Baidu Doing Drone Forestry Inspections with AI

Recall I worked with forestry management applications, so the need here rings true.  Note the system mentioned PaddlePaddle is open sourced.

Baidu’s deep-learning platform fuels the rise of industrial AI

PaddlePaddle lets developers build applications that can help solve problems in a wide range of industries, from waste management to health care.

by Baidu  ( In TechnologyReview.  This content was produced by Baidu.
It was not written by MIT Technology Review's editorial staff. ) 

AI is driving industrial transformation across a variety of sectors, and we’re just beginning to scratch the surface of AI capabilities. Some industrial innovations are barely noticed, such as forest inspection for fire hazards and prevention, but the benefits of AI when coupled with deep learning have a wide-ranging impact. In Southeast Asia, AI-powered forest drones have helped 155 forestry bureaus expand the range of forest inspections from 40% to 100% and perform up to 200% more efficiently than manual inspections. 

Behind these smart drones are well-trained deep-learning models based on Baidu’s PaddlePaddle, the first open-source deep-learning platform in China. Like mainstream AI frameworks such as Google’s TensorFlow and Facebook’s PyTorch, PaddlePaddle, which was open sourced in 2016, provides software developers of all skill levels with the tools, services, and resources they need to rapidly adopt and implement deep learning at scale. ... " 

Simple Economics of the Blockchain

Considerable and interesting piece, well worth reading if you are considering blockchain use. And a proposition of the Blockchain's value.    Not very technical.

Some Simple Economics of the Blockchain
By Christian Catalini, Joshua S. Gans
Communications of the ACM, July 2020, Vol. 63 No. 7, Pages 80-90  10.1145/3359552

In October 2008, a few weeks after the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act rescued the U.S. financial system from collapse, Satoshi Nakamoto34 introduced a cryptography mailing list to Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic cash system "based on crypto graphic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party." With Bitcoin, for the first time, value could be reliably transferred between two distant, untrusting parties without the need of an intermediary. Through a clever combination of cryptography and game theory, the Bitcoin 'blockchain'—a distributed, public transaction ledger—could be used by any participant in the network to cheaply verify and settle transactions in the cryptocurrency. Thanks to rules designed to incentivize the propagation of new legitimate transactions, to reconcile conflicting information, and to ultimately agree at regular intervals about the true state of a shared ledger (a blockchain)a in an environment where not all participating agents can be trusted, Bitcoin was also the first platform, at scale, to rely on decentralized, Internet-level 'consensus' for its operations. Without involving a central clearinghouse or market maker, the platform was able to settle the transfer of property rights in the underlying digital token (bitcoin) by simply combining a shared ledger with an incentive system designed to securely maintain it.

From an economics perspective, this new market design solution provides some of the advantages of a centralized digital platform (for example, the ability of participants to rely on a shared network and benefit from network effects) without some of the consequences the presence of an intermediary may introduce such as increased market power, ability to renege on commitments to ecosystem participants, control over participants' data, and presence of a single point of failure. As a result, relative to existing financial networks, a cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin may be able to offer lower barriers to entry for new service providers and application developers, and an alternative monetary policy for individuals that do not live in countries with trustworthy institutions. Key commitments encoded in the Bitcoin protocol are its fixed supply, predetermined release schedule, and the fact that rules can only be changed with support from a majority of participants. While the resulting ecosystem may not offer an improvement for individuals living in countries with reliable and independent central banks, it may represent an option in countries that are unable to maintain their monetary policy commitments. Of course, the open and "permissionless" nature of the Bitcoin network, and the inability to adjust its supply also introduce new challenges, as the network can be used for illegal activity, and the value of the cryptocurrency can fluctuate wildly with changes in expectations about its future success, limiting its use as an effective medium of exchange.

In the article, we rely on economic theory to explain how two key costs affected by blockchain technology—the cost of verification of state, and the cost of networking—change the types of transactions that can be supported in the economy. These costs have implications for the design and efficiency of digital platforms, and open opportunities for new approaches to data ownership, privacy, and licensing; monetization of digital content; auctions and reputation systems.   ..." 

Microsoft Relaunches Cortana without Alexa

Was initially impressed by the cooperation between Microsoft and Amazon, but admit I saw little from it.  Why not not have a joint effort to provide assistant intelligence?   All I saw was that you could ask Cortana things like "Ask Alexa ... "  but with little new regard for context of the question.  So you then could ask 'universal' things like the weather, wikipedia entries, states of connected systems ... but nothing that showed intelligence beyond the context of the device involved. Not very impressive beyond language processing.   And now MS has disconnected entirely, but promises continued collaboration.  Below a bit dated, but some insight to the state of assistance.

Microsoft launches Cortana app for Windows 10 without Amazon’s Alexa
By Khari Johnson in Venturebeat

Microsoft AI assistant Cortana is getting a dedicated app today for Windows 10 PCs. Unlike Cortana in the Start menu or pinned to the taskbar, the AI assistant can now function in a dedicated space users can resize, move, and interact with like any other PC program. Cortana responding to text commands in a dedicated app can be used to do things like start meetings, create reminders, ask for info from some native Microsoft apps, automatically suggest responses, and respond to questions like “Do I have an email from my boss?”

At launch, Cortana lead Andrew Shuman told VentureBeat the dedicated Cortana app will not respond to Alexa queries. In what may be the largest such partnership in the spirit of a multi-assistant world, Amazon and Microsoft partnered up in August 2018 to make Cortana available via Amazon Echo speakers and Alexa available through Windows 10. Few public steps have taken place since then to advance or deepen the partnership.  .... '

The Nature of Visual Illusions

Always have been interested in visual illusions, and here a study of probably the most famous one.  These gives us insight into how our brains and seeing apparatus work together in practice.  Shows also too that direct biomimicry may not always be best.    Image examples at the link.

Study sheds light on a classic visual illusion
Neuroscientists delve into how background brightness influences our perception of an object.

By Anne Trafton | MIT News Office

It’s a classic visual illusion: Two gray dots appear on a background that consists of a gradient from light gray to black. Although the two dots are identical, they appear very different based on where they are placed against the background.

Scientists who study the brain have been trying to figure out the mechanism behind this illusion, known as simultaneous brightness contrast, for more than 100 years. An MIT-led study now suggests that this phenomenon relies on brightness estimation that takes place before visual information reaches the brain’s visual cortex, possibly within the retina.

“All of our experiments point to the conclusion that this is a low-level phenomenon,” says Pawan Sinha, a professor of vision and computational neuroscience in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. “The results help answer the question of what is the mechanism that underlies this very fundamental process of brightness estimation, which is a building block of many other kinds of visual analyses.”  ... ' 

IBM Introduces Watson Works with AI

Newly introduced:

Watson Works
Work safe, work smart, and ensure the health and productivity of your people in a changing workplace  ... 

Watson Works is a curated set of products that embeds Watson AI models and applications to help you:

Decide when employees can return to the workplace 
Organize and manage facilities and adhere to new protocols
Answer customer and employee questions on COVID-19
Maximize the effectiveness of contact tracing
Secure and protect your employees and organization

Schedule a consultation  ... 

Marty the Robot at Stop&Shop

Good view of what they are doing with robots at Stop@Shop. Mostly to map and feed video images and alerts to spills.  Will not talk to the shopper.  Impressive rollout.   One of the first examples of in store walking with the shopper.  Have never seen it live, but will make a note to.



Marty the Robot Rolls out AI in the Supermarket  in AI Trends
Marty the supermarket robot is among the first to travel with customers in the store, looking to avoid collisions and find spills.    By John P. Desmond, AI Trends Editor 

When six-foot-four inch Marty first rolled into Stop & Shop, the robot walked into history. Social robot experts say it is among the first instance of a robot deployed in a customer environment, namely supermarkets in the Northeast. 

Marty rolls around the store looking for spills with its three cameras. It does take the place of the human worker, called an associate, that did the same thing, but it means the associate can do something else. Doing the walk-around of the store is seen as a mundane task. 

Marty does not talk or tell jokes. Unlike Alexa, who many children in the store undoubtedly interact with at home, Marty will not respond. The robot does notify associates when it sees with its computer vision that something on the floor needs to be cleaned up, through the public address system. An associate comes over to clean it up, and presses a button on Marty that it’s done. Marty takes a picture of the cleaned-up aisle.    ..." 

Badger Technologies Rolled Out 500 Martys in 2019 

The AI in Marty is concentrated on the machine vision and the collision-avoidance navigation features, according to Tim Rowland, CEO of Badger Technologies, makers of Marty. After trials, Badger rolled out 500 multi-purpose robots into Stop & Shop and Giant/Martin’s grocery stores on the East Coast over the course of 2019. Each Marty is equipped with navigation systems, high-resolution cameras, many sensors and its software systems.   ... "

At the link, much more detail and Images.

Blogger Being Updated

I have been alerted that the underlying Blogging capability here will be updated by the end of June.  A quick test seems to show that no problems should occur, but it's possible attached resources will change.   Could cause display changes.   If you see anything amiss, inform me via the email on this page.   The plan is to move ahead seamlessly.

To Date:  20K Posts,  2,492K Reads

Oil and Gas use of AI Technology

Worked with this industry for a while. Here a good non-technical overview:

Oil & Gas Industry Transforming Itself with the Help of AI   By AI Trends Staff

The oil and gas industry is turning to AI to help cut operating costs, predict equipment failure, and increase oil and gas output.

A faulty well pump at an unmanned platform in the North Sea disrupted production in early 2019 for Aker BP, a Norwegian oil company, according to an account in the Wall Street Journal. The company installed an AI program that monitors data from sensors on the pump, flagging glitches before they can cause a shutdown, stated Lars Atle Andersen, VP of operations for the firm. Now he flies in engineers to fix such problems ahead of time and prevent a shutdown, he stated.

Aker BP employed a solution from SparkCognition of Austin, Texas.

Partnerships are forming throughout the industry. Exxon Mobil last year started a partnership with Microsoft to deploy AI programs to optimize operations in the West Texas Basin. The AI is needed to interpret data coming from millions of sensors that monitor Exxon refineries all over the globe. Total S.A., the French multinational oil and gas company, is partnering with Google to better interpret seismic data with the goal of better exploiting existing assets.

Advances in machine learning and the falling cost of data storage are factors in the move to AI in big oil. “When you mention data at this scale to data scientists, you can see them start salivating,” stated Sarah Karthigan, data science manager at ExxonMobil. The company has a database consisting of about five trillion data points. “The intent here is that we can run our plants more efficiently, more safely and potentially with fewer emissions.”

Sarah Karthigan, Data Science Manager, Exxon Mobil
With the price of oil low, oil and gas companies are looking for efficiencies. Deployment of AI in upstream operations could yield savings in capital and operating expenses of $100 billion to $1 trillion by 20205, according to a 2018 report by PwC.  .... "

Not Self Driving Cars, But Robots that Could Drive cars?

Interesting and bold challenge.    Build a robot that would autonomously drive cars.   With vision, decision making, interaction with car systems.   Adapting to various kinds of cars.   Not necessarily an android, looking like a person, with arms and legs and head and eyes.   But the equivalent. 

Its taking too long to get car based autonomy, so will this be quicker, cheaper, more adaptable?  But even having a robot navigate complex spaces, like the home, is also hard.     Lance Eliot discusses and poses an instructive list of positive and negatives.   See also his Forbes column:  https://forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/   :

What If We Made A Robot That Could Drive Autonomously?  By Lance Eliot, the AI Trends Insider

There must be a better way, some lament.

It is taking too long, some say, and we need to try a different alternative.

What are those comments referring to?

They are referring to the efforts underway for the development of AI-based self-driving driverless autonomous cars.

There are currently billions upon billions of dollars being expended towards trying to design, develop, build, and field a true self-driving car.

For true self-driving cars, the AI drives the car entirely on its own without any human assistance during the driving task. These driverless cars are considered a Level 4 and Level 5, while a car that requires a human driver to co-share the driving effort is usually considered Level 2 and Level 3.

There is not as yet a true self-driving car at Level 5, which we don’t yet even know if this will be possible to achieve, and nor how long it will take to get there.

Meanwhile, the Level 4 efforts are gradually trying to get some traction by undergoing very narrow and selective public roadway trials, though there is controversy over whether this testing should be allowed per se (we are all life-or-death guinea pigs in an experiment taking place on our highways and byways, some point out).

So far, thousands of automotive engineers and AI developers have been toiling away at trying to invent a true self-driving car.

Earlier claims that progress would be fast and sweet have shown to be over-hyped and unattainable.

If you consider this to be a vexing problem, and if you have a smarmy person that you know, they might ponder the matter and offer a seemingly out-of-the-box proposition.

Here’s the bold idea: Rather than trying to build a self-driving car, why not instead just make a robot that can drive?   ... " 

Algorithmic Design for Building

Algorithms both generating data and using data for the design and construction of buildings.   Like managing pertinent metadata.

Algorithms are designing better buildings

Silvio Carta in The Conversation
Head of Art and Design, University of Hertfordshire

When giant blobs began appearing on city skylines around the world in the late 1980s and 1990s, it marked not an alien invasion but the impact of computers on the practice of building design.

Thanks to computer-aided design (CAD), architects were able to experiment with new organic forms, free from the restraints of slide rules and protractors. The result was famous curvy buildings such as Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and Future Systems’ Selfridges Department Store in Birmingham.

Today, computers are poised to change buildings once again, this time with algorithms that can inform, refine and even create new designs. Even weirder shapes are just the start: algorithms can now work out the best ways to lay out rooms, construct the buildings and even change them over time to meet users’ needs. In this way, algorithms are giving architects a whole new toolbox with which to realise and improve their ideas.

At a basic level, algorithms can be a powerful tool for providing exhaustive information for the design, construction and use of a building. Building information modelling uses comprehensive software to standardise and share data from across architecture, engineering and construction that used to be held separately. This means everyone involved in a building’s genesis, from clients to contractors, can work together on the same 3D model seamlessly.

More recently, new tools have begun to combine this kind of information with algorithms to automate and optimise aspects of the building process. This ranges from interpreting regulations and providing calculations for structural evaluations to making procurement more precise. .... "

Value Creation

Good piece.   Take care to carefully measure the value.

The Value of Value creation
By Marc Goedhart and Tim Koller, McKinsey Quarterly  ( link to PDF)

Challenges such as globalization, climate change, income inequality, and the growing power of technology titans have shaken public confidence in large corporations. In an annual Gallup poll, more than one in three of those surveyed express little or no confidence in big business—seven percentage points worse than two decades ago.1 Politicians and commentators push for more regulation and fundamental changes in corporate governance. Some have gone so far as to argue that “capitalism is destroying the earth.”2

This is hardly the first time that the system in which value creation takes place has come under fire. At the turn of the 20th century in the United States, fears about the growing power of business combinations raised questions that led to more rigorous enforcement of antitrust laws. The Great Depression of the 1930s was another such moment, when prolonged unemployment undermined confidence in the ability of the capitalist system to mobilize resources, leading to a range of new policies in democracies around the world.

Today’s critique includes a call on companies to include a broader set of stakeholders in their decision making, beyond just their shareholders. It’s a view that has long been influential in continental Europe, where it is frequently embedded in corporate-governance structures. The approach is gaining traction in the United States, as well, with the emergence of public-benefit corporations, which explicitly empower directors to take into account the interests of constituencies other than shareholders. .... ' 

Sony Aibo Updated, will Greet You at the Door

Seems to be only assistant system left that makes a claim to being mobile and family friendly.   Home oriented.   With elements of a home pet emphasized.   We visited their lab early on, and that was one of the claims.  But it never seems to have reached that.  Notably similar in aims to the Kuri, now defunct.

Sony's Aibo robot will now greet you at the front door.  So, so adorable.
Nick Summers, @nisummers in Engadget

Sony’s robotic Aibo pup continues to learn new tricks. Thanks to a new software update, the android companion will now predict when you come home and sit patiently at the front door. Or that’s the idea, anyway. According to Sony’s website, you’ll first need to assign a meeting place — the entrance to your front home — by saying a phrase like “this is where you should go.” Aibo should then lower its head and ‘sniff’ the ground to indicate that it’s storing the location. If the process is successful, a door icon should appear on the map located inside the companion app.  ... "

Claims of over 100K sold in various forms, costing as much as  $2,900 each. There had seemed to be some indications it might be abandoned,  but this recent software update would say otherwise.   Glad the general idea continues, it has a place. 

Some detail in the Wikipedia:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIBO

Patient Survey for Telemedicine

Useful to get some real experience from this event:

Doctor.com's Patient Survey Reveals Surprising Trends About Telemedicine Adoption Amid Reopenings
PR Newswire
June 16, 2020

A nationwide survey of 1,800 patients by healthcare marketing automation company Doctor.com found evidence of massive telemedicine adoption during the current pandemic, as well as growing demand for telemedicine services in the coming years. Most (83%) of the surveyed patients expect to use telemedicine after the pandemic, 55% are willing to use telemedicine to see new doctors, and 69% said "easy-to-use technology" would help them decide to make a telemedicine appointment. Moreover, 71% would consider using telemedicine services now, while 83% are likely to use such services after the pandemic. Doctor.com CEO Andrei Zimiles said, "As telemedicine becomes part of a 'new normal,' it is critical that providers begin shifting their long-term care strategies to incorporate virtual care and meet patients' rapidly evolving expectations for this channel."

High Quality Images of Moving Objects

I recall having to solve this problem for diagnosing from images of manufacturing machine parts.

Capturing Moving Subjects in Still-Life Quality
EPFL News (Switzerland)
June 18, 2020

Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) Advanced Quantum Architecture Laboratory and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) Wision Laboratory have developed a method for capturing extremely clear images of moving subjects. UW-Madison's Mohit Gupta borrowed EPFL's SwissSPAD camera, which generates two-dimensional binary images at a resolution of 512 x 512 pixels. EPFL's Edoardo Charbon said SwissSPAD captures 100,000 binary images per second, as an algorithm corrects for variations; the researchers built a high-definition image of a moving subject by combining these photos. The team aims to repeat the experiment with the MegaX camera, which Charbon said "is similar to SwissSPAD in many ways; it's also a depth-sensing camera, thus it can generate [three-dimensional] images."   ... " 

Upcoming ISSIP/CSG Talk: Robots in the Pandemic

Correspondent Jim Spohrer talks about robot tech in our pandemic futures.    I will post about this and point to the transcript.

ISSIP Speaker Series: COVID-19 & Future of Work and Learning

Speaker: Jim Spohrer, Director, Cognitive Open Tech, IBM
Title: How will COVID-19 affect the need for and use of robots in a service world with less physical contact?
Date & Time: June 24, 2020, 12:30-1:00 PM US Pacific Time, (on Zoom, info below)

Abstract: As AI and robotics come to the service world, including retail, hospitality, education, healthcare, and government, some jobs will go away, some new jobs will be created, and the income required for a family to thrive might be lessened.   In this creative session participants will be asked to engage in discussing three scenarios below – and the wicked problem of the bespoke impact on livelihood and jobs, which is creating uncertainty and concerns.   The groups will then report back on which scenarios they find more desirable. Click here for more details about this session.

More on this talk and background:  http://www.issip.org/about-issip/community/covid-19-working-group/

Recorded talk, slides:   https://youtu.be/RchxIKum_tI 

See also:  http://www.issip.org/   The International Society of Service Innovation Professionals, ISSIP 

ISSIP Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/2f401b893caa/issip-june-2020-newsletter?e=78b83a31fb

Google Assistant and Duplex can Listen Better

This made me think a while about the implications.  It does not necessarily imply a loss of privacy, these are the actions-skills that we accept as extensions to an assistant.   Commands.   So would seem it would be very useful to office voice actions ....   So I could say 'Copy This',  and what follow would be recorded.    Or  'Translate this ... And the following would be translated.     We know that Google can do that ... just need better context operation.    As long as we can control the results.  Lately too have been impressed how the assistant can better handle my mis-stated commands.  But should that make us fear for privacy?

Google Assistant actions can now continuously listen for specific words
Kyle Wiggers@KYLE_L_WIGGERS in Venturebeat

Google today detailed new tools for partners developing on Google Assistant, its voice platform used by over 500 million people monthly in 30 languages across 90 countries. Actions Builder, a web-based integrated development environment (IDE), provides a graphical interface to show conversation flows and support debugging and training data orchestration. Continuous Match Mode allows Google Assistant to respond immediately to a user’s speech by recognizing specified words and phrases. And AMP-compliant content on smart displays like Nest Hub Max speeds up browsing via the web.

Google also revealed that Duplex, its AI chat agent that can arrange appointments over the phone, has been used to update over half a million business listings in Google Search and Google Maps to date. Back in March, CEO Sundar Pichai said Google would use Duplex “where possible” to contact restaurants and businesses so it can accurately reflect hours, pick-up, and delivery information during the pandemic. The company subsequently expanded Duplex in a limited capacity to the U.K., Australia, Canada, and Spain, adding support for the Spanish language in the last instance.  ... " 

Concept Mapping-based Platform for Learning and Knowledge Assessment.

Re connecting with Sero!, here is a repeat of a previous post:

Brought my attention by Brian Moon,  a knowledge design practitioner we have worked with.  I am a longtime proponent of concept mapping, we developed thousands.  Can this finally be a way to efficiently use such mapping to learn and analyze.?  Can it convert concept maps into knowledge maps, or at least their skeletal infrastructure?   Linking to process modeling?  Will be taking a deeper look:

Introducing Sero!, a concept mapping-based platform for learning and knowledge assessment.

We are harnessing the power of concept mapping to move well beyond outmoded assessments, exercising holistic and higher order thinking skills for formative and summative assessments. See what we're up to at https://www.serolearn.com. And take a sneak peek under the hood on our Assessor and Taker instructional pages.  .... 
 .. "

New Physics: All the Way Down?

Descriptive.  But will it show us something really predictively new?

THE THIRD CULTURE
Computation All the Way Down In the Edge
A Conversation with Stephen Wolfram

We're now in this situation where people just assume that science can compute everything, that if we have all the right input data and we have the right models, science will figure it out. If we learn that our universe is fundamentally computational, that throws us right into the idea that computation is a paradigm you have to care about. The big transition was from using equations to describe how everything works to using programs and computation to describe how things work. And that's a transition that has happened after 300 years of equations. The transition time to using programs has been remarkably quick, a decade or two. One area that was a holdout, despite the transition of many fields of science into the computational models direction, was fundamental physics.

If we can firmly establish this fundamental theory of physics, we know it's computation all the way down. Once we know it's computation all the way down, we're forced to think about it computationally. One of the consequences of thinking about things computationally is this phenomenon of computational irreducibility. You can't get around it. That means we have always had the point of view that science will eventually figure out everything, but computational irreducibility says that can't work. It says that even if we know the rules for the system, it may be the case that we can't work out what that system will do any more efficiently than basically just running the system and seeing what happens, just doing the experiment so to speak. We can't have a predictive theoretical science of what's going to happen.

STEPHEN WOLFRAM is a scientist, inventor, and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. He is the creator of the symbolic computation program Mathematica and its programming language, Wolfram Language, as well as the knowledge engine Wolfram|Alpha. His most recent endeavor is The Wolfram Physics Project. He is also the author, most recently, of A Project to Find the Fundamental Theory of Physics. ...."  More.

Money Reimagined?

Are we there yet?   Still I think major regulatory issues ahead.  Good piece:

Money Reimagined: Ethereum’s Renaissance Creates an Opportunity – And a Major Test   Michael J. Casey in Coindesk

If, in the compressed time of blockchain existence, the “crypto winter” of 2018-2019 was Ethereum’s Dark Ages, then we’re now in its Renaissance. 

But it’s an open question whether the blockchain platform and its enthusiastic community can take the wider world into the next era: the decentralized equivalent of the industrial revolution. 

As Ethereum prepares to celebrate the five-year anniversary of its mainnet launch on July 31, billions of dollars in value rest on that question. Specifically, on whether the all-important Ethereum 2.0 scaling project can be successfully launched and integrated into its existing architecture.  

By most measures, the Ethereum ecosystem is undergoing an impressive growth spurt. Record-breaking “gas” usage for smart contract and payment executions has now put Ethereum’s daily transaction fees totals above those of bitcoin. A strong rally in the price of ether (ETH) means Ethereum’s native token is among just a few leading cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, Cardano’s ADA and Stellar’s XLM, to have more or less shaken off the sharp crypto selloff seen in March. And the amount of second-tier value locked into Ethereum smart contracts is ballooning, with total daily value transfers on Ethereum reaching that of Bitcoin in April. ... " 

Facebook Acquires Mapillary, Competes with Street View

First I had seen this.  Generalized tool for looking at location.  Commercial users for now.

Facebook acquires Google Street View competitor Mapillary
The street imaging platform will now be accessible to commercial users.
By Rachel England, @rachel_england in Engadget

Facebook has done a fair bit with maps in recent times — last year it opened up its AI tool to OpenStreetMap users and announced its plans to recreate an AR planet based on a 3D map of the world. More recently, it’s deployed an interactive map to keep users up-to-date with the spread of COVID-19. Now, it’s acquired Google Street View alternative Mapillary. ... "

Google Maps Add New COVID-19 Alerts

Useful updates regarding changes in status of Pandemic.

Google Maps adds new COVID-19 alerts as more cities reopen

Maps will remind you to wear a face covering on public transit
By Chris Welch@chriswelch in Theverge

Google is continuing to build more helpful new features into Google Maps to assist people trying to navigate around cities that have begun emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic. When you look for public transit directions, you’ll now see “relevant alerts” from transit agencies about mandatory precautions you’ll need to take — such as wearing a face covering. And if a public transit line is temporarily suspended due to the ongoing COVID-19 response, you’ll hopefully get a heads-up about that, too. ... " 

Consider the Flow, Tempo and Rhythm of Process

Had been looking at how different streams of work and delivery could be combined and transferred between  flows and tasks?    And had some time ago thought of the analogy of the combination of streams of music, rhythm, tempo and other musical measures and ideas.   Now discovered the Algoriddim system.   Could this be taken beyond music? Say to process flow and results?

Algoriddim’s Djay Pro AI can transfer vocals and rhythms between songs
JEREMY HORWITZ@HORWITZ JUNE 18, 2020 7:04 A

Algoriddim’s live DJ mixing and editing app — Djay Pro — has been a standout on iPads, iPhones, and Macs for years, enabling users to slow songs down, speed them up, scratch them, and blur them together with ease. Today, the company is evolving the iOS version of the app with AI features, using a trained neural network to transfer one song’s vocals or rhythms to another track in real time.

Djay Pro previously focused on synchronizing the speeds of two different tracks, rebalancing their volume levels or equalization and playing with each song as it “spun” on a virtual turntable. Algoriddim’s new Neural Mix feature goes deeper, isolating and pulling out vocals (a trick best suited to hip hop tracks) or percussive/harmonic components (ideal for electronic music). DJs can use the AI-powered feature to create background-free a cappella tracks or voice-free instrumentals from existing songs or place one song’s words on another’s background.  .... " 

Wal-Mart and Spotify, Why?

Was exploring this and discovered one answer in Inc.

Walmart Just Made a Surprising Announcement and It's Very Bad News for Amazon.  Watch out, Amazon: Small businesses may now have more options for reaching customers with their online stores.   By Jason Aten  @JASONATEN in Inc.

Walmart isn't the type of company that makes surprising announcements, but on Monday, its partnership with Shopify was exactly that. The two companies said they will now make it possible for companies using Shopify to access Walmart's Marketplace at Walmart.com. 

This matters for a few reasons. The first is that as online shopping has surged in the past few months with retail shops closed, big companies like Walmart (and Amazon) are betting that trend will continue. Amazon recently announced that it would offer 125,000 temporary workers hired since March full-time positions moving forward as it adjusts to the shift in how consumers are shopping. ... "

Reopening Businesses Safely

Important look by McKinsey on the topic.

Reopening safely: Sample practices from essential businesses

After weeks of shutdowns and remote working, businesses around the world are gradually resuming on-site operations. Of course, some businesses—those considered essential—kept their doors open and operated at full capacity, even at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the list of essential businesses varies by jurisdiction, in most cases it includes healthcare facilities, pharmacies, grocery stores, convenience stores, banks, and gas stations, as well as delivery, sanitation, plumbing, and electrical-repair services. Those businesses offer valuable lessons for companies in any sector considering reopening: How does a business stay operational while keeping employees and customers safe and preventing new COVID-19 outbreaks?

Work environments differ vastly from each other, and there are no one-size-fits-all solutions. That said, as we studied the safety practices of essential businesses during the pandemic, two principles clearly stood out as effective: tailoring safety measures to the unique business environment and implementing them across the full range of business activities (not just on-site operations). This article describes several practices that essential businesses have adopted, some of which are applicable in other sectors as well. These practices are well worth considering as the business world charts a path toward the next normal.  ... "

Qualcomm Attracting Robotics Developers with New Chips

Seeing continued directions from Qualcomm.

Qualcomm aims to woo robotics developers with new chips, tools  in Reuters
Building robots and drones is messy: Developers must pull together sensors to be the eyes and ears, chips for the brains and motors to make the device move, tying them all together with several kinds of software. ... " 

Comments on the Return of Retail

in His Curious Voyager:     

My colleague Walter Riker writes:

What will the return of retail look like in the coming months - years?
Recently, because of the Pandemic, there has been a great deal of talk about the ability for retail to recover from “stay-at-home” restrictions put in place to help reduce the spread of COVID-19. Having spent a great number of years working in retail, and then owning a small retail store while simultaneously creating a life in technology, I think I understand the viability of the question - can small retail return? Can any retail return, big or small? And if so, which type of retail has the better chance?  .... '    (and much more at the link)

Making Images Sharper, More secure?

A remarkable approach is described, sharper images for human eyes,  but too sharp for the task of recognition?  Implications for security?

AI Makes Blurry Faces Look More Than 60 Times Sharper
Duke Today
By Robin A. Smith

Researchers at Duke University have created an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that can improve an image of a face with up to 64 times its original resolution, making a blurry, unrecognizable picture into a sharp, realistic image. However, the method, known as PULSE, cannot be used to identify people, such as by making images from a security camera clearer, because the faces it produces may not actually exist. Using a generative adversarial network machine learning tool, the system weeds through AI-generated examples of high-resolution faces to find images that appear similar to the input image when reduced to the same size. Said Duke’s Cynthia Rudin, “Never have super-resolution images been created at this resolution before with this much detail.”  .. '

An Intuitive Language for Quantum Computers

Is it better t have a coding method devoted to an innovation like quantum, or one that provides the greatest accessibility?

The First Intuitive Programming Language for Quantum Computers
ETH Zurich
Florian Meyer
June 15, 2020

Computer scientists at ETH Zurich in Switzerland have created the first intuitive high-level quantum programming language, a coding mechanism that they say is as simple, reliable, and as safe as classical computer languages. ETH Zurich's Benjamin Bichsel described Silq as a programming language keyed toward the mindset of programmers when they want to solve a problem, rather than on hardware construction and functionality. Silq's most significant advancement is its ability to automatically identify and delete intermediate or temporary values that are no longer needed, a process called uncomputation, using only programming commands that lack any special quantum operations. ETH Zurich's Martin Vechev said, "Silq is a major breakthrough in terms of optimizing the programming of quantum computers; it is not the final phase of development."

Amazon Enforces Distancing with AI

Somewhat novel application which I assume uses location and image analysis to report and manage distance rules.   More details at the link.

Amazon uses AI-powered displays to enforce social distancing in warehouses
By Ryan Daws | June 17, 2020 | TechForge Media,  Editor at TechForge Media.  

Amazon has turned to an AI-powered solution to help maintain social distancing in its vast warehouses.

Companies around the world are having to look at new ways of safely continuing business as we adapt to the “new normal” of life with the coronavirus.

Amazon has used its AI expertise to create what it calls the Distance Assistant. Using a time-of-flight sensor, often found in modern smartphones, the AI measures the distance between employees.  ... " 

Amazon Takes Auto Echo to UK, Canada and Parts of Europe

Thought I had detected less support to auto assistants by Amazon, but this indicates they are going again, to new regions and likely regulation.     Extending in a sense the smart home to the car.    Competing now with related assistance capabilities in many new cars.  But considerably cheaper too if you have invested in the Amazon infrastructure.   Have had one installed since launch.  Found it to be somewhat tricky to install and maintain,  but useful if you spend significant time in your car.

Amazon's Echo Auto comes to the UK, Canada and parts of Europe   Two years after the US launch.   By Rachel England, @rachel_england in Engadget

Amazon launched Echo Auto in the US back in 2018, designed to bring Alexa voice commands to vehicles where they wouldn’t normally be an option. Now, finally, it’s arrived in the UK and Canada, as well as Germany, Italy and Spain (it was previously also available in Australia and India).  ... "

Human Dynamics in Decision Making

Have thought that we need better understanding of our decision making, at least if we believe in useful biomimicry to build intelligent systems.   Here an interesting, if very technical piece.   Can we use some ideas here to model and improve such systems?     Note that it starts with the statement that we do not understand the processing steps that lead to a decision. In Nature.

Human stereoEEG recordings reveal network dynamics of decision-making in a rule-switching task
Marije ter Wal, Artem Platonov, Pasquale Cardellicchio, Veronica Pelliccia, Giorgio LoRusso, Ivana Sartori, Pietro Avanzini, Guy A. Orban & Paul H. E. Tiesinga 
Nature Communications volume 11, Article number: 3075 (2020) 

Abstract
The processing steps that lead up to a decision, i.e., the transformation of sensory evidence into motor output, are not fully understood. Here, we combine stereoEEG recordings from the human cortex, with single-lead and time-resolved decoding, using a wide range of temporal frequencies, to characterize decision processing during a rule-switching task. Our data reveal the contribution of rostral inferior parietal lobule (IPL) regions, in particular PFt, and the parietal opercular regions in decision processing and demonstrate that the network representing the decision is common to both task rules. We reconstruct the sequence in which regions engage in decision processing on single trials, thereby providing a detailed picture of the network dynamics involved in decision-making. The reconstructed timeline suggests that the supramarginal gyrus in IPL links decision regions in prefrontal cortex with premotor regions, where the motor plan for the response is elaborated. ... "

Security of The Form and Parameters of Neural Nets.

Out of Cornell University an intriguing article that deals with how neural nets react to adversarial attacks in their energy consumption.   As predicted by simulation.   Akin to how you might test a system by giving it questions that you know would take time for a human to do, but are easy for machines.  Doing this repeatedly could reveal indications to the form and parameters of the network involved. Which contains the 'knowledge' involved.  Threats continue to get very innovative.

Sponge Examples: Energy-Latency Attacks on Neural Networks

By Ilia Shumailov, Yiren Zhao, Daniel Bates, Nicolas Papernot, Robert Mullins, Ross Anderson

The high energy costs of neural network training and inference led to the use of acceleration hardware such as GPUs and TPUs. While this enabled us to train large-scale neural networks in datacenters and deploy them on edge devices, the focus so far is on average-case performance. In this work, we introduce a novel threat vector against neural networks whose energy consumption or decision latency are critical. We show how adversaries can exploit carefully crafted sponge examples, which are inputs designed to maximise energy consumption and latency.

We mount two variants of this attack on established vision and language models, increasing energy consumption by a factor of 10 to 200. Our attacks can also be used to delay decisions where a network has critical real-time performance, such as in perception for autonomous vehicles. We demonstrate the portability of our malicious inputs across CPUs and a variety of hardware accelerator chips including GPUs, and an ASIC simulator. We conclude by proposing a defense strategy which mitigates our attack by shifting the analysis of energy consumption in hardware from an average-case to a worst-case perspective.  ... "

Also being discussed at Schneier, where there is some interesting comment going on.

Subscriptions and IFTTT

During the earliest days of looking at behavior in the smart home, we examined subscription methods.   And talked to Spotify when they emerged.   Now here an upcoming webinar on subscriptions as a tactic, and the use of IFTTT.

Webinar on  June 18, 2020, 10AM PT / 1PM ET

Winning the subscription economy (sign up for webinar)     
How Dropbox, Spotify, and Trello use third-party integrations to drive paid subscriptions

In this webinar you will learn:

Why successful subscription-based companies use integrations to optimize premium conversions
How subscription services decide which integrations to prioritize and why

The different integration strategies of 3 innovative brands

Subscription services with freemium pricing know that increasing the value of their product offerings is the most predictable way to create stickiness, drive premium conversions, and retain paid users. But, building new features can be time-consuming and inefficient.

Join IFTTT Founder and CEO, Linden Tibbets, as he reviews the strategies of 3 innovative companies — Dropbox, Trello, and Spotify — to understand how they leverage integrations to scale their products and succeed in the subscription economy.

Linden_Tibbets
IFTTT Founder and CE
Linden Tibbets is Founder and CEO of IFTTT, the essential integration and discovery platform for businesses to continuously connect, grow and maximize the value of their customers.

Will Voice Tech Shape Post Pandemic Office?

If it is a true 'post' pandemic, inclined to think the change will not be that substantial.   A mix of bad memories of those times, and enjoying actual human interaction.   Will be interesting to watch.

How Voice Tech could Shape the Post-pandemic Workplace

As companies start thinking about how to reopen offices, contactless interfaces could be key to ensuring employees stay safe.     By Charlotte Trueman in Computerworld

As workplaces grapple with the realities of reopening amid the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, voice technologies and contactless interfaces could provide the answer to re-establishing safe working environments.

Social distancing measures are still required in most countries and could remain in place until at least the end of the year to prevent fresh coronavirus outbreaks. And while there has been an enterprise  focus in recent months on collaboration and videoconferencing software as work-from-home necessities, companies now need to start think about bringing workers back in, according to Anthony Mullen, senior analyst at Gartner.

“There has definitely been an expectation of change,” Mullen said. “And it's not just from staff, it’s managers and HR teams, too. Certainly, a lot of the larger organizations were already taking a conservative look at what the future of work was going to be like – but now they’re really obsessing over that.”  .... " 

Podcast: Do we Need Data Scientists in a World of Automation?

New Podcast below, by SAS and DSC.    Good topic.  The question should be:  How many and how should the be involved in an enterprise?  Just like Computer Scientists, Economists, Statisticians ... and other technical fields.  Machine Learning can't do it all.

Do We Need Data Scientists in Today’s World of Automation?

Machine learning is said to be an important driver of the future of intelligent systems, automatically analyzing data and distilling new knowledge, actionable insights and compelling decisions. But why show market trends that investments in data scientists – those golden people that train machine learning models – have never been higher if machine learning can be fully automated? Why do we need data scientists if machine learning is designed to do it all?

In today’s Data Science Central podcast, Véronique Van Vlasselaer, Data & Decision Scientist at SAS, will discuss what machine learning automation entails, and how valuable human input in the machine learning process is.

Speaker: Véronique Van Vlasselaer, Data & Decision Scientist - SAS
Hosted by: Rafael Knuth, Contributing Editor - Data Science Central

IBM Bringing Watson AI to Advertising and Marketing

A natural space, was one of the first areas we experimented with leveraging intelligence for the advertising enterprise.  Below is IBM's ad on the subject.   Trust emphasized.

IBM Watson Advertising
We build trust between consumers, marketers, publishers, and machines.

Our Solutions
Trusted, insight-driven solutions that can be deployed across a brand's entire marketing strategy to help drive results.

About Us
IBM Watson Advertising uses the world's leading artificial intelligence (AI) technology to unlock data and insights and help marketers make better decisions.

We offer trusted, insight-driven solutions that can be deployed across a brand's entire marketing strategy to help drive results.

Enter IBM Watson
Watson is AI tech that has been designed to solve today’s data challenges and empower smarter business. It does this by understanding, reasoning and learning from all data and facilitating increasingly natural interactions with humans. .... 

Watson empowers smarter business because:

It takes a client-first approach: Clients build and train their own AI so data stays proprietary and secure

It has proven AI capabilities: Leading capabilities in language, vision, speech, emotional reasoning are based on decades of research and proven results for clients

It is open to the world: Anyone can access the APIs for a fee, and use them to develop innovative solutions .... " 

USAF Using Supply Chain Network with Blockchain

Another indication that Blockchain is being further used to secure supply chain transactions.  Here with US Govt DOD applications.

US Air Force Gives Blockchain Firm $1.5M to Build Supply Chain Network by Danny Nelson in Coindesk

SIMBA Chain, a blockchain-as-a-service company with deep ties to the Department of Defense, has two years and $1.5 million to research and develop a blockchain for supply chain logistics for the U.S. Air Force.

The South Bend, Ind., firm said on Monday it has entered Phase II of its Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) USAF project with a renewed mandate to investigate blockchain’s military supply chain value propositions. It has also gained a new partner: Boeing. 

SIMBA CEO Joel Neidig said his firm will “stand up” a node running Hyperledger Fabric at Oklahoma’s Tinker Air Force Base – a hub for Air Force supply chain logistics – with a special focus on risk management: knowing the what, where, who and how of parts that may one day go through the USAF’s $62 billion procurement machine. ... '

Oversensing in the Home

Had not heard the term before: 'Oversensing'.  But sensors do create security implications.

How to Curtail Oversensing in the Home
By Connor Bolton, Kevin Fu, Josiah Hester, Jun Han
Communications of the ACM, June 2020, Vol. 63 No. 6, Pages 20-24   10.1145/3396261

Future homes will employ potentially hundreds of Internet of Things (IoT) devices whose sensors may inadvertently leak sensitive information. A previous Communications Inside Risks column ("The Future of the Internet of Things," Feb. 2017) discusses how the expected scale of the IoT introduces threats that require considerations and mitigations.2 Future homes are an IoT hotspot that will be particularly at risk. Sensitive information such as passwords, identification, and financial transactions are abundant in the home—as are sensor systems such as digital assistants, smartphones, and interactive home appliances that may unintentionally capture this sensitive information. IoT device manufacturers should employ sensor sensor permissioning systems to limit applications access to only sensor data required for operation, reducing the risk that malicious applications may gain sensitive information. For example, a simple notepad application should not have microphone access.

However, even if this least-privilege approach was enacted across all IoT systems (a difficult task), sensor systems still gather much more information than intended or required by an application—for example, how motion sensors can capture nearby sounds, including words and keystrokes. We call this oversensing: where authorized access to sensor data provides an application with superfluous and potentially sensitive information. Manufacturers and system designers must employ the principle of least privilege at a more fine-grained level and with awareness of how often different sensors overlap in the sensitive information they leak. We project that directing technical efforts toward a more holistic conception of sensor data in system design and permissioning will reduce risks of oversensing.... ."

Underwater WiFi

Was unaware of this possibility, of course devices will have to be redesigned to make it readily available.  Only works for a 'few' meters, so the capability narrow and limited.

Angling for Underwater Wi-Fi
KAUST Discovery
June 10, 2020

Researchers at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia built an underwater Wi-Fi system that could enable divers to transmit footage from underwater to the surface instantly by sending data through light beams. Researchers tested the Aqua-Fi system by simultaneously uploading and downloading multimedia between two computers located a few meters apart in static water, recording a maximum data transfer speed of 2.11 megabytes per second. The goal is to use radio waves to send data from a diver's smartphone to a "gateway" device attached to their gear, which would then send the data via a light beam to a computer at the surface connected to the Internet via satellite. Said King Abdullah University’s Basem Shihada, “This is the first time anyone has used the Internet underwater completely wirelessly.  .... " 

Wal-Mart Teams with Shopify

Expanding online marketplace.   Note recent grounding of the Jet online service.

Walmart partners with Shopify to expand e-commerce 'marketplace' in Techxplore

US retail giant Walmart has teamed up with Shopify to expand its online marketplace of third-party sellers

Walmart said Monday it was teaming up with e-commerce platform Shopify to expand its online marketplace in a ramped-up challenge to Amazon for third-party sellers.
The deal allows the estimated one million US businesses using Shopify's platform to sell on Walmart.com without any listing fees.

"As we launch this integration with Shopify, we are focused on US-based small and medium businesses whose assortment complements ours and have a track record of exceeding customers' expectations," said Jeff Clementz, vice president of Walmart Marketplace.

"We're excited to be able offer customers an expanded assortment while also giving small businesses access to the surging traffic on Walmart.com."  ... "

Beating Zoom Fatigue

Somewhat of an old idea,  how well can it be done?   And, as we have been seeing with facial recognition, will it be blocked for implying the wrong 'kind' of control?   I would further ask, is 'zoom fatigue' any different from just general in-the-office work fatigue?  Seems if anything it is less controlling/fatiguing since you can avoid and hide from it readily. 

Emotionally aware technology could help us beat Zoom fatigue By Rana El Kaliouby in FastCompany
In times of crises we tend to crave connection, but we’re being asked to do the opposite through social distancing. More emotionally intelligent computers could help bridge the gap.  ... " 

Baking Anti-Malware into CPUs

Continued back and forth, the article is skeptical about how well this will work.  But something must be done,

Intel will soon bake anti-malware defenses directly into its CPUs
Control-Flow Enforcement Technology will debut in Tiger Lake microarchitecture.
By Dan Goodin in ArsTechnica

The history of hacking has largely been a back-and-forth game, with attackers devising a technique to breach a system, defenders constructing a countermeasure that prevents the technique, and hackers devising a new way to bypass system security. On Monday, Intel is announcing its plans to bake a new parry directly into its CPUs that’s designed to thwart software exploits that execute malicious code on vulnerable computers.

Control-Flow Enforcement Technology, or CET, represents a fundamental change in the way processors execute instructions from applications such as Web browsers, email clients, or PDF readers. Jointly developed by Intel and Microsoft, CET is designed to thwart a technique known as return-oriented programming, which hackers use to bypass anti-exploit measures software developers introduced about a decade ago. While Intel first published its implementation of CET in 2016, the company on Monday is saying that its Tiger Lake CPU microarchitecture will be the first to include it. ... "

Scan Uses Wrinkles, Spots

Was surprised that this was not more often commonly done,  but perhaps it was as part of an overall facial scan?

AI algorithm identifies age of faces in photos using wrinkles, spots  by Ruhr-Universitaet-Bochum in Techxplore

An algorithm developed by neuroinformatics engineers in Bochum estimates age and ethnic origin as exactly as humans do. The researchers are not yet sure which features it interprets.

A person's aging process is accompanied by such tell-tale signs on their face as wrinkles, furrows, and spots. Researchers from the Institute for Neural Computation at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) have developed an algorithm that interprets these features very reliably. The RUB team published its report in the journal Machine Learning from May 2020. ... "

OpenAI Text Generation

The OpenAPI text generation system was previously described as 'too dangerous', has now been released in a new and I assume less dangerous form.   Seems to claim generalized text completion tasks, and they claim is very easy to test, and provide code below.   My impression would be skeptical that such a generalized approach would require context (common sense) assumptions that are still hard. 

Described below:

OpenAI API

We’re releasing an API for accessing new AI models developed by OpenAI. Unlike most AI systems which are designed for one use-case, the API today provides a general-purpose “text in, text out” interface, allowing users to try it on virtually any English language task. You can now request access in order to integrate the API into your product, develop an entirely new application, or help us explore the strengths and limits of this technology.

Given any text prompt, the API will return a text completion, attempting to match the pattern you gave it. You can “program” it by showing it just a few examples of what you’d like it to do; its success generally varies depending on how complex the task is. The API also allows you to hone performance on specific tasks by training on a dataset (small or large) of examples you provide, or by learning from human feedback provided by users or labelers. ... "

And further:

OpenAI’s Text Generator Is Going Commercial  in Wired

The research institute was created to steer AI away from harmful uses. Now it’s competing with tech giants to sell a cloud-computing service to businesses  ..."

Technique Enables Cheaper Fertilizer Production

Local and simpler form of fertilizer.    Manure?

Technique could enable Cheaper Fertilizer production

Chemical engineers take a step toward generating ammonia with small-scale, electrochemical reactors.   By Anne Trafton | MIT News Office

Most of the world’s fertilizer is produced in large manufacturing plants, which require huge amounts of energy to generate the high temperatures and pressures needed to combine nitrogen and hydrogen into ammonia.

MIT chemical engineers are working to develop a smaller-scale alternative, which they envision could be used to locally produce fertilizer for farmers in remote, rural areas, such as sub-Saharan Africa. Fertilizer is often hard to obtain in such areas because of the cost of transporting it from large manufacturing facilities.

In a step toward that kind of small-scale production, the research team has devised a way to combine hydrogen and nitrogen using electric current to generate a lithium catalyst, where the reaction takes place.

“In the future, if we envision how we want this to be used someday, we want a device that can breathe in air, take in water, have a solar panel hooked up to it, and be able to produce ammonia. This could be used by a farmer or a small community of farmers,” says Karthish Manthiram, an assistant professor of chemical engineering at MIT and the senior author of the study.

Graduate student Nikifar Lazouski is the lead author of the paper, which appears ... in Nature Catalysis. Other authors include graduate students Minju Chung and Kindle Williams, and undergraduate Michal Gala.  ... " 

On Fakes and Frauds via AI

Creating frauds that are hard to distinguish from the real thing.

AI vs. AI   By R. Colin Johnson in ACM

The Hackathon for Peace, Justice and Security (logo pictured) featured a contest to create the best AI software to identify deep fakes..

This battle of the artificial intelligence spitting fraudster again cybersecurityis being fought in the trenches of fake news, fake videos, and fake audio.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has made great strides in catching attempted credit-card fraud—most of us have received communications from our credit-card issuers to confirm attempted purchases made by cybercriminals. Using machine learning (ML) to compile "synthetic identities" that display the usual behavior patterns of its credit holders, financial institutions can spot anomalous behaviors in real time. Unfortunately, cybercriminals likewise are using AI to create their own synthetic identities, producing results realistic enough to fool the AI that spots anomalous behaviors.

This battle of the AIs—pitting fraudster again cybersecurity—is also being fought in the trenches of fake news, fake videos, and fake audio. Thus the arms race has begun: AI versus AI.

Jupiter Research's Steffen Sorrell says synthetic identities are the "low-hanging fruit" of credit card fraud. According to Jupiter Research's latest Online Payment Fraud report, synthetic identities are driving online payment fraud toward $200 billion in losses to the bad guys by 2024. For the good guys, it is also driving the fraud-detection market to reach $10 billion over the same period, up from $8.5 billion this year.

"Online fraud takes place in a highly-developed ecosystem with division of labor," said Josh Johnston, director of AI Science at Boise, ID-based fraud prevention enterprise Kount Inc.  Johnston said cybercriminals specialize in different types of crimes ranging from manually "skimming cards" to creating synthetic identities with AI. "Others test stolen card numbers and credentials against soft targets like charities and digital goods merchants to make sure they haven't been cancelled," said Johnston, who claims high-limit credit card numbers with accurate name, address, and CVV (card verification value) can be purchased for less than a dollar in Internet black markets on the dark web.
"A fraudster can buy a list of these verified cards and monetize them through any number of online schemes," said Johnston. "AI is used heavily by these criminals, who also share software tools and tips on Internet forums just like legitimate developers."

These high-volume fakes use all types of AI and other automation techniques, ranging from small programs that generate and register realistic email addresses by combining real first and last names followed by random numbers, to large ML programs that create synthetic identities by combining bits of information from multiple real people to create a composite, according to Johnston.  If a fraud detector checks on a synthetic identity, they often find a fake email account, Facebook page, and other Internet presences showing details of the synthetic identity have been recorded by the fraudster. ... '

Control of Genetic Behavior

Interesting linking to specific group behavior.  What behavior would you want to influence?  Then, thinking about if further, looks rather dangerous.

Genetic Control of Collective Behavior
The Harvard Gazette     By Jessica Lau

Researchers at Harvard University and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany have developed a computer vision-reliant method to study how genes influence collective behavior. The team tested 90 different genes to see if they affect zebrafish social behavior, using gene editing to mutate one gene at a time. The researchers used computer vision to track individual fish and analyze their interactions, finding several genetic mutations that had a significant effect on fish group behavior. Said Institute director Iain Couzin, "We developed new computational tools for tracking and analyzing behavior among animals, which provide a powerful means to investigate how genetic factors influence collective behaviors."

Full Article at link.

Considering the Length of Lists

Very nicely put pieee on the length of lists.  Very true., good to have in the back of your mind when writing or speaking.

Communicate Using the Numbers 1, 2, 3, and More    By Thomas A. Limoncelli

Communications of the ACM, June 2020, Vol. 63 No. 6, Pages 42-44   10.1145/3386267

The human brain reacts differently to lists of different lengths. When you align what you say with what the human brain expects, you communicate more effectively. In this column I'll explain how to leverage the way the brain reacts to various quantities to make your speaking and writing more effective.

People often use lists of various sizes when communicating. I might have 2 reasons for supporting the new company strategy. I might tell you my 3 favorite programming languages. I might make a presentation that describes 4 new features. There is 1 vegetable that I like more than any other.

The length of the list affects how the audience interprets what is being said. Not aligning with what the human brain expects is like swimming upstream. Given the choice, why would anyone do that?  ... '

Aiming to put AI in Your Pocket

Mentioned this previously, now more in Singularity Hub on the topic:

MIT’s Tiny New Brain Chip Aims for AI in Your Pocket
By Jason Dorrier - Jun 11, 2020 in Singularity Hub

The human brain operates on roughly 20 watts of power (a third of a 60-watt light bulb) in a space the size of, well, a human head. The biggest machine learning algorithms use closer to a nuclear power plant’s worth of electricity and racks of chips to learn.

That’s not to slander machine learning, but nature may have a tip or two to improve the situation. Luckily, there’s a branch of computer chip design heeding that call. By mimicking the brain, super-efficient neuromorphic chips aim to take AI off the cloud and put it in your pocket.

The latest such chip is smaller than a piece of confetti and has tens of thousands of artificial synapses made out of memristors—chip components that can mimic their natural counterparts in the brain.

In a recent paper in Nature Nanotechnology , a team of MIT scientists say their tiny new neuromorphic chip was used to store, retrieve, and manipulate images of Captain America’s Shield and MIT’s Killian Court. Whereas images stored with existing methods tended to lose fidelity over time, the new chip’s images remained crystal clear.

“So far, artificial synapse networks exist as software. We’re trying to build real neural network hardware for portable artificial intelligence systems,” Jeehwan Kim, associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT said in a press release. “Imagine connecting a neuromorphic device to a camera on your car, and having it recognize lights and objects and make a decision immediately, without having to connect to the internet. We hope to use energy-efficient memristors to do those tasks on-site, in real-time.” ...   " 

Internet Archive Threatened with Suit

We used the INternet Archive early on to track the use of web sites and trademarks.     But had not visited for a while.  Now saw this controversy which had been broiling.   A publishers threat to sue the archive in an emergency.

Temporary National Emergency Library to close 2 weeks early, returning to traditional controlled digital lending  by Brewster Kahle in the Archive Blog

Within a few days of the announcement that libraries, schools and colleges across the nation would be closing due to the COVID-19 global pandemic, we launched the temporary National Emergency Library to provide books to support emergency remote teaching, research activities, independent scholarship, and intellectual stimulation during the closures. 

We have heard hundreds of stories from librarians, authors, parents, teachers, and students about how the NEL has filled an important gap during this crisis. 

Ben S., a librarian from New Jersey, for example, told us that he used the NEL “to find basic life support manuals needed by frontline medical workers in the academic medical center I work at. Our physical collection was closed due to COVID-19 and the NEL allowed me to still make available needed health informational materials to our hospital patrons.” We are proud to aid frontline workers.

Today we are announcing the National Emergency Library will close on June 16th, rather than June 30th, returning to traditional controlled digital lending. We have learned that the vast majority of people use digitized books on the Internet Archive for a very short time. Even with the closure of the NEL, we will be able to serve most patrons through controlled digital lending, in part because of the good work of the non-profit HathiTrust Digital Library. HathiTrust’s new Emergency Temporary Access Service features a short-term access model that we plan to follow. 

We moved up our schedule because, last Monday, four commercial publishers chose to sue Internet Archive during a global pandemic.  However, this lawsuit is not just about the temporary National Emergency Library. The complaint attacks the concept of any library owning and lending digital books, challenging the very idea of what a library is in the digital world. This lawsuit stands in contrast to some academic publishers who initially expressed concerns about the NEL, but ultimately decided to work with us to provide access to people cut off from their physical schools and libraries. We hope that similar cooperation is possible here, and the publishers call off their costly assault.  .. "

NorthWestern: Emerging Trends in Retail Robotics

Good in detail piece worth looking at:

Emerging Trends in Retail Robotics,  24 pages,  May 2020 Northwestern, Retail Analytics Council

Introduction:

Robots are increasingly being deployed in retail environments. The reasons for this include: to relieve staff from the performance of repetitive and mundane tasks; to reallocate staff to more value-added, customer-facing activities; to realize operational improvements; and, to utilize real-time in-store generated data. Due to the impact of the 2020 Coronavirus outbreak, we can now add a new reason to use robots in retail: to assist with customer and employee safety. 

In this Research Article, we present information on the benefits associated with this store automation. Estimates of the size of the global retail robot market are advanced. The impact on the demand for robots in the grocery industry, in light of the Coronavirus outbreak, is discussed as well. This is followed by a review of U.S. retail robot deployments and the advancement of some emerging applications, partially around customer and employee safety.  ...   " (Full doc at link) 

Will Amazon Change its Retail Model?

Interesting examination.  in HBSWK.    Likely but only to the extent it can continue to provide value. Here too an examination of the state of its work.

Will Challenged Amazon Tweak Its Retail Model Post-Pandemic?   by James Heskett

Amazon's usually strong retail performance has been threatened by the pandemic, opening the doors for competitors. Does the online giant need a strategy overhaul? asks James Heskett.  ... 

NSF Seeks to Improve Smart Home Security

Useful direction.

Scientists want to fix our notoriously insecure smart home devices
The National Science Foundation wants to boost consumer trust in the Internet of Things.

By Steve Dent, @stevetdent in Engadget

The dream of a smart home that would automate your life à la The Jetsons is more like a nightmare thanks to the lack of security in numerous smart devices. Now, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is intervening with a nationwide project designed to boost internet of things (IoT) security. Seven academic institutions will research technology designed to reduce the security burden on users and help fix smart home privacy flaws eroding consumer trust. ... " 

Cisco's Ava Telepresence Robot

Saw something similar demonstrated at the Cisco smart home innovation center in the late 90s.  Somewhat surprising that this coming for them now, would like to see more. Perhaps the time is now right.  Note 'telepresence', e.g remote human controlled, not autonomous.  Also, Ava was mentioned here before in 2018, see the tag below.

Webex Powered telepresence robot.
Collaboration
Ava: A Virtual Best Friend
Madisen Andersen

The Customer Story blog series highlights how Cisco’s collaboration technology has helped customers solve their business challenges. Learn how Cisco is meeting customers where they are helping them achieve their business goals.

An Easy and Fast Way to Stay Connected with Ava

 Wouldn’t it be great to have a way for patients in hospitals, nursing homes, rehab centers, and other long-term care facilities to stay connected with their loved ones during the current time and beyond? Connected in a way that it seems they are together, in person?  After all, being with family is what helps us get through tough times. Unfortunately, during these recent challenging times, most of these facilities have been forced to close their doors to their patient’s loved ones.  

Strict rules put in place have made it nearly impossible for patients to have any in-person interaction with their families. So how can healthcare facilities enable patients to communicate and connect with their families in a secure, safe, and simple way? 

Fortunately, there is a way: Ava.  Ava is like a friend to everyone in need.    ... "

Nokia Research on 5G

Indications of the importance of emerging 5G:

In Global newswire:
SomeindNew Nokia research reveals biggest 5G drivers for enterprise IT and OT

Press Release New Nokia research reveals biggest 5G drivers for enterprise IT and OT Survey finds 65% of IT decision-makers are aware of 5G, one-third are using it today and 47% have started their 5G planning Businesses identify video as most .... '

Seeing Through Walls

Had seen this before, fascinating example of how more and richer signals can be leveraged into new kinds of imaging.  Here a kind of fabulous example, seeing through walls.    But in the right circumstances, with the right data.

Seeing Through Walls     by Neil Savage
Communications of the ACM, June 2020, Vol. 63 No. 6, Pages 15-16   10.1145/3392516

Machine vision coupled with artificial intelligence (AI) has made great strides toward letting computers understand images. Thanks to deep learning, which processes information in a way analogous to the human brain, machine vision is doing everything from keeping self-driving cars on the right track to improving cancer diagnosis by examining biopsy slides or x-ray images. Now some researchers are going beyond what the human eye or a camera lens can see, using machine learning to watch what people are doing on the other side of a wall.

The technique relies on low-power radio frequency (RF) signals, which reflect off living tissue and metal but pass easily through wooden or plaster interior walls. AI can decipher those signals, not only to detect the presence of people, but also to see how they are moving, and even to predict the activity they are engaged in, from talking on a phone to brushing their teeth. With RF signals, "they can see in the dark. They can see through walls or furniture," says Tianhong Li, a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He and fellow graduate student Lijie Fan helped develop a system to measure movement and, from that, to identify specific actions. "Our goal is to understand what people are doing," Li says.

Such an understanding could come in handy for, say, monitoring elderly residents of assisted living facilities to see if they are having difficulty performing the tasks of daily living, or to detect if they have fallen. It could also be used to create "smart environments," in which automated devices turn on lights or heat in a home or an office. A police force might use such a system to monitor the activity of a suspected terrorist or an armed robber.

In living situations, one advantage of monitoring activity through walls with RF signals is that they are unable to resolve faces or see what a person is wearing, for instance, so they could afford more of a sense of privacy than studding the home with cameras, says Dina Katabi, the MIT professor leading the research. Another is that it does not require people to wear monitoring devices they might forget or be uncomfortable with; they just move through their homes as they normally would.

The MIT system uses a radio transmitter operating at between 5.4 GHz and 7.2GHz, at power levels 1,000 times lower than a Wi-Fi signal, so it should not cause interference. The RF transmissions bounce strongly off people because of all the water content of our bodies, but they also bounce off other objects in the environment to varying degrees, depending on the composition of the object. "You get this mass of reflections, signals bouncing off everything," Katabi says.

So the first step is to teach the computer to identify which signals are coming from people. The team does this by recording a scene in both visible light and RF signals, and using the visual image to label the humans in the training data for a convolutional neural network (CNN), a type of deep learning algorithm that assigns weights to different aspects of an image. The signals also contain spatial information, because it takes a longer time for a signal to travel a longer distance. The CNN can capture that information and use it to separate two or more people in the same vicinity, although it can lead to errors if the people are very close or hugging, Katabi says.  .... " 

Virtual Metabolic Human Models

Considerable complexity in such models, but they at least will point to the kinds and amounts of data and predictions that will be necessary to provide computational results.   A kind of Digital Twin.

Virtual Metabolic Humans—Harvey and Harvetta, Novel Computational Models for Personalized Medicine
Science Foundation Ireland
June 3, 2020

Researchers at National University of Ireland and the Netherlands' Leiden University have created whole-body human computational models for personalized medicine called Harvey and Harvetta. The models can simulate individual metabolisms, physiologies, diets, and gut microbiomes; they also can predict known biomarkers of inherited metabolic diseases, and facilitate investigation of potential metabolic interactions between humans and their gut microbiomes. Harvey and Harvetta are anatomically interconnected whole-body virtual male and female models incorporating more than 80,000 biochemical reactions distributed across 26 organs and six blood-cell types. Their development required the creation of novel algorithms and software for constraint-based simulation of high-dimensional biochemical networks. Leiden University's Ines Thiele said, “Harvey and Harvetta will usher in a new era for research into causal host-microbiome relationships and greatly accelerate the development of targeted dietary and microbial intervention strategies.”

Google Ad Manager

Late to notice this, intriguing approach managed by Google.  In the Google Blog. Note there are 4 previous posts on this.

Use insights to make better business decisions

Chelsea Rice
Product Manager, Google Ad Manager

This is the fifth and final post in a series exploring several of Ad Manager’s key features and how they help our publisher partners maximize their ad revenue. To learn more, read posts one, two, three and four. 

Today, data from a publisher’s advertising activities can extend beyond revenue to inform nearly every aspect of their business. From helping steer content strategy, to delivering better user experiences, to driving subscriptions, ad data can be incredibly useful, but only if you have the tools to gather and analyze the relevant insights.

Google Ad Manager was built to power our partners’ entire digital advertising businesses, including the ability to discover, visualize, and activate data-driven opportunities. For the majority of our partners, the platform has everything they need to manage and optimize their ads business. And for our largest and most data-centric partners, Ad Manager features seamless integrations with Google Analytics, Cloud, and more to support sophisticated data initiatives and segmentations. 

Most importantly, our data solutions always comply with applicable privacy regulations, are consistent with Google's commitments to protect users and their data, and offer partners the tools they need to ensure the right level of privacy for their customers.   ... " 

Knee, Hip Replacement with 3D Printed Artificial Cartilage

Novel approach to a common kind of replacement.

People with Damaged Knees, Hips Could Be Treated with 3D-Printed Artificial Cartilage
Daily Mail (U.K.)
Joe Pinkstone

University of Colorado Denver (CU Denver) scientists three-dimensionally (3D)-printed artificial cartilage for potentially treating damaged hips, knees, and vertebrae. The technique entails the manipulation of liquid-crystal elastomers (LCEs), a highly flexible material with an outstanding ability to dissipate high energy. The researchers converted LCEs into a honey-like resin and loaded them into a specialized 3D printer which prints the resin in a honeycomb-like lattice that emulates the structure of human cartilage. The resin is hardened into its final shape by exposure to ultraviolet light. CU Denver's Christopher Yakacki said the method offers the potential to repair spinal damage, because "with 3D printing—and the high resolution we've gotten from it—you can match a person's anatomy exactly." ...'