Daily Archives: December 23, 2021

LAGOS, Nigeria -- Computers have become amazingly precise at translating spoken words to text messages and scouring huge troves of information for answers to complex questions. At least, that is, so long as you speak English or another of the worlds dominant languages.

But try talking to your phone in Yoruba, Igbo or any number of widely spoken African languages and youll find glitches that can hinder access to information, trade, personal communications, customer service and other benefits of the global tech economy.

We are getting to the point where if a machine doesnt understand your language it will be like it never existed, said Vukosi Marivate, chief of data science at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, in a call to action before a December virtual gathering of the world's artificial intelligence researchers.

American tech giants dont have a great track record of making their language technology work well outside the wealthiest markets, a problem thats also made it harder for them to detect dangerous misinformation on their platforms.

Marivate is part of a coalition of African researchers who have been trying to change that. Among their projects is one that found machine translation tools failed to properly translate online COVID-19 surveys from English into several African languages.

Most people want to be able to interact with the rest of the information highway in their local language, Marivate said in an interview. He's a founding member of Masakhane, a pan-African research project to improve how dozens of languages are represented in the branch of AI known as natural language processing. Its the biggest of a number of grassroots language technology projects that have popped up from the Andes to Sri Lanka.

Tech giants offer their products in numerous languages, but they don't always pay attention to the nuances necessary for those apps work in the real world. Part of the problem is that theres just not enough online data in those languages including scientific and medical terms for the AI systems to effectively learn how to get better at understanding them.

Google, for instance, offended members of the Yoruba community several years ago when its language app mistranslated Esu, a benevolent trickster god, as the devil. Facebook's language misunderstandings have been tied to political strife around the world and its inability to tamp down harmful misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines. More mundane translation glitches have been turned into joking online memes.

Omolewa Adedipe has grown frustrated trying to share her thoughts on Twitter in the Yoruba language because her automatically translated tweets usually end up with different meanings.

One time, the 25-year-old content designer tweeted, Tl b dn, Tl b tr. yin lm b e , which means, If the land (or country, in this context) is not peaceful, or merry, youre responsible for it. Twitter, however, managed to end up with the translation: If you are not happy, if you are not happy.

For complex Nigerian languages like Yoruba, those accent marks -- often associated with tones -- make all the difference in communication. Ogun, for instance, is a Yoruba word that means war, but it can also mean a state in Nigeria (gn), god of iron (gn), stab (gn), twenty or property (Ogn).

Some of the bias is deliberate given our history," said Marivate, who has devoted some of his AI research to the southern African languages of Xitsonga and Setswana spoken by his family members, as well as to the common conversational practice of code-switching between languages.

The history of the African continent and in general in colonized countries, is that when language had to be translated, it was translated in a very narrow way, he said. "You were not allowed to write a general text in any language because the colonizing country might be worried that people communicate and write books about insurrections or revolutions. But they would allow religious texts.

Google and Microsoft are among the companies that say they are trying to improve technology for so-called low-resource languages that AI systems don't have enough data for. Computer scientists at Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, announced in November a breakthrough on the path to a universal translator" that could translate multiple languages at once and work better with lower-resourced languages such as Icelandic or Hausa.

That's an important step, but at the moment, only large tech companies and big AI labs in developed countries can build these models, said David Ifeoluwa Adelani. He's a researcher at Saarland University in Germany and another member of Masakhane, which has a mission to strengthen and spur African-led research to address technology that does not understand our names, our cultures, our places, our history.

Improving the systems requires not just more data but careful human review from native speakers who are underrepresented in the global tech workforce. It also requires a level of computing power that can be hard for independent researchers to access.

Writer and linguist Kola Tubosun created a multimedia dictionary for the Yoruba language and also created a text-to-speech machine for the language. He is now working on similar speech recognition technologies for Nigerias two other major languages, Hausa and Igbo, to help people who want to write short sentences and passages.

We are funding ourselves," he said. "The aim is to show these things can be profitable.

Tubosun led the team that created Googles Nigerian English voice and accent used in tools like maps. But he said it remains difficult to raise the money needed to build technology that might allow a farmer to use a voice-based tool to follow market or weather trends.

In Rwanda, software engineer Remy Muhire is helping to build a new open-source speech dataset for the Kinyarwanda language that involves a lot of volunteers recording themselves reading Kinyarwanda newspaper articles and other texts.

They are native speakers. They understand the language, said Muhire, a fellow at Mozilla, maker of the Firefox internet browser. Part of the project involves a collaboration with a government-supported smartphone app that answers questions about COVID-19. To improve the AI systems in various African languages, Masakhane researchers are also tapping into news sources across the continent, including Voice of Americas Hausa service and the BBC broadcast in Igbo.

Increasingly, people are banding together to develop their own language approaches instead of waiting for elite institutions to solve problems, said Damin Blasi, who researches linguistic diversity at the Harvard Data Science Initiative.

Blasi co-authored a recent study that analyzed the uneven development of language technology across the world's more than 6,000 languages. For instance, it found that while Dutch and Swahili both have tens of millions of speakers, there are hundreds of scientific reports on natural language processing in the Western European language and only about 20 in the East African one.

O'Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island.

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In Africa, rescuing the languages that Western tech ignores - ABC News

(iStock/Illustration by Kevin Rebong for The Real Deal)

The infobahn is coming to central Texas or at least to one 17-mile stretch of highway.

The section of US Highway 79 near the small town of Taylor, where Samsung plans to build a $17 billion semiconductor factory, may be poised to be a destination for more tech facilities, according to the Austin Business Journal. That would draw residential subdivisions, mixed-use properties and commercial projects aimed at serving the communities around them.

While the highway running west from Taylor largely cuts through farmland and the occasional car dealership, the areas economic boom is more visible on the outskirts of Hutto. Thats where two major projects are in the works: a shovel-ready, 1,486-acre megasite and the 750-acre RCR Taylor Logistics Park, a future industrial park with rail access to the east.

The corridor, about 30 miles northeast of Austin, has plenty of underdeveloped land as well as access to Interstate 35, the states Highway 130 and a parallel Union Pacific rail line. Nearby Austin metro area developments include the $550 million Kalahari Resort and Convention Center, the $300 million, 110-acre Mihaus mixed-use project in Round Rock, a new Apple campus in northwest Austin and the Tesla Giga Texas factory in East Austin.

All but the Tesla factory are located in business-friendly, often incentive-wielding Williamson County, where County Judge Bill Gravell told the outlet that he envisions the evolution of the technology superhighway of the world.

Samsungs new plant could be a new center of gravity for the types of industries that rely upon chips today John Boyd Jr, principal at Boca Raton, Florida-based site selection firm the Boyd Company, told ABJ. He noted that Texas Instruments plans to build a semiconductor fabrication facility in Sherman, about an hour north of Dallas, where the company is based.

Texas is really a destination point, in terms of its leading the nation within the semiconductor industry, Boyd told the outlet. This industry is really in the global spotlight today given the supply chain crisis.

[ABJ] Cindy Winder

Contact Cindy Widner

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Samsung plant may bring the infobahn literally to Texas - The Real Deal

Many of the tech giants are taking their time considering whether or not to support cryptocurrencies amid a huge wave of investment and interest in the space. Now a new report from the New York Times looks at how executives and engineers are leaving companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, and Meta for crypto startups.

Last month, we heard Tim Cook share in an interview that he personally owns bitcoin and/or Ethereum while reiterating that Apple is looking at it but that the company does not have immediate plans to implement support for cryptocurrencies.

But while companies like Apple, Amazon, and more take time deliberating if or how to jump in, fast-moving startups in the crypto space are attracting executives and engineers from the tech giants.

When Sandy Carter left her job as a vice president of Amazons cloud computing unit this month, she announced in a LinkedIn post that she was joining a crypto technology company. She included a link for open positions at the start-up.

Within two days, she said, more than 350 people many from the biggest internet companies had clicked the link to apply for jobs at the firm, Unstoppable Domains. The start-up sells website addresses that sit on the blockchain, the distributed ledger system that underpins cryptocurrencies.

The NYT report highlights that over $28 billion has been invested into crypto and blockchain startups around the world this year, which is 4x what was seen in 2020.

Carter also noted that beyond the potential for being very lucrative, people are interested to join crypto startups to move toward the goal of decentralization.

Ms. Carter, the former Amazon vice president, said people were interested in working at crypto firms for more than just money. Some were drawn to the ethos of web3, which strives to decentralize power and decision making. Its an alternative to how Google and Facebook came to dominate the internet by sucking up personal data from users to sell targeted ads.

Former Google executive Sridhar Ramaswamy compared where crypto is at now to the 1990s and the birth of the internet:

There is a giant sucking sound coming from crypto, said Sridhar Ramaswamy, chief executive of search engine start-up Neeva and a former Google executive, who competes with crypto companies for talent. It feels a bit like the 1990s and the birth of the internet all over again. Its that early, that chaotic and that much full of opportunity.

The full NYT piece is an interesting read, check it out here.

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Apple among tech companies quickly losing talent to lucrative crypto startups - 9to5Mac

Snapchat released an Avatar lens AR filter today, which makes you look like a Sims character. Or, in more modern parlance, it makes you look like what youd look like in the metaverse. To use the lens, open your camera in the Snapchat app to scan the QR code on Snapchats website, then look at how scarily smooth your skin is in the metaverse, where freckles and acne evidently do not exist.

A new Snapchat lens isnt inherently notable, especially as the company goes all-in on augmented reality but this is a continuation of a years-long, on-and-off viral trend. And if the past is any indication, itll probably go viral and crop up on TikTok soon.

In August 2020, Snapchat released the Cartoon Face lens, which users realized could be used to Disneyfy their pets the tag#disneydog jumped over to TikTok to get 40.9 million views. Then, Snapchat struck viral gold again that December when it released the Cartoon lens, which rendered more even realistic results for human faces than the previous iteration.

But the app keeps manufacturing slightly improved versions of this trend, which end up going viral as well. Humans are so predictable.

In June of this year, the Disney-like trend struck again with the Cartoon Style 3D lens, which earned 2.8 billion impressions in its first week after release. And now, weve arrived at the Avatar lens, which also makes your clothing look cartoonish, not just your face. Whats next, a lens that also makes our surroundings look like something that someone built on Horizon Worlds? Probably.

Earlier this month, Snapchat hosted Lens Fest, a celebration of the apps AR technology. The company announced at the event that there are over 250,000 lens creators from more than 200 countries. Combined, they have made 2.5 million lenses that have been viewed more than 3.5 trillion times. Meanwhile, on Snapchats TikTok clone Spotlight, the app awarded 12,000 creators a total of $250 million for their posts. The company says that over 65% of Spotlight submissions use one of Snapchats creative tools or lenses.

Companies like Niantic and Snapchat think that augmented reality is better suited to build the metaverse than virtual reality. But even for headset-loving tech giants like Meta, AR can help make us actually look like ourselves in the metaverse. The Snapchat Avatar filter makes me look like an unrealistic, Barbie-esque version of myself, yet it still feels a bit more personalized than my Meta Horizon avatar, which just looks like any random white woman with brown hair and glasses.

Still, theres something disorienting about seeing ourselves like this my avatar in the Snapchat lens looks like me, but my eyebrows become perfectly manicured, like I just got them tediously threaded by a beautician. My lips become fuller, like Im wearing a plumping lip gloss, but I didnt put on any makeup today.

In the VR metaverse, we need some sort of avatar to represent us, because otherwise, were just an invisible blob. Startups like Ready Player Me, Spatial and Geniesare cropping up to help us craft our virtual personas. But in augmented reality, the premise is to alter the real world in a way that helps us engage more deeply in it. Snapchats AR filters are fun, but we dont really need avatars in the AR metaverse, and maybe thats a good thing we already know how dangerous it can be when we only present the best versions of ourselves online.

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Snapchat knows you want to see what youd look like in the metaverse - TechCrunch

Look, were not here to discredit the impact of Amazon HQ2national tech giants in the DMV over the past year, but we think the local growth companies deserve some well-earned credit, too.

All on their own, theyve been hard at workputting the DC tech scene on the map (well, more than it already was) in 2021. With overnight IPOs and a whole herd of new unicorns not to mention the oodles of VC funding we compiled earlier this week the tech giants, old pros and newer stars brought all kinds of eyes to the area this year. And if its any indication of 2022, theres plenty of room for even more to follow in the footsteps.

To wrap up the year, weve rounded up the top public offerings, M&As and new unicorns from 2021. Take a bow, guys.

The DMV had more than a few companies make their debut in the public markets this year, largely thanks to a number of SPAC mergers. In total, seven companies went public, with one other announcing 2022 intentions.

Xometry premiered on the Nasdaq in June 2021 (photo via @Nasdaq on Twitter).

Chip Paucek, 2U CEO (right), and Anant Argawal, 2U chief open learning officer (courtesy photo).

This year featured a number of noteworthy acquisitions from companies in and out of the region pulling DMV firms under their umbrella, but we narrowed it down to the six biggest.

ID.mes headquarters in McLean, Virginia (courtesy photo).

The mythical creature isnt so much of a fantasy in the area anymore. The District and surrounding region is now home to a number of once-startups now valued at over $1 billion.

P.S. We also published a roundup of the regions top megarounds in 2021, if youve got the growth company bug.

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Unicorns, SPACs and acquisitions: Here are the top DC tech moments of 2021 - Technical.ly DC

For most of the last decade and a half, Google has been the most visited web domain in the world, and it's not even close. The last time another site posed a real challenge for the top spotwas Yahoo, and that was a decade ago.

When you consider the number of people who use Google's services every day for everything from school assignments, collaborating on documents, finding directions, sharing photos, and well, searching for just about everything, it's not all that surprising.Google is the most popular search engine in the world, and it's where the vast majority of people start when they want to find something online.

Somewhere close to half of all internet traffic originates with a Google search. That dominance has made Google the world's largest advertising platform--not to mention the most profitable.

This year, that has been changing. According to a report released on Monday by Cloudflare, one of the major internet content delivery networks, TikTok.com overtook Google as the most visited domain in the world in 2021.

On the one hand, considering how relatively new TikTok is in our collective consciousness, that's surprising. On the other hand, when you rememberTikTok is the fastest-growing social network ever, it shouldn't be. It was even the most-downloaded app in 2020 and now has more than 1 billion users.

TikTok's rise to the top clearly says something about howtechnology is changing, but more importantly, it says something about the change in the way we find and consume information about the world around us. For more than a decade, the way we use the internet has mainly been dominated by Google, Facebook, YouTube (which is owned by Google), and Amazon. If you happened to find yourself somewhere else online, there's a good chance you started at one of those sites.

However, that's becoming less the case, especially with younger users. TikTok is more popular among teenagers than Instagram or Snapchat. Despite that, TikTok isn't just videos of memes or teenagers dancing. Some of the most popular content are beauty tips, recipes, and how-to videos. That's squarely in the lane occupied by Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.

It also means that people aren't just using TikTok for entertainment, but for information. That'sa massive shift, and it has real implications for every other platform.

TikTok is quickly becoming a real threat to the established tech giants in a way almost no one expected. It makes sense that a new social media platform could take away attention from Facebook, or Twitter,or Instagram, but Google? Theplace we go for information about, well, everything? That's a shift that most people wouldn't have predicted because it doesn't fit our understanding of how people use technology.

Let's set aside privacy or security concerns about TikTok, which is owned by a Chinese company,Bytedance. We'll also ignore the absurdity of the previous administration trying to force a sale first to Microsoft, then to Oracle. That only distracts from the reality that TikTok has become a far more integral way to access information that most people understood or expected.

Of course, it isn't without problems. Any platform that relies on user-generated content faces the same challenge of what to do with that content when it crosses a line. TikTok has its share of misinformation, as well as racist and incendiary content. And it isn't clear it has had any better luck moderating its platform--but, as it continues to grow, that becomes more of a concern.

TikTok is still small compared to its competition in almost every other measurement. Its Chinese parent company is private, so it's impossible to know exactly how much revenue it brings in. Still, analysts think TikTok had around $2 billion in revenue in 2020, a number that is a rounding error compared to Google ($181 billion) or even Facebook ($86 billion). That, however, means it has enormous room to grow.

There's a certain amount of irony that while the established tech giants have attracted intense scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators on both sides of the Atlantic, they're already in the process of being disrupted by an app that most of them didn't take seriously. The real lesson here is that established businesses and institutions are notoriously slow at recognizing the thing that will replace them.

They assume that their main competition is what they can see in front of them. Sometimes, however, it's something no one took seriously until suddenly it's not just a shiny new thing that everyone assumes will fade with time, but a real threat. By then, it's probably too late.

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

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TikTok Just Ended Google's 15 Year Rein as the World's Most Popular Web Domain - Inc.

Chelsey Opare-Addo Dre Moore On the Shot

Background: Chelsey Opare-Addo landed her "dream job" as an Amazon recruiter this past year, she said. She also runs her own rsum-coaching business, Not Your Mother's Resume, which she said was inspired by her large family (who always solicited her help applying to jobs).

She says her range of experiences has shown her what companies of all sizes are looking for during the hiring process.

Advice: Tech recruiters don't always come from technical backgrounds, so Opare-Addo appreciates specificity, she said. For example, rather than saying that you know five coding languages, spell out what these languages are, she said.

"You really have three audiences when you're writing your rsum," she said. "The first one is the applicant-tracking system, the software that picks up your rsum and sometimes scans for keywords. The second audience is the recruiter. And the third is the hiring manager."

The name of Opare-Addo's rsum-coaching business, Not Your Mother's Resume, is inspired by how she thinks about rsums, she said.

"The name comes from a lot of rsums that I see play it really safe, and they try to show the most professional facade, almost a shadow of themselves," she said. "You don't have to do that. You don't have to be boring. Recruiters aren't boring we're some of the spiciest people I've ever met."

Preferred contact method: LinkedIn is the best way to contact Opare-Addo, she said. She primarily works with software engineers with at least three years of experience but offers insight for any role.

"When you're reaching out to any recruiter, the best thing to do is look on their profile and make sure they actually recruit for the roles you're interested in," she said. "If you can find a role that they're recruiting for and you have the job ID, include that in the message."

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7 Tech Recruiters to Know, From Startups to AWS and Meta - Business Insider