Category Archives: Ai

For the Internet of Things (IoT), enterprises need to focus their efforts on the basics of business optimization rather than innovate from insights. But businesses are reluctant.

The problem with big data and business intelligence software is that it is reactionary and static. It is great for analysing things after the event -- but how do enterprises manage when they need real-time insight?

A recent survey from data analysis provider GlobalData showed that IoT professionals still have a heavy reliance on traditional business intelligence (BI) software. Around 40 percent of its 1,000 respondents ranked BI platforms well above all other means of analysing data.

Unfortunately, do-it-all BI software platforms have been usurped by smaller, more discrete ways of deriving value from enterprise data. It could be a direct SQL query, a predictive data modeller, an auto-generated data discovery visualisation, or an interactive dashboard that delivers insights in real-time.

The reasons for this are that users rely on basic reporting mechanisms that use complex queries and reports. BI software tends to be reactionary and static. This brings costs into the enterprise to build and maintain systems.

For the Internet of Things (IoT), enterprises need to focus their efforts on the basics of business optimization rather than innovate from insights. But businesses are reluctant.

This reluctance to follow the broader market away from BI platforms within IoT is concerning. The survey noted a subtle shift over time with IoT deployment fails.

In 2016, no failures were noted post-deployment. In 2017, however, that number had increased to 12 percent.

The top reason IoT deployments fail or are abandoned prior to deployment are deployment and maintenance costs.

Encouragingly, however, nearly 70 percent of enterprises who had already implemented an IoT solution indicate that the project had already met their return-on-investment (ROI) expectations, regardless of the initial goals.

AI could be the answer to the IoT problem. It could prove the value of IoT as a means of optimizing existing business processes.

Even with a simple AI Machine Learning (ML) framework and model, IoT practitioners would be able to detect anomalies and predict desired outcomes. This would enable them to solve two problems at once.

The survey shows that enterprise buyers are eager to improve operational efficiencies. Forty three percent of survey respondents indicated that the best role for AI is to centrally automate and optimise business processes.

Although centralization is part and parcel to traditional BI analysis, reporting, and predictive modeling, where AI tends to be most useful is at the edge of deployments. IoT deployments should use tools like ML, close to the device itself.

Any analytics endeavors should be brief and focused on solving specific challenges. IoT buyers want centralized, global visibility of the business but also local optimization through AI.

This approach will not solve all problems, but it is affordable and it will have a direct impact on businesses. It will help to prove the value of IoT by not building an expensive monolithic analytics system centrally.

Brad Shimmin, service director for global IT technology and software at GlobalData, said: "It becomes clear, therefore, that IoT practitioners should emphasize tactical benefits over strategic analytical insights at least at the outset of a project as a means of proving ROI and securing future investment from the business."

As AI floods the market, which chatbots deliver the best ROI for enterprises?

A recent report shows that AI and chatbots can bring a huge ROI (return on investment) for the enterprise. But which solution should you choose?

Although chatbot use rises, we still prefer talking to humans

Research has forecast that bot interactions in the banking sector, completed without human assistance, will move from 12 percent to over 90 percent in 2022. Will this mean the end of the contact centre agent as bots take over?

Although smart cities rely on IoT, security confusion still reigns

Cities all over the world have started to use the Internet of Things (IoT) to manage their urban infrastructure more efficiently, a concept known as 'smart cities.' But IT teams are still confused about cloud security, with many adopting conflicting strategies toward cloud security and IoT.

Kore.ai lets enterprises build intelligent chatbots with sentiment analysis

Enterprises are looking to AI solutions to help them scale their customer interactions, tasks, and workflows.

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Report shows that AI is more important to IoT than big data insights - ZDNet

Follow the money

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By Timothy Revell

After Kubiiki Prides 13-year-old daughter disappeared, it took 270 days for her mother to find her. When she did, it was as an escort available to be rented out on an online classified web site. Her daughter had been drugged and beaten into compliance by a sex trafficker.

To find her, Pride had to trawl through hundreds of advertisements on Backpage.com, a site that in 2012, the last date for which stats are available, was hosting more than 70 per cent of the US market for online sex ads. When it comes to identifying signs of human trafficking in online sex adverts, the task for police is often no easier. Thousands of sex-related classifieds are posted every week. Some are legal posts. Other people, like Prides daughter, are forced to do it. Working out which ads involve foul play is a laborious task.

However, the task is being automated using a strange alliance of artificial intelligence and bitcoin.

The internet has facilitated a lot of methods that traffickers can take advantage of. They can easily reach big audiences and generate a lot of content without having to reveal themselves, says Rebecca Portnoff at the University of California, Berkeley.

But a new tool developed by Portnoff and her colleagues can ferret traffickers out. It uses machine learning to spot common patterns in suspicious ads, and then uses publicly available information from the payment method used to pay for them bitcoin to help identify who placed them.

The tool will help not only the investigation and intervention of potential traffickers, but also to support prosecution efforts in an arena where money moves with rapidity across financial instruments and disappears from the evidence trail, says Carrie Pemberton Ford at the Cambridge Centre for Applied Research in Human Trafficking.

There are about 4.5 million people who have been forced into sexual exploitation. In the US, many of them end up advertised on Backpage, the second biggest classified ad listing site. People list everything from events to furniture there, but it has also become associated with sex ads and sex trafficking so much so that the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has said that the majority of child sex trafficking cases referred to them involve ads on Backpage.

Normally, the tell-tale sign that an advert involves trafficking is that the person behind it is responsible for many other adverts across the site. However, this is difficult to spot, as adverts mention the people being trafficked, not the traffickers.

To identify the authors of online sex ads, Portnoffs tool looks at the style in which ads are written. Artificial intelligence trained on thousands of different adverts highlights when similar styles have been used, and clusters together likely candidates for further investigation.

The second step comes via the payment method. Credit card companies stopped the use of their services on Backpage in 2015, leaving bitcoin as the only way to paying for adverts.

Every transaction made using bitcoin is logged on a publicly available ledger called the blockchain. It doesnt store identities, but every user has an associated wallet that is recorded alongside the transaction. The AI tool searches the blockchain to identify the wallet that corresponds to each advert.

It is also easy to see when each ad was posted. We look at cost of the ad and the timestamp, then connect the ad to a specific person or group. This means the police then have a pretty good candidate for further investigation, says Portnoff.

Once the police know which ads are of dubious origin, they can call the numbers on them in the knowledge that they might well be linked to crime. Narrowing down from the hundreds of thousands of ads online will be very useful for law enforcement officers who have to read through so many ads during an investigation, says Portnoff.

During a four-week period, the research team tried out their tool on 10,000 adverts. It correctly identified about 90 per cent of adverts that had the same author, with a false positive rate of only 1 per cent. One of the bitcoin wallets they tracked down was responsible for $150,000 worth of sex adverts, possible evidence of an exploitation ring.

Backpage has not yet responded to New Scientists requests for comment.

The team is working with a number of different police forces and NGOs with the hope of using the tool in real investigations soon. The work was presented at the Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining in Canada this month.

The trafficker who kidnapped Kubiiki Prides daughter was eventually caught and sentenced to five years in prison. Successfully prosecutions like that are rare, but with Portnoffs new tool that could soon change.

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AI uses bitcoin trail to find and help sex-trafficking victims - New Scientist

NASAs no stranger to AI. The space administration includes a number of artificial intelligence laboratories in its fold, such as QuAIL and JPLs Artificial Intelligence Group (which even has an imaginative moonshot division). Last week at NASAs Frontier Development Lab 2017, however, six research teams explored the next generation of how artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms could be used to protect our planetand explore outer space.

NASA FDL is an eight-week long research and developmentbootcamphosted in partnership with companies such as Intel, Nvidia, IBM, and Lockheed Martin. Interdisciplinary teams from both the public and private sector work together at it to fill in some blanks in NASAs already vast understanding of the universeand how to analyze it.Astronomers, planetologists, and the like study the universe through telescope-snapped photos and radar scans. In a given day, they may have to sort through a thousand images to identify ones with any meaningful information. This is where AI can prove immensely usefulit can sort through that data in a fraction of the time a human can, as long as its trained properly.

In its second year, the FDL research teams addressed three areas:planetary defense, space resources, and space weather.

In the realm of planetary defense, one team tackled an issue paramount to the premise of the 1998 blockbuster Armageddon: figuring out how to model the shapes of asteroids. Asteroids arent just rocky spheres floating in space. They have unusual geometries, spin around on an axis, and may even tout their own smaller asteroid satellites. All of this is important to know if, say, you wanted to plan a mission that would actually land on one, or if you wanted to plot its trajectory to make sure it wont eventually collide with Earth.

There are 16,000 known near-Earth asteroids, only 700 of which weve observed by radar, and only a fraction of that number whose exact shapes we know. Using a density-based clustering algorithm, the team potentially improved how fast we can model the size and shape of asteroids, from a period of one to two months (currently) to only a few weeks.

Image via Frontier Development Lab

Another team used AI to develop a technique that could give us more warning time before impact with along-period cometcomets that disappear into our solar system for 200 years or more.

First, they had to train their AI algorithm on what a comet looks like in the sky. Even humans have trouble spotting them in images at times; they can be confused with birds or planes, or obscured by cloud cover. Then the algorithm trained on data from known meteor showers and outbursts such as the Perseids. This helped it to identify new, previously unknown meteor showers in our skies and ideally allows it to spot the dust trails of long-period comets that could pose an Armageddon-style threat to our planetpotentially years in advance of impact.

Other teams addressed the issue of solar storms, difficult-to-predict phenomena that can affect communications and electronics here on Earth. Right now, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) can predict general estimates of when a geomagnetic storm or solar flare might crop up. By training AI algorithms on historical data from solar storms, researchers were able to identify which factors are the most important in predicting solar flares. They could also more accurately forecast when periods of high activity may arrive (the ultimate goal being to give us one hour of notice before a major storm strikes).

Where AI holds a ton of promise, though, is when we head out into space. For future lunar missions, researchers are trying to accurately map the moons crater-pocked surface, paying particular attention to shadowy craters that could house frozen water. Right now, images of the moons surface vary in quality and dont always match up with the topographical data we have. For this, a deep learning network (Intel Nervana) analyzed 40,000 tiled images of the moon to answer the question: Is that a crater?

This could help future lunar missions by reducing how much onboard water is needed (it costs $25,000 to send one gallon of water into space). And with accurate maps, rovers can rove and find water without fear of plummeting into the depths of a surprise crater.

Related video

We all know Siri is pretty useless. Good thing she's not your mom.

Accurate, trustworthy AI will be incredibly important to more distant space missions in the futuremissions too far or dangerous to send a human. Rover-type devices will need to be able to assess situations and make decisions on their own. And for manned missions, it may become impractical to communicate back and forth with mission control back on Earth. In those cases, consulting an onboard AI could be a good alternative (as long as it doesnt turn into HAL).

For decades astronomers have been snapping regular photos of our sun, moon, and night skies. Thanks to AI algorithms, were finally becoming able to analyze all that data in a meaningful way, saving researchers time, teaching us valuable insights, and preparing us for the next era in space discovery.

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NASA FDL 2017 Researchers Use AI To Explore Space, Prevent ... - The Daily Dot

Shares of Salesforce may have ticked down after thecompany's earnings beat, but CEO Marc Benioff was entirely forward-looking when he discussed his cloud giant's prospects with CNBC.

"We're really seeing this incredible new capability that's driving so much growth in enterprise software, artificial intelligence, and Salesforce is the first to deliver artificial intelligence in all of our products that are helping our customers do machine learning and machine intelligence and deep learning using Einstein," Benioff told "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer on Tuesday.

Einstein, Salesforce's A.I. platform, was rolled out in 2016 as the company turned its focus to cutting-edge developments in the world of software, Benioff said.

"I think everybody understands how important the cloud is. It's the single most transformative technology in enterprise software today. I think everybody understands mobility because everybody's got a cellphone and lots of apps and seen how they've moved off of PCs and onto mobility," Benioff said. "Einstein is Salesforce's AI platform that is really the next generation of Salesforce's products and it's in the hands of all of our customers right now and making a huge difference. It makes them have the ability to make much smarter decisions about their business each and every day."

On top of its earnings beat, Salesforce hit an annual revenue run-rate, or future revenue forecast, of over $10 billion faster than any other enterprise software company, ever.

Benioff touted the software giant's revenue 24 percent growth forecast, attributing it in part to the rapid growth in the customer relationship management market.

"The forecasts are that the CRM market is going to $1 trillion," Benioff told Cramer. "The CRM market has gone from being an also-ran market in enterprise software to the largest and most important market in enterprise software. It used to be operating systems, it used to be databases, it used to be other things in enterprise software. Now it's all about CRM and we are No. 1 in the fastest growing segment in enterprise software. That is growing our revenue so dramatically."

Salesforce's earnings were also driven by an array of new clients including luxury fashion brand Louis Vuitton and the United States Department of Veterans Affairs.

Benioff said Salesforce helped Louis Vuitton produce a tech-enabled watch tied to an app connected with Salesforce.

But Salesforce's biggest new client, one of the largest auto manufacturers in the world, asked the cloud company not to publicly name them.

"[They] signed a wall-to-wall agreement with us in sales, in service, in marketing, in commerce, in all these areas," Benioff said. "Very exciting."

The Department of Veterans Affairs, on the other hand, commissioned Salesforce to create an assortment of high-quality systems to help veterans connect to their customers.

When Cramer asked Benioff how he felt working for President Donald Trump's administration in light of recent controversy, the Salesforce chief offered a measured response.

"I've worked with three administrations, and I have a set of core values," Benioff said. "One of them [is] equality. Another one is love. And the things that are important to me don't change. Administrations change."

The CEO said that when Trump asked him for advice, Benioff told him to focus on apprenticeships given the rise of artificial intelligence and, following that, job displacement.

"We need to make sure we do more job retraining, and that's why we're working to have a 5 million apprenticeship dream," Benioff told Cramer. "But for the CEOs who call me and say, 'What should I do? Should I resign? Should I stay? Should I go?' I don't really know what to tell them, because I didn't join any of the councils because I really learned a long time ago the best thing I can do is just give my best advice. And the best way that I can give my best advice is not to be encumbered with any job with any administration."

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Salesforce's Marc Benioff details cloud giant's push into AI, dishes on secret client - CNBC

Soldiers march during a changing of the Guard at the Mamayev Kurgan World War Two memorial complex and Mother Homeland statue (back) in Volgograd, Russia

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Italian emergency workers rescue a baby (C) after an earthquake hit the popular Italian tourist island of Ischia, off the coast of Naples, causing several buildings to collapse overnight. A magnitude-4.0 earthquake struck the Italian holiday island of Ischia, causing destruction that left two people dead at peak tourist season, authorities said, as rescue workers struggled to free two children from the rubble

AFP/Mauro Pagnano

Damage to the portside is visible as the Guided-missile destroyer USS John S. McCain (DDG 56) steers towards Changi naval base in Singapore following a collision with the merchant vessel Alnic MC. The USS John S. McCain was docked at Singapore's naval base with "significant damage" to its hull after an early morning collision with the Alnic MC as vessels from several nations searched Monday for missing U.S. sailors.

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A protester covers her eyes with a China flag to imply Goddess of Justice during the rally supporting young activists Joshua Wong, Nathan Law and Alex Chow in central in Hong Kong, Hong Kong. Pro-democracy activists Joshua Wong, Nathan Law and Alex Chow were jailed last week after being convicted of unlawful assembly.

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An extreme cycling enthusiast performs a stunt with a bicycle before falling into the East Lake in Wuhan, Hubei province, China. This activity, which requires participants to ride their bikes and jump into the lake, attracts many extreme cycling enthusiasts from the city.

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People gather around tributes laid on Las Ramblas near to the scene of yesterday's terrorist attack in Barcelona, Spain. Fourteen people were killed and dozens injured when a van hit crowds in the Las Ramblas area of Barcelona on Thursday. Spanish police have also killed five suspected terrorists in the town of Cambrils to stop a second terrorist attack.

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Participants take part in Panjat Pinang, a pole climbing contest, as part of festivities marking Indonesia's 72nd Independence Day on Ancol beach in Jakarta. Panjat Pinang, a tradition dating back to the Dutch colonial days, is one of the most popular traditions for celebrating Indonesia's Independence Day.

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Demonstrators participate in a march and rally against white supremacy in downtown Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Demonstrations are being held following clashes between white supremacists and counter-protestors in Charlottesville, Virginia over the weekend. Heather Heyer, 32, was killed in Charlottesville when a car allegedly driven by James Alex Fields Jr. barreled into a crowd of counter-protesters following violence at the Unite the Right rally.

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South Korea protesters hold placards with an illustration of U.S. President Donald Trump during a during a 72nd Liberation Day rally in Seoul, South Korea. Korea was liberated from Japan's 35-year colonial rule on August 15, 1945 at the end of World War II.

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The Chattrapathi Shivaji Terminus railway station is lit in the colours of India's flag ahead of the country's Independence Day in Mumbai. Indian Independence Day is celebrated annually on 15 August, and this year marks 70 years since British India split into two nations Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan and millions were uprooted in one of the largest mass migrations in history

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A demonstrator holds up a picture of Heather Heyer during a demonstration in front of City Hall for victims of the Charlottesville, Virginia tragedy, and against racism in Los Angeles, California, USA. Rallies have been planned across the United States to demonstrate opposition to the violence in Charlottesville

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Jessica Mink (R) embraces Nicole Jones (L) during a vigil for those who were killed and injured when a car plowed into a crowd of anti-fascist counter-demonstrators marching near a downtown shopping area Charlottesville, Virginia

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White nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the alt-right clash with counter-protesters as they enter Lee Park during the Unite the Right in Charlottesville, Virginia. After clashes with anti-fascist protesters and police the rally was declared an unlawful gathering and people were forced out of Lee Park

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A North Korean flag is seen on top of a tower at the propaganda village of Gijungdong in North Korea, as a South Korean flag flutters in the wind in this picture taken near the border area near the demilitarised zone separating the two Koreas in Paju, South Korea

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A firefighter extinguishes flames as a fire engulfs an informal settlers area beside a river in Manila

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A rally in support of North Korea's stance against the US, on Kim Il-Sung square in Pyongyang.

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Rocks from the collapsed wall of a hotel building cover a car after an earthquake outside Jiuzhaigou, Sichuan province

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People in Seoul, South Korea walk by a local news program with an image of US President Donald Trump on Wednesday 9 August. North Korea and the United States traded escalating threats, with Mr Trump threatening Pyongyang with fire and fury like the world has never seen

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A Maasai woman waits in line to vote in Lele, 130 km (80 miles) south of Nairobi, Kenya. Kenyans are going to the polls today to vote in a general election after a tightly-fought presidential race between incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta and main opposition leader Raila Odinga

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Pro-government supporters march in Caracas, Venezuela on 7 August

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Children pray after releasing paper lanterns on the Motoyasu river facing the Atomic Bomb Dome in remembrance of atomic bomb victims on the 72nd anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, western Japan.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin (L), accompanied by defence minister Sergei Shoigu, gestures as he fishes in the remote Tuva region in southern Siberia.

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A family claiming to be from Haiti drag their luggage over the US-Canada border into Canada from Champlain, New York, U.S. August 3, 2017.

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A disabled man prepares to cast his vote at a polling station in Kigali, Rwanda, August 4, 2017

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ATTENTION EDITORS -People carry the body of Yawar Nissar, a suspected militant, who according to local media was killed during a gun battle with Indian security forces at Herpora village, during his funeral in south Kashmir's Anantnag district August 4, 2017.

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A general view shows a flooded area in Sakon Nakhon province, Thailand August 4, 2017.

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A plane landed in Sao Joao Beach, killing two people, in Costa da Caparica, Portugal August 2, 2017

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Hermitage Capital CEO William Browder waits to testify before a continuation of Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., July 27, 2017

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TOPSHOT - Moto taxi driver hold flags of the governing Rwanda Patriotic Front's at the beginning of a parade in Kigali, on August 02, 2017. Incumbent Rwandan President Paul Kagame will close his electoral campaigning ahead of the August 4, presidential elections which he is widely expected to win giving him a third term in office

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TOPSHOT - Migrants wait to be rescued by the Aquarius rescue ship run by non-governmental organisations (NGO) "SOS Mediterranee" and "Medecins Sans Frontieres" (Doctors Without Borders) in the Mediterranean Sea, 30 nautic miles from the Libyan coast, on August 2, 2017.

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Two children hold a placard picturing a plane as they take part in a demonstration in central Athens outside the German embassy with others refugees and migrants to protest against the limitation of reunification of families in Germany, on August 2, 2017.

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Flames erupt as clashes break out while the Constituent Assembly election is being carried out in Caracas, Venezuela, July 30, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlins

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People in the village of Gabarpora carry the remains of Akeel Ahmad Bhat, a civilian who according to local media died following clashes after two militants were killed in an encounter with Indian security forces in Hakripora in south Kashmir's Pulwama district, August 2, 2017. REUTERS/Danish Ismail

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- Incumbent Rwandan President Paul Kagame gestures as he arrives for the closing rally of the presidential campaign in Kigali, on August 2, 2017 while supporters greet him. Rwandans go the polls on August 4, 2017 in a presidential election in which strongman Paul Kagame is widely expected to cruise to a third term in office.

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Soldiers of China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) get ready for the military parade to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the foundation of the army at Zhurihe military training base in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China.

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Cyclists at the start of the first stage of the Tour de Pologne cycling race, over 130km from Krakow's Main Market Square, Poland

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Israeli border guards keep watch as Palestinian Muslim worshippers pray outside Jerusalem's old city overlooking the Al-Aqsa mosque compound

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A supporter of Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif passes out after the Supreme Court's decision to disqualify Sharif in Lahore

Reuters/Mohsin Raza

Australian police officers participate in a training scenario called an 'Armed Offender/Emergency Exercise' held at an international passenger terminal located on Sydney Harbour

Reuters/David Gray

North Korean soldiers watch the south side as the United Nations Command officials visit after a commemorative ceremony for the 64th anniversary of the Korean armistice at the truce village of Panmunjom in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) dividing the two Koreas

Reuters/Jung Yeon-Je

Bangladeshi commuters use a rickshaw to cross a flooded street amid heavy rainfall in Dhaka. Bangladesh is experiencing downpours following a depression forming in the Bay of Bengal.

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The Soyuz MS-05 spacecraft for the next International Space Station (ISS) crew of Paolo Nespoli of Italy, Sergey Ryazanskiy of Russia, and Randy Bresnik of the U.S., is transported from an assembling hangar to the launchpad ahead of its upcoming launch, at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Baikonur, Kazakhstan

Reuters/Shamil Zhumatov

A protester shouts at U.S. President Donald Trump as he is removed from his rally with supporters in an arena in Youngstown, Ohio

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Indian supporters of Gorkhaland chant slogans tied with chains during a protest march in capital New Delhi. Eastern India's hill resort of Darjeeling has been rattled at the height of tourist season after violent clashes broke out between police and hundreds of protesters of the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM) a long-simmering separatist movement that has long called for a separate state for ethnic Gorkhas in West Bengal. The GJM wants a new, separate state of "Gorkhaland" carved out of eastern West Bengal state, of which Darjeeling is a part.

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Demonstrators clash with riot security forces while rallying against Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro's government in Caracas, Venezuela. The banner on the bridge reads "It will be worth it"

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The Heathcote river as it rises to high levels in Christchurch, New Zealand. Heavy rain across the South Island in the last 24 hours has caused widespread damage and flooding with Dunedin, Waitaki, Timaru and the wider Otago region declaring a state of emergency.

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A mourner prays at a memorial during an event to commemorate the first anniversary of the shooting spree that one year ago left ten people dead, including the shooter in Munich, Germany. One year ago 18-year-old student David S. shot nine people dead and injured four others at and near a McDonalds restaurant and the Olympia Einkaufszentrum shopping center. After a city-wide manhunt that caused mass panic and injuries David S. shot himself in a park. According to police David S., who had dual German and Iranian citizenship, had a history of mental troubles.

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Palestinians react following tear gas that was shot by Israeli forces after Friday prayer on a street outside Jerusalem's Old City

Reuters/Ammar Awad

Ousted former Thai prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra greets supporters as she arrives at the Supreme Court in Bangkok, Thailand

Reuters/Athit Perawongmetha

Marek Suski of Law and Justice (PiS) (C) party scuffles with Miroslaw Suchon (2nd L) of Modern party (.Nowoczesna) as Michal Szczerba of Civic Platform (PO) (L) party holds up a copy of the Polish Constitution during the parliamentary Commission on Justice and Human Rights voting on the opposition's amendments to the bill that calls for an overhaul of the Supreme Court in Warsaw

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AI is coming to war, regardless of Elon Musk's well-meaning concern - The Independent

It's considerably more flexible than many of its hard-coded rivals, too. It relies on a 'soft' dynamic neural network processing engine dropped into off-the-shelf FPGA chips where competitors often need their approach locked in from the outset. It can handle Microsoft's own AI framework (Cognitive Toolkit), but it can also work with Google's TensorFlow and other systems. You can build a machine learning system the way you like and expect it to run in real-time, instead of letting the hardware dictate your methods.

To no one's surprise, Microsoft plans to make Project Brainwave available through its own Azure cloud services (it's been big on advanced tech in Azure as of late) so that companies can make use of live AI. There's no guarantee it will receive wide adoption, but it's evident that Microsoft doesn't want to cede any ground to Google, Facebook and others that are making a big deal of internet-delivered AI. It's betting that companies will gladly flock to Azure if they know they have more control over how their AI runs.

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Microsoft built a hardware platform for real-time AI - Engadget

Will artificial intelligence bring a utopia of plenty? Or a dystopic hellscape? Will we, jobless and destitute, scavenge for scraps outside the walls of a few techno-trillionaires? Or will we work alongside machines, achieving new levels of productivity and fulfillment? The tech world has no lack of prognosticators: Bill Gates and Elon Musk, for example, see in AI an existential threat to the human species, while Ray Kurzweil thinks it cant come soon enough.

Silicon Slopes and big data

In fact, artificial intelligence is already here, and has been for some time. While many mistakenly equate AI with consciousnessHollywood has done the robot-gains-consciousness plot to deaththe two are distinct phenomena. As Noah Yuval Harari discusses in Homo Deus, AI need not be conscious to possess superhuman intelligence. Nor is it likely to be. Already, in domain-specific tasks, non-conscious computers are far beyond humans in intelligence. Watson beat humans at Jeopardy back in 2011; more recently, Googles AlphaGo AI beat Korean Grandmaster Lee Sodol for the fifth consecutive time at the incredibly complex game of Go. And, to those who point out the narrow scope within which such AIs can function, just remember how rapidly the scope has expanded in only a few years.

AI depends on intelligent algorithms, and such algorithms depend on the analysis of vast amounts of data. Which is why Utah is on the map with regard to AI advancement. The so-called Silicon Slopes has become, per Mark Gorenberg, a world leader in data analytics. Gorenberg should know. He serves as managing director of Zetta Venture Partners, an AI-focused venture capital firm based in San Francisco, and has invested in a number of Utah companies. The notion of analytics has become a cornerstone of Utah technology, he says.

Utah boasts high-profile data firms like Domo, Omniture (now part of Adobe) and Qualtrics, to be sure. But it also has an ecosystem of lesser-known players. Teem, for example, started by putting software on an iPad so that corporate teams could book conference rooms, Gorenberg explains. In the process, they gathered a ton of data that allows them to predict the digital workplace of the future. One Click Retail (my employerfull disclosure) uses machine learning and Amazon.com data points to help sellers optimize ecommerce operations. InsideSales employs data analytics to accelerate sales productivity by identifying the highest ROI accounts, contacts and action steps. Verscend, a healthcare analytics company, utilizes data in meaningful ways to bring our customers smarter and more effective analytics, per the company website.

But will robots dispossess us of gainful employment?

Utahs tech sector is clearly positioned to benefit from the emergence of data-driven intelligent algorithms. Well and goodbut were still left with the trillion-dollar question: Will smart machines eventually take our jobs? Are we fated to be like the typewriterthe human being as obsolete technologywhile artificial intelligence becomes, metaphorically, the word processor and laser printer? In many areas, yes. According to Gorenberg, however, there will be just as many areas in which the new AI frontier creates jobs. Sure, well lose jobs, he says. But what people arent seeing is the jobs well be gaining.

Take autonomous vehicles, Gorenberg continues by way of example. Sure, a lot of people who drive for a livingtaxi drivers, truckers, etc.will no longer be needed. At the same time, think of the downtown areas of cities. Traffic-congested urban centers no longer need be congested; sophisticated algorithms will route traffic for maximum flow. Intelligent cars, free from human errorand human distractionwill travel faster and in tighter formations, with far fewer accidents.

Then theres the issue of parking. The average downtown area uses 30 percent of its space for parking, Gorenberg notes. Those cars just sit there all day while their owners work. If the hive mind of the autonomous vehicle system knows exactly what transit is needed, and when, it can provide it at a moments notice. Fewer cars will be needed, and they can be kept outside the city center and brought in to meet demand.

Thirty percent of a citys downtown is a lot of area. Gorenberg describes the construction frenzy that will occur as the whole nature of downtowns change from all that prime acreage suddenly available. He imagines a city center could include gardens, urban manufacturing and much more.

Sure, well lose jobs. But what people arent seeing is the jobs well begaining. Mark Gorenberg, managing director, Zetta Venture Partners

And, in his vision of urban reconfiguration, Gorenberg sees beyond the myriad blue-collar jobs that such massive projects will create. Not only will you need construction workers and the like; youll need architects, city designers and planners, software development and IOT implementation, he says. There will be a need for energy experts and water experts and all of the various disciplines it takes to make a city highly functional. In short, the reuse of urban space for the next generation of cities will be a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity and will create millions of jobs at all levels.

Would you like your automation full or partial?

Economist James Bessen would agree with Gorenberg. In his article How computer automation affects occupations: Technology, jobs and skills, he concedes that full automation might indeed result in job losses. However, most automation ispartialonly some tasks are automated. In fact, as he details in his study, out of 270 occupations listed in the 1950 Census, only onethat of elevator operatorhas disappeared. Bessen claims that most job losses are not the result of machines replacing humans, but of humans using machines to replace other humans, as graphic designers with computers replaced typesetters. Or, as Mark Gorenberg puts it, this [artificial intelligence revolution] is no different than any other technology wave.

Are Bessen and Gorenberg overly optimistic, perhaps even nave, about the potential of artificial intelligence to replace humans? Or are AI alarmists a bunch of Luddites? Such questions can only be answered retrospectively. In the present, however, the incontrovertible fact is that intelligent algorithms are helping humans get better at their jobs. We dont know whether, as Alibaba CEO Jack Ma predicts, algorithms will one day be CEOs. What we do know, in the words of Gorenberg, is that a [human] CEO empowered with data is a better CEO.

So the short-to-medium-term prognosis is that human plus machine equals a better work unit than either on its own. Humans empowered by machine learning, data and sophisticated algorithms can outcompete regular old humans in the knowledge economy.

InsideSales has a dataset of over 100 billion sales interactions, says CEO Dave Elkington. The firms intelligent algorithms use this ocean of data to guide salespeople. Often, the lift provided by our software is so extreme as to make our users wonder if there might have been a reporting error. Data-powered, AI-guided salespeople. How can regular salespeople, doing things the old-fashioned way, compete? Most likely, they wont be able to.

Intelligent machines will also extend human abilities in important ways. To illustrate: the developed world (to say nothing of the developing world) faces a shortage of doctors, both generalists and specialists. I believe that AI augmenting healthcare will allow more people to perform healthcare services that today only a few can do, says Gorenberg, adding that, for example, an AI could work side by side with nurses and allow them to take expert ultrasounds and other medical images that today have to be done by a select set of experts. Thousands of high-skill nursing jobs would open up. Whats more, if lower-level professionals can do advanced medical work that is currently the exclusive domain of doctors, doctors will be free to focus on aspects of medicine for which a human with 710 years of medical training is uniquely suited.

Often, the lift provided by our software is so extreme as to make our users wonder if there might have been a reporting error. Dave Elkington, CEO, InsideSales.com

The third wave of tech revolution

If steam power was the first technological wave, and software/internet the second, artificial intelligence could well be the third. In Gorenbergs vision, the huge number of new data science and analytics positions that this upheaval will demand will compare with the millions of developer jobs created by software 25 years ago.

Over the next 510 years and beyond, well see in exactly which ways AI revolutionizes industry and business. One thing, however, is clear: Its happening, and its going to be big. And, here in Utah, were smack in the technological middle.

Jacob Andra is a writer andcontent marketing consultantin Salt Lake City, Utah. You can find him onLinkedInandTwitter.

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How will AI shape the workforce of the future? - Utah Business

Artificial intelligence labs race to develop processors that are bigger, faster, stronger.

With major companies rolling out AI chips and smaller startups nipping at their heels, theres no denying that the future of artificial intelligence is indeed already upon us. While each boasts slightly different features, theyre all striving to provide ease of use, speed, and versatility. Manufacturers are demonstrating more adaptability than ever before, and are rapidly developing new versions to meet a growing demand.

In a marketplace that promises to do nothing but grow, these four are braced for impact.

The Verge reports that Qualcomms processors account for approximately 40% of the mobile market, so their entry into the AI game is no surprise. Theyre taking a slightly different approach thoughadapt existing technology that utilizes Qualcomms strengths. Theyve developed a Neural Processing Engine, which is an SDK that allows develops to optimize apps to run different AI applications on Snapdragon 600 and 800 processors. Ultimately, this integration means greater efficiency.

Facebook has already begun using its SDK to speed up augmented reality filters within the mobile app. Qualcomms website says that it may also be used to help a devices camera recognize objects and detect object for better shot composition, as well as make on-device post-processing beautification possible. They also promise more capabilities via the virtual voice assistant, and assure users of the broad market applications--from healthcare to security, on myriad mobile and embedded devices, they write. They also boast superior malware protection.

It allows you to choose your core of choice relative to the power performance profile you want for your user, said Gary Brotman, Qualcomm head of AI and machine learning.

Qualcomms SDK works with popular AI frameworks, including Tensor Flow, Caffe, and Caffe2.

Googles AI chip showed up relatively early to the AI game, disrupting what had been a pretty singular marketplace. And Googles got no plans to sell the processor, instead distributing it via a new cloud service from which anyone can build and operate software via the internet that utilizes hundreds of processors packed into Google data centers, reports Wired.

The chip, called TPU 2.0 or Cloud TPU, is a followup to the initial processor that brought Googles AI services to fruition, though it can be used to train neural networks and not just run them like its predecessor. Developers need to learn a different way of building neural networks since it is designed for Tensorflow, but they expectgiven that the chips affordabilitythat users will comply. Google has mentioned that researchers who share their research with the greater public will receive access for free.

Jeff Dean, who leads the AI lab Google Brain, says that the chip was needed to train with greater efficiency. It can handle180 trillion floating point operations per second. Several chips connect to form a pod, that offers 11,500 teraflops of computing power, which means that it takes only six hours to train 32 CPU boards on a portion of a podpreviously, it took a full day.

Intel offers an AI chip via the Movidius Neural Compute Stick, which is a USB 3.0 device with a specialized vision processing unit. Its meant to complement the Xeon and Xeon Phi, and costs only $79.

While it is optimized for vision applications, Intel says that it can handle a variety of DNN applications. They write, Designed for product developers, researchers and makers, the Movidius Neural Compute Stick aims to reduce barriers to developing, tuning and deploying AI applications by delivering dedicated high-performance deep-neural network processing in a small form factor.

The stick is powered by a VPU like what you might find in smart security cameras, AI drones, and industrial equipment. It can be used with trained Caffe framework-based feed-forward Convolutional Neural Network or the user may choose another pre-trained network, Intel reports. The Movidius Neural Compute Stick supports Cnn profiling, prototyping, and tuningworkflow,provides power and data over a single USB Type A port, does not require cloud connectivity, and runs multiple devices on the same platform.

From Raspberry Pi to PC, the Movidius Neural Compute Stick can be used with any USB 3.0 platform.

NVIDIA was the first to get really serious about AI, but theyre even more serious now. Their new chipthe Tesla V100is a data center GPU. Reportedly, it made enough of a stir that itcaused NVIDIA's shares to jump 17.8% on the day following the announcement.

The chip stands apart in training, which typically requires multiplying matrices of data a single number at a time. Instead, the Volta GPU architecture multiplies rows and columns at once, which speeds up the AI training process.

With 640 Tensor Cores,Volta is five times faster than Pascal and reduces the training time from 18 hours to 7.4 and uses next generation high-speed interconnect technology which, according to the website, enables more advanced model and data parallel approaches for strong scaling to achieve the absolute highest application performance.

Heard of more AI chips coming down the pipe? Let us know in the comments below!

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Intel, Qualcomm, Google, and NVIDIA Race to Develop AI Chips and Platforms - All About Circuits

One of the worlds most famous living artists is headed to New York City this fall, and hes bringing a massive public art project with him.

Ai Weiwei, the prolific Chinese artist and activist famously profiled in the documentary Never Sorry, is behind the ambitious Good Fences Make Good Neighbors project set to take over NYC this October. Commissioned by the Public Art Fund, the five-borough exhibition will involve over 300 locations and hundreds of individual artworks, turning the sprawling city into an unconventional canvas for his collage-like experiment.

According to a statement announcing the projects specific locations on Tuesday, Ais upcoming intervention was inspired by the international migration crisis and current global geopolitical landscape. The exhibition will use the concept of a security fence, something long touted by President Donald Trump, as its central visual element.

Ai Weiweis work is extraordinarily timely, but its not reducible to a single political gesture, Nicholas Baume, the director and chief curator of Public Art Fund, told HuffPost. The exhibition grows out of his own life and work, including his childhood experience of displacement during the Cultural Revolution, his formative years as an immigrant and student in NYC in the 1980s, and his more recent persecution as an artist-activist in China. It reflects his profound empathy with other displaced people, particularly migrants, refugees and victims of war.

The exhibition has been in development for several years, he added, so the election of President Trump has only added to its relevance.

In an earlier interview with The New York Times, Ai explained more directly that the work is a reaction to a retreat from the essential attitude of openness in American politics, though he did not explicitly mention Trumps desire to erect a wall on the border between Mexico and the U.S.

The fence has always been a tool in the vocabulary of political landscaping and evokes associations with words like border, security, and neighbor, Ai said in a statement on Tuesday. But whats important to remember is that while barriers have been used to divide us, as humans we are all the same. Some are more privileged than others, but with that privilege comes a responsibility to do more.

The name Good Fences Make Good Neighbors comes from a Robert Frost poem called Mending Wall, which Baume sent to Ai early in the projects development.The poem includes the ambiguous phrase Ai used as his title, as well as the line, Before I built a wall Id ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out / And to whom I was like to give offence.

He loved the clarity and directness of Frosts writing, and the subtle irony of this famous refrain, Baume added.

Physically, the exhibition will involve large-scale, site-specific, freestanding works, some described as sculptural interventions that will be installed in public spaces like Central Park, Washington Square Park and Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, as well as on private walls and buildings. Beyond the sculptures, Ai will display a series of 200 two-dimensional works on lamppost banners and 100 documentary images on bus shelters and newsstands. The photos were taken during the artists travels to research the international refugee crisis, and they will be coupled with text about displaced people around the world.

This is clearly not an exhibition of conventional, off-the-shelf fences, Baume said.[Ai] has taken the familiar and utilitarian material of metal fencing, which has many forms, as a basic motif. He has created multiple variations on that theme, exploring the potential of the material as a sculptural element, adapted to different locations in very site-responsive ways. Some installations are more straightforward, some more complex, but they all share this basic DNA.

Good Fences will open to the public on Oct.12 and will run until Feb. 11, marking the Public Art Funds 40th anniversary. Since its inception, the organizations mission has revolved around providing public access to contemporary art, a goal Baume said is more relevant than ever. In the past, the Fund has organized projects like Anish Kapoors Sky Mirror (2006) at the Rockefeller Center and Tatzu Nishis Discovering Columbus (2012) at Columbus Circle.

See a detailed list of the locations for Good Fences by downloading the available press releaseon Public Art Funds website. Ai Weiwei: Good Fences Make Good Neighbors will be on view from Oct. 12, 2017, to Feb. 11, 2018.

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Ai Weiwei Is Building Fences All Over NYC In A Powerful Public Art Project - HuffPost

One hundred and sixteen roboticists and AI researchers, including SpaceX founder Elon Musk and Google Deepmind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, have signed a letter to the United Nations calling for strict oversight of autonomous weapons, a.k.a. "killer robots." Though the letter itself is more circumspect, an accompanying press release says the group wants "a ban on their use internationally."

Other signatories of the letter include executives and founders from Denmarks Universal Robotics, Canadas Element AI, and Frances Aldebaran Robotics.

The letter describes the risks of robotic weaponry in dire terms, and says that the need for strong action is urgent. It is aimed at a group of UN officials considering adding robotic weapons to the UNs Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons . Dating back to 1981, the Convention and parallel treaties currently restrict chemical weapons, blinding laser weapons, mines, and other weapons deemed to cause unnecessary or unjustifiable suffering to combatants or to affect civilians indiscriminately.

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Robotic warriors could arguably reduce casualties among human soldiers at least, those of the wealthiest and most advanced nations. But the risk to civilians is the headline concern of Musk and Suleymans group, who write that these can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways."

The letter also warns that failure to act swiftly will lead to an arms race towards killer robots but thats arguably already underway. Autonomous weapons systems or precursor technologies are available or under development from firms including Raytheon , Dassault , MiG , and BAE Systems.

Element AI founder Yoshua Bengio had another intriguing warning that weaponizing AI could actually hurt the further development of AIs good applications. Thats precisely the scenario foreseen in Frank Herberts sci-fi novel Dune, set in a universe where all thinking machines are banned because of their role in past wars.

The UN weapons group was due to meet on Monday, August 21, but that meeting has reportedly been delayed until November.

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Elon Musk and AI Experts Call for Total Ban on Robotic Weapons - Fortune