Category Archives: Ai

Forbes

Robotics, AI, And Cognitive Computing Are Changing Organizations Even Faster Than We Thought Forbes The world of AI, robotics and cognitive computing are changing business even faster than we thought. JPMorgan Chase & Co now uses software to perform the mind-numbing job of interpreting commercial loans, reducing 360,000 hours of lawyer time each ...

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Robotics, AI, And Cognitive Computing Are Changing Organizations Even Faster Than We Thought - Forbes

For many of its nearly 2 billion users, Facebook is the primary channel of communication, a place where they can share their thoughts, post pictures and discuss every imaginable topic of interest.

Including suicide.

Six years ago, Facebook posted a page offering advice on how to help people who post suicidal thoughts on the social network. But in the year since it made its live-streaming feature, Facebook Live, available to all users, Facebook has seen some people use its technology to let the world watch them kill themselves.

TOO MUCH SOCIAL MEDIA USE LINKED TO FEELINGS OF ISOLATION

After at least three users committed suicide on Facebook Live late last year, the companys chairman and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, addressed the issue in the official company manifesto he posted in February:

"To prevent harm, we can build social infrastructure to help our community identify problems before they happen. When someone is thinking of suicide or hurting themselves, we've built infrastructure to give their friends and community tools that could save their life.

There are billions of posts, comments and messages across our services each day, and since it's impossible to review all of them, we review content once it is reported to us. There have been terribly tragic events like suicides, some live streamed that perhaps could have been prevented if someone had realized what was happening and reported them sooner. These stories show we must find a way to do more."

Now, in its effort to do more, the company is using artificial intelligence and pattern recognition to identify suicidal thoughts in posts and live streams and to flag those posts for a team that can follow up, typically via Facebook Messenger.

FACEBOOK REPORTS JOURNALISTS TO THE COPS FOR REPORTING CHILD PORN TO FACEBOOK

Were testing pattern recognition to identify posts as very likely to include thoughts of suicide, product manager Vanessa Callison-Burch, researcher Jennifer Guadagno and head of global safety Antigone Davis wrote in a blog post.

Our Community Operations team will review these posts and, if appropriate, provide resources to the person who posted the content, even if someone on Facebook has not reported it yet.

Using artificial intelligence and pattern recognition, Facebook will monitor millions of posts to identify common behaviors among potential suicides, something a human intervention expert could never do.

FACEBOOK ADDS SUICIDE-PREVENTION TOOLS FOR LIVE VIDEO

But it still doesnt go far enough, some experts say.

Cheryl Karp Eskin, program director at Teen Line, said using artificial intelligence (AI) to identify patterns holds great promise in detecting expressions of suicidal thoughts but it wont necessarily decrease the number of suicides.

There has been very little progress in preventing suicides in the last 50 years. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among 15- to 29-year-olds, and the rate in that age group continues to rise.

Eskin expressed concerns that the technology might wrongly flag posts, or that users might hide their feelings if they knew a machine learning algorithm was watching them.

A TECHNICAL GLITCH LEFT SOME FACEBOOK USERS LOCKED OUT OF THEIR ACCOUNTS

AI is not a substitute for human interaction, as there are many nuances of speech and expression that a machine may not understand, she said. There are people who are dark and deep, but not suicidal. I also worry that people will shut down if they are identified incorrectly and not share some of their feelings in the future.

Joel Selanikio, MD, an assistant professor at Georgetown University who started the AI-powered company Magpi, said Facebook has a large data set of users, which helps AI parse language constantly and enables it to work more effectively.

But even if AI helps Facebook identify suicidal thoughts, that doesnt mean it can help determine the best approach for prevention.

FIFTH-GRADER HITS POLICE FACEBOOK SITE FOR EMERGENCY HOMEWORK HELP

Right now, Selanikio said, my understanding is that it just tells the suicidal person to seek help. I can imagine other situations, for example in the case of a minor, where the system notifies the parents. Or in the case of someone under psychiatric care, this might alert the clinician.

Added Wendy Whitsett, a licensed counselor, I would like to learn more about the plan for follow-up support, after the crisis had ended, and helping the user obtain services and various levels of support utilizing professional and peer support, as well as support from friends, neighbors, pastors, and others.

I am also interested to know if the algorithms are able to detect significant life events that would indicate increased risk factors and offer assistance with early intervention.

Technology has moved from offering assistance to people who view others suicidal posts to using artificial intelligence and pattern recognition to track and flag the posts automatically. But that, the experts say, is just the beginning. Facebook still has a long way to go.

Next, they hope, Facebook will be able to use AI to predict behavior and intervene in real-time to help those in need.

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Facebook is using AI to identify suicidal thoughts -- but it's not ... - Fox News

TechCrunch

Astro raises an $8 million Series A for its AI-powered email solution for teams TechCrunch But the real story is that the startup, backed with a new $8 million Series A led by Redpoint, is gearing up to pitch enterprises on its collaboration platform that combines AI, social graphs and integrations with common CRM, ticketing and group ... Astro aims to fix your email mess with an AI chatbot - The VergeThe Verge Astro is an AI-powered email client with big dreams | PCWorldPCWorld Astro raises $8.3 million for its email app with AI assistantVentureBeat all 5 news articles »

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Astro raises an $8 million Series A for its AI-powered email solution for teams - TechCrunch

While I came across only six artificial intelligence/machine learning acquisitions last month, at least half of them should be of keen interest to marketers and media moguls. And if youre still on the fence about how big a deal artificial intelligence is, check out this list of February buyers (in alpha order): Apple, Baidu, Cond Nast, Ford, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Meltwater Group, the media analytics firm.

Superficially, at least, Apples deal for Israeli start-up RealFace (variously reported as worth $2 million to several million) appears not to involve marketing. RealFace has AI-based facial recognition technology that can be used to verify who you are, so is considered a cybersecurity company that does user authentication: eliminating passwords while improving security, that sort of thing.

But, looking deeper, theres a train of thought suggesting RealFace could play a key role in Apples solution to a critical authentication problem related to the future of conversational user interfaces.

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Think about it: Anybody in your house can order up merchandise on your Amazon Echo, right? It doesnt differentiate whos speaking. As chatbots become the universal UI everyone expects them to be, there will be myriad applications where youd want to know that the user is truly authorized to do the thing he or she is doing.

More and more, AI will not only power the brains behind the conversation between marketers and audiences, but through video-based facial recognition and audio-based voice recognition it will make sure you know exactly whos doing the talking.

BTW, this isnt Apples only facial recognition AI acquisition: last year it bought Emotient, whose technology helped advertisers understand the emotional connection between advertisements and viewers by evaluating facial expressions in real time to determine attention, engagement and sentiment. Imagine a world where you dont have to guess how the girl feels about you at the end of the first date.

Speaking of conversation-as-a-platform, Baidus February AI deal was for Raven Tech, which makes Chinese Siri-like AI voice assistant technology that never really took off. Raven Techs CEO is being put in charge of Baidus smart home business, and will report to Qi Lu, the Baidu COO hired in January who previously was among the architects of Microsofts conversation-as-a-platform vision.

Cond Nast bought CitizenNet, whose machine learning software leveraged the Facebook Advertising API to reverse-engineer social interactions in order to teach itself to predict advertising CTRs. Thats a bit of an oversimplification, so you may want to check out the CitizenNet CEOs more scientific explanation from his fascinating 2011 post. Cond Nast plans to integrate CitizenNet into the Cond Nast Spire data analytics unit to expand audience targeting capabilities from the companys own audiences to social platforms.

Meltwater acquired Wrapidity. According to TechCrunch, Wrapiditys AI tech can automatically figure out how to navigate web content, what that content is about, and then how to extract the content data in a structured way so that it can be interrogated for different purposes, including media monitoring. That means, for example, Meltwater will be able to quickly on-board new content sources or domains without having to manually decipher its structure and write new scraping rules.

Fords deal for Argo AI does not involve media and marketing, but its notable in that its the only one with an announced price tag: $1 billion. Thats the amount Ford says it will invest in Argo over the next five years in return for its majority stake. The deal is unusual on other fronts: Argo will remain independently operated, with CEO Brian Salesky (of Google driverless car fame) in charge, will be headquartered in Pittsburgh (all the key wetware brains behind Argos AI brains hale from Carnegie Mellon Universitys world-class robotics labs, including Salesky), and will incorporate Fords own team currently in charge of building a virtual driver system for Ford.

So its kind of a reverse-integration: instead of absorbing the company into Ford and allowing it to disappear or dissipate, Ford is throwing its own relevant talent and intellectual capital over the wall into the start-up! Fords stated goal is to achieve full SAE level 4 self-driving capability -- that means fully autonomous, with no human back-up -- by 2021.

HPEs deal was for Niara, one of those cyber intrusion-detection systems. It works by establishing a baseline that defines a given organizations legit cyber activity, and then looks for and investigates any activity that is inconsistent with that baseline.

For those who dont know, thats pretty much SOP cybersecurity stuff. The difference is that its all automated through the magic of machine learning, with time frames required to accomplish the work compressed by many orders of magnitude. Of course, the bad guys will just get their own software to take into battle -- this is, after all, an arms race (go reread Neuromancer, the novel that coined the term cyberspace).

And thats all the AI M&A activity I found for February 2017; you can find the January rundown here. If youre aware of any deals I missed, let me know in the comments below.

The rest is here:

February AI M&A: Big Brands Boost Buying - MediaPost Communications

Top generals from Russia, Turkey, and the U.S. met yesterday in Turkey to discuss tension over the partnerships with local forces fighting ISIS in Syria. Late last week, a buffer zone just outside of Manbij, Syria was created that separates U.S.-backed Kurdish forces, the YPG, from clashes with Turks.

Turkey considers the YPG a terrorist group and said last week it would capture Manbij in a "confrontation" if the U.S. didn't kick out its local fighters.

Why this matters: Instead of splitting their attention between fighting Turkey and ISIS, the U.S.-backed forces can now fully focus on ISIS. Plus, this is a Russian-brokered deal, which is worth noting since this is not the last time rival rebel groups fighting ISIS will clash with one another as they all move closer in on ISIS geographically.

The U.S. called the agreement "a measure of success." Turkey? Not so much: "What Turkey is experiencing with its allies in the West is traumatic We do hope the Trump administration will have a better understanding of Turkey's concerns," Turkey's Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Simsek said.

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The head of Uber's AI labs is latest to leave the company - Axios

Machine learning is the next big thing, says Google with its acquisition of AI site Kaggle.

It doesn't take artificial intelligence to know Google thinks machine learning will be central to your future.

After all, the Silicon Valley powerhouse has been busy creating self-teaching tech that can translate languages, vamp with you on piano, and politely crush you at the ancient Chinese game of Go.

"Over time, the computer itself -- whatever its form factor -- will be an intelligent assistant helping you through your day," Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in his first-ever letter to shareholders, last year. "We will move from mobile first to an AI first world."

Now Google has taken another step toward that future. On Wednesday, the Google Cloud Platform said it had acquired Kaggle, what it calls the world's biggest community for data scientists and machine learning geeks.

Among other things, Kaggle lets AI enthusiasts "climb the world's most elite machine learning leaderboards," "explore and analyze a collection of high quality datasets," and "run code in the cloud and receive community feedback on your work," according to the site.

The Kaggle team will stay together and continue Kaggle as its own brand within Google Cloud, Kaggle CEO Anthony Goldbloom said in a blog post.

Fei-Fei Li, chief scientist, Google Cloud AI and machine learning, said in her own post that the acquisition would give Kaggle members direct access to the most advanced cloud machine learning environment.

"We must lower the barriers of entry to AI and make it available to the largest community of developers, users and enterprises, so they can apply it to their own unique needs," Li wrote. "With Kaggle joining the Google Cloud team, we can accelerate this mission."

So much for avenging your Go loss. Tennis, anyone?

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Google buys Kaggle and its gaggle of AI geeks - CNET

Chinas Uber rival Didi Chuxing has officially opened its U.S.-based research lab. The new center is part of a move to suck up talent beyond Didis current catchment pool in China, particularly in the areas of AI and self-driving vehicles, but it doesnt signal an expansion of itsservice into North America.

The existence of the research center itself isnt new. Last September, TechCrunch wrote that Didi had hired a pair of experienced security experts based in the U.S. Dr Fengmin Gong and Zheng Bu to lead the center, which works closely with another China-based facilitythat opened in late 2015, but now it is officially open.

Dr Gong will lead the facility in Mountain View, and his team of dozens of leading data scientists and researchers will include former Uber researcher Charlie Miller. Miller rose to fame in 2015 when he hacked a journalists vehicle from a laptop 10 miles awayin a pre-arranged stunt to demonstratevulnerabilities within the automotive industry.

Millers job seems much like his role at Uber according to tweets he sent out today. His defection is noteworthy since it appears to be the first major poach that Didi has made from Uber, and it falls in the self-driving car space whereUber has made a huge push.

Didi is looking to make an early impact in Silicon Valley through a partnership with Udacity around self-driving vehicles. The two companies announced a joint contest inviting teams to developan Automated Safety and Awareness Processing Stack (ASAPS) to increasedriving safety for both manual and self-driving vehicles. Five finalists chosen will get a shot at the $100,000 grand prize and the opportunity to work closer with Didi and Udacity on automotive projects.

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China's Didi Chuxing opens US lab to develop AI and self-driving car tech - TechCrunch

Facebook today announced a new server design it calls Big Basin, a successor to its Big Sur line of artificial intelligence training systems. These Nvidia-powered GPU servers, tied together into large training networks for AI software, are what enable Facebook products to perform object and facial recognition and real-time text translation, as well as describe and understand the contents of photos and videos.

Big Basin can now train on learning models 30 percent larger than its predecessor, Facebook says. It can also crunch through the massive number sets used by an AI system to improve itself at nearly twice the speed, according to tests conducted on standardized neural network models.

Facebooks AI training systems just became faster and more capable

Facebook plans to make the server design open to the public in the near future. Thats standard at the company, which participates in and helped create the Open Compute Project for sharing and collaborating on data center hardware and software. So anyone even server design specialists in competing companies will soon be able to download the Big Basin schematics once theyre posted online.

For Facebook, its less about keeping under wraps the tools it uses to train AI systems and more about trying to advance what its AI systems are capable of. Its not just about pushing the limits of technology, though Facebook is among one of the largest organizations investing in cutting-edge and experimental AI research. The companys large investments in AI go hand-in-hand with its push toward live video and other consumer-centric focuses. If youve logged into Facebook, its very likely youve used some type of AI system weve been developing says Kevin Lee, a technical program manager at Facebook who works on Big Basin and other data center initiatives.

For instance, by tagging friends and categorizing videos including those streamed live Facebook may help drive more users to upload video and consume it. Theres also a large social impact the company can have with its AI research. One key function of Facebooks current AI algorithms today is describing the contents of photos to blind users, while just last week Facebook announced it would use AI-powered pattern recognition software to try and identify when troubled users may be in need of mental health outreach. All of this is made possible because the company invests in and continues to develop the servers, like Big Basin, that train these systems before theyre pushed out to public products.

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Facebook's new AI training server is nearly twice as fast - The Verge

Its an insult to people named Trish everywhere.

Even in its success among Silicon Valley nerds, Soylent, the Los Angeles-based meal-replacement drink company, has become something of a parody. In staying true to form the company has invented Trish, its new AI-powered personal assistant. Its mostly useless, but it may answer some of the queries you may have about Soylent products.

No need to buckle your seatbelt, though, the questions you can ask are pretty basic. And the answers are mostly arthritic.

According to the gospel of Soylent, maximum nutrition should be delivered with minimal effort. And while that might be a noble ambition among some crowds, its also led to a fair number of embarrassing headlines, including that time Soylent bars gave people explosive diarrhea. Still, Soylentnamed after the processed food in the sci-fi film Soylent Green that turns out to be made from humanspersists.

The new botcreated by the marketing firm Wieden+Kennedywont just be appearing on Soylents website, according to SocialTech. It will also appear on broadcast and social media. Soylents chief marketing officer, Adam Grablick, told AdAge that Trish is part of an effort to bring the brand to life.

Theres an AI bot frenzy happening in companies, especially at the tech firms where Soylent found many of its earliest and most evangelical users. Facebooks Messenger app has a bunch of them and its founder built his own, which he named Jarvis. US telecom AT&T has a new AI-powered bot named Atticus. Coca-Cola wants an AI bot to create its ads, one has been built to beat humans at Texas Hold Em poker, and theres even one out there watching and interpreting porn. Quartz even has one, which we taught to play old-school Atari games.

Still, Trish isnt all that interesting (you can only ask it so many questions), and only time will tell if it becomes useful over time. In the meantime, maybe buy any real-life friends named Trish a stiffer drink than Soylent.

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Just like all the cool kids, Soylent now has its own pointless AI assistant - Quartz

Photo: Tekla Perry Teal's drone uses the Nvidia Jetson module to identify what its cameras see

People arejust now getting comfortable with the ideathat data from many electronic gadgets they use flies up to the cloud. But going forward, much of that data will stick closer to Earth, processed in hardware that lives at the so-called edgefor example, inside security cameras or drones.

Thats why Nvidia, the processor company whose graphics processing units (GPUs) are powering much of the boom in deep learning, is now focused on the edge. Deepu Talla, vice president and general manager of the companys Tegra businessunit, says bringing AI technology to the edge will make a new class of intelligent machines possible. These devices will enable intelligent video analytics that keep our cities smarter and safer, new kinds of robots that optimize manufacturing, and new collaboration that makes long-distance work more efficient, he said in a statement.

Why the move to the edge? At a press event held Tuesday in San Francisco, Talla gave four main reasons: bandwidth, latency, privacy, and availability. Bandwidth is becoming an issue for cloud processing, he indicated, particularly for video, because cameras in video applications such aspublic safety are moving to 4K resolution and increasing in numbers. By 2020, there will be 1 billion cameras in the world doing public safety and streaming data, he said. Theres not enough upstream bandwidth available to send all this to the cloud. So, processing at the edge will be an absolute necessity.

Latency, he said, becomes an issue in robotics and self-driving cars, applications in which decisions have to be made with lightning speed. Privacy, of course, is easier to protect when data isnt moving around. And availability of the cloud, Talla pointed out, is an issue in many parts of the world where communications are limited.

We will see AI transferring to the edge, he said, with future intelligent applications using a combination of edge and cloud processing.

Nvidia, of course, wasnt painting this glowing picture of edge computing without some self-interest. At the event, the company announced its new edge-processing platform, the Nvidia Jetson TX2. This credit cardsizemodule is a plug-in replacement for the companys Jetson TX1, designed for embedded computing. Depending on how it is applied, it can either run at twice the speed of its predecessor or use half the power. Detailed specs are here. The developer kit costs $600, $300 for educators; the production version will sell for $400.

Developers, showing off their work at the launch event, were happy to point out how they are using or intend to use internal AI processing at the edge. A few examples:

IEEE Spectrums blog featuring the people, places, and passions of the world of technologists in Silicon Valley and its environs. Contact us:t.perry@ieee.org

University of Michigan "micromotes" aim to make the Internet of Things smarter without consuming more power 10Feb

Inventors of the CCD, the pinned photodiode, and the CMOS imager honored with 1 million prize 2Feb

Ubers experiment in San Francisco showed that bicycles and bike lanes are a problem self-driving cars are struggling to crack 31Jan

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang wants his robocar computer package to become an industry standard 5Jan

Supercharged hardware will speed up deep learning in everything from tiny devices to massivedatacenters 29Dec2016

Microchips AWS-ECC508 bakes in securecommunications 22Dec2016

Giving each pixel hundreds of memory cells means CMOS imaging chips will have much faster global shutter speed 16Dec2016

Danish island experiments with demand aggregation 7Dec2016

The company will expand the autonomous-taxi experiment it began some months ago in Singapore 21Nov2016

Seeing isnt just about taking pictures. The real revolution will come when our digital devices understand whats in front of their eyes 3Nov2016

The "Jeep hacker" says denial-of-service attacks against cars are easy hacksand urges people not to buy any car dongles 28Oct2016

AI-powered traffic light coordination would cut time spent in the car, traffic congestion, and emissions 17Oct2016

Self-driving cars require driver-monitoring capability to know when it is safe to hand over control 4Oct2016

A revised draft of regulations proposes doing away with drivers during tests 3Oct2016

If your smart glasses contain a virtual companion who knows exactly what you are doing and has an opinion about it, are you living in an augmented reality? 30Sep2016

Hondas new Acura NSX is the first to marry a V-6 engine to three electric motors for high-speed steering 26Sep2016

A squishy underwater robot with limbs that bend in every direction requires unusual control strategies 15Aug2016

Industry leaders from around the globe use multiphysics simulation to stay ahead of the curve

Applications streamline capacitive touchscreen design and optimize the workflow

Hear from simulation experts about their experience with computational apps and how they are creating the future of numerical simulation

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Nvidia wants AI to Get Out of the Cloud and Into a Camera, Drone, or Other Gadget Near You - IEEE Spectrum