introduces the entire campus community to the students vision, inventiveness, ingenuity, and passion.

Karl Marx had a term to describe those 19thcentury communitarians, like Charles Fourier, John Humphrey Noyes, Robert Owen, and Henri de Saint-Simon, who strove to create cooperative communities inside capitalist societies. He called these visionaries utopian socialists and dismissed their dreams as fanciful and unrealistic.

In fact, however, some of their communities lasted for decades and, more than that, inspired many womens rights advocates, sex radicals, labor organizers, diet and dress reformers, abolitionists, and advocates of world peace with dazzling visions of a world rid of status hierarchies and exploitation.

Theres nothing utopian or original about the kinds of community building initiatives that this posting proposes. If we want to combat the commoditization of higher education, just follow these steps, which are eminently doable.

All implementation requires is the will to create campuses where every student has a community to call their own.

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Combating the Commodification of Higher Education | Higher Ed Gamma - Inside Higher Ed

It was the summer of 2018, and Ham Serunjogi, a 24-year-old Ugandan immigrant, thought the pitch he was making to a Palo Alto venture capital firm was going well. He had explained how his fintech startup, Chipper Cash, would enable African consumers to send money to each other, across national borders, more cheaply and easily than the antiquated banking systema sort of Venmo for the continent.

Then came a question from one of the partners: Why dont you go look for donations and grants to fund this? Because, Serunjogi replied, this will be a profit-making business. The clueless partner persisted: Why dont you talk to Unicef or an impact investing firm? Serunjogi discreetly declines to name the firm, or to say which VC later told him that regardless of what the metrics are, I have to apply a discount to this business because its in Africa.

Follow the Money: Chipper president Maijid Moujaled and CEO Ham Serunjogi in their San Francisco headquarters, where they located for access to venture capital.

Those memories still sting, even though Chipper Cash has now raised $300 million from a roster of blue-chip VCs, most recently in November at a $2.2 billion valuation. These were things Id have to take with a straight face. But it was outrageous, and it still is, Serunjogi says from the San Francisco office where he, cofounder Maijid Moujaled and nearly a fifth of the companys 350 employees are based. The two founders each have an estimated 10% stake in Chipper, translating into paper fortunes north of $200 million.

Sheel Mohnot, a former partner at 500 StartupsChipper Cashs first backerchalks up some early investor resistance to ignorance about Africa. No one was investing in Africa at the time, he says. That has changed. Per CB Insights, venture capitalists invested $1.5 billion in African fintech companies last year, up sevenfold from 2020. Sub-Saharan Africans today have 605 million registered mobile money accountswith which they can send cash via text messageup from 469 million in 2018. That makes the area fertile ground for more advanced consumer financial apps.

Four years after its founding, Chipper Cash has 5 million registered users in seven countries, including Uganda, Ghana and Nigeria. It offers not only low-cost money transfers but bill payment, crypto trading and the ability to buy U.S. stocks. Excluding crypto transactions, it booked more than $75 million in revenue in 2021, compared with $18 million in 2020.

The idea for Chipper Cash was seeded when high-school-age Serunjogi saw the problems his father encountered trying to move money through Africas ossified banking system. Serunjogis family lived in Gayaza, a Ugandan town 10 miles outside Kampala, the capital. His parents owned a farm, and his father also ran an IT operation helping local businesses set up networks. Though hardly rich, the family sent Serunjogi and his two brothers to a private high school and enrolled them in a competitive swim club. In 2010, Serunjogi, then 16, made the Ugandan Youth Olympic team. After having problems completing a bank transfer, his father was forced to fly to South Africa with an envelope full of cash to pay his sons swim coach while they were training there.

After high school, Serunjogi followed his older brother to Grinnell, a small liberal arts college in Iowa known for its strong academics, where both swam varsity. At Grinnell he met Moujaled, a Ghanaian computer science major who had started a popular student coding group. Almost immediately, the two began talking about developing an African money transfer app. But first they wanted real-world tech experience and needed work visas. So during his junior year Serunjogi sent cold emails to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg and snagged an internship with Facebook, which turned into a full-time job in Dublin after he graduated in 2016.

In the spring of 2018, Serunjogi texted Moujaled, who was working as a software engineer in San Francisco, to say it was time to get going. Serunjogi quit his job and moved into Moujaleds studio apartment, sleeping on an air mattress in the kitchenette. The two used their combined savings of less than $30,000 and Moujaleds ongoing salary as seed capital. They launched a test version of their app in July 2018, letting customers send money from Uganda to Ghana for free.

They took pitches to more than 50 VC firms until, in November 2018, 500 Startups agreed to invest $150,000. Before the papers were signed, Mohnot wired $40,000 to Chipper after Serunjogi told him he was about to miss rent. I will be eternally grateful to him for that, Serunjogi says.

Chippers free, easy-to-use app was a big improvement over the available alternatives. For example, Kenyas M-Pesa, which launched in 2007, charges 1% to 2% for many domestic transfers.

By mid-2019 Chipper Cash was available in Uganda, Ghana, Kenya and Rwanda. It soon expanded to Nigeria, Africas biggest market with more than 200 million people, and by the end of the year, it had 600,000 customers. It also introduced a foreign-exchange markup fee of 2% to 5% to start generating revenue. As bitcoin rose from $14,000 to $20,000 in the fall of 2020, Chipper began to let users buy and sell bitcoin and ether, establishing a second lucrative line of business: trading fees. It reached a $2.2 billion valuation in late 2021, with investment from firms including Sam Bankman-Frieds FTX, Ribbit Capital and Bezos Expeditions. Transactions grew from $200 million in the first quarter of 2021 to $1.6 billion 12 months later.

All that growth comes with added high-stakes challenges. One is liquidity: Chipper needs to make sure it has enough funds in each country to support instant transfers. When it doesnt, transaction times can slow to a full day or longer. Money can solve that problem. A bigger worry is competition. Senegal-based startup Wave offers similar services (albeit in different countries so far) and notched a $1.7 billion valuation last year. Other remittance companies such as Remitly and Wise dont yet let people send money from one African country to another, but theres nothing stopping them from entering the market.

For now, Serunjogi is focused on maintaining Chippers steep growth, moving to profitabilityand helping Africans while doing so. Customers benefit, he says, when they can move money easily and have new ways to invest and build wealth. Im a deep believer in the role of entrepreneurship and capitalism in improving the lives of people who live in developing countries.

The rest is here:

How Two Africans Overcame Bias To Build A Startup Worth Billions - Forbes