Google Building more Private Web: Privacy Sandbox

Google talks about its approaches to a more private, yet financially sustainable Web.

Building a more private web    By Justin Schuh  Director, Chrome Engineering
Published Aug 22, 2019

Privacy is paramount to us, in everything we do. So today, we are announcing a new initiative to develop a set of open standards to fundamentally enhance privacy on the web. We’re calling this a Privacy Sandbox. 

Technology that publishers and advertisers use to make advertising even more relevant to people is now being used far beyond its original design intent - to a point where some data practices don’t match up to user expectations for privacy. Recently, some other browsers have attempted to address this problem, but without an agreed upon set of standards, attempts to improve user privacy are having unintended consequences.

First, large scale blocking of cookies undermine people’s privacy by encouraging opaque techniques such as fingerprinting. With fingerprinting, developers have found ways to use tiny bits of information that vary between users, such as what device they have or what fonts they have installed to generate a unique identifier which can then be used to match a user across websites. Unlike cookies, users cannot clear their fingerprint, and therefore cannot control how their information is collected. We think this subverts user choice and is wrong.

Second, blocking cookies without another way to deliver relevant ads significantly reduces publishers’ primary means of funding, which jeopardizes the future of the vibrant web. Many publishers have been able to continue to invest in freely accessible content because they can be confident that their advertising will fund their costs. If this funding is cut, we are concerned that we will see much less accessible content for everyone. Recent studies have shown that when advertising is made less relevant by removing cookies, funding for publishers falls by 52% on average.

So we are doing something different. We want to find a solution that both really protects user privacy and also helps content remain freely accessible on the web. At I/O, we announced a plan to improve the classification of cookies, give clarity and visibility to cookie settings, as well as plans to more aggressively block fingerprinting. We are making progress on this, and today we are providing more details on our plans to restrict fingerprinting. Collectively we believe all these changes will improve transparency, choice, and control.  .... " 

Shape of Data Implies its Uses

Recall hearing about this approach in training we took.    Making it easier to connect key data to analytics.   Shape constraint languages.

Graph Database ‘Shapes’ Data   By George Leopold in Datanami

A semantic graph database technology vendor is supporting a key specification designed to validate graph-based data against a set of conditions that specify the “shape” of data. The goal is a more agile way of analyzing larger volumes of complex, distributed data.

Franz Inc. said this week its flagship AllegoGraph platform now supports SHACL, the SHApe Constraint Language used to describe “the shape that data should have.” The spec was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium.

The language using a concept known as “triples” to describe data properties. Triples refers to the subject (the thing being described), predicate (properties or relationships of the subject) and object (an intrinsic value such as an integer or text).

SHACL also specifies the number of triples required in a repository along with metadata about the object, including a specified subject and predicate.

Oakland-based Franz said support for SHACL would improve the ability of its graph database to validate data and applications from outside sources while improving interoperability. “Adding SHACL to AllegroGraph helps our customers simplify the complexity of enterprise systems through the ability to loosely combine independent elements, while allowing the overall system to function smoothly,” said CEO Jans Aasman.

The 6.6 version of AllegroGraph includes a data-shaping validation engine used to confirm whether data conforms with desired requirements. SHACL allows a data graph, for instance, to specify the corresponding shapes graph used to describe the link between a given shape and targeted data.  .... "

Crowd Sources Autonomous Vehicle Training

From Ideaconnection, offer of sale or licensing of  a US patent:

Crowd-sourced Autonomous Vehicle Training

Definitions: When driving, human drivers encounter non-events (expected events like traffic lights turning red) as well as events (unexpected events like an unaccompanied child standing at the edge of the road).

Events are captured from crowd-sourced participants driving their own cars during their routine lives. The determination that a particular scenario is an unexpected event is carried out automatically (without manual input) by sensing eye, foot and hand positions and movements, and comparing it to a map. This arrangement can not only sense the driver’s actions to change speed or direction in response to such unexpected events, it can also detect the driver’s intentions to do so. It can also determine various driving attributes and mental components of the driver. This in turn allows drivers to be scored and ranked in each geographical region, so that expert drivers can be identified. 

Signatures for events extracted from the driving patterns of such expert drivers are more reliable, and form better training routines for improving autonomous vehicle software. A database of thousands of such signatures, and their variations, are obtained by crowd-sourced expert drivers. These signatures are then used by autonomous vehicles to identify potential or real events, and react to these events in a human-like manner. 

Companies developing AVs need not wait for a history of “millions of miles tested”, but instead can rely on extremely quick, cheap and highly reliable, human-like training sub-routines extracted from crowd-sourced drivers.   .... " 

GeoThermal Batteries

Never hear of this specifically, but makes sense.

A Novel Thermal Battery Promises Green Power Around the Clock

Japanese scientists have developed a thermal battery that converts heat into electricity when buried in a geothermal zone   In IEEE Spectrum By John Boyd

You can fry an egg on the ground in Las Vegas in August, but try that in Iceland or Alaska and you'll just end up with the stuff on your face—unless you know how to tap into the Earth's vast reservoirs of geothermal energy. 

Researchers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology have developed a new kind of battery that can reliably generate electric power from heat in environments with temperatures ranging from 60 degrees C to 100 degrees C—which is low enough to mimic geothermal heat.

In an earlier experiment, the researchers developed sensitized thermal cells (STCs) that employed dye-sensitized solar cells to convert light into electric power. In their latest advance, team leader Sachiko Matsushita, an associate professor at Tokyo Tech, explained that they replaced the dye with a semiconductor to enable the cells to operate using heat instead of light.

Several methods for converting heat into electric power already exist, including redox batteries that employ the flow of hot and cold chemical liquids to create electricity, and thermoelectric batteries that use the Seebeck effect to generate electricity when a temperature gradient is applied along a conductor.

But Matsushita points out that whereas the STC battery can literally be buried in the ground and work as is, the other devices would face major physical and operational issues if required to operate in such a way.  .... "

Epistemic (How we gain secure and manage) Knowledge

Also fundamental.   Really how we manage knowledge, which means lots of things including finding, keeping  and preparing it for use in context.   I would add fear and measurable risk too.   Who would imagine we could fear data and knowledge?   Here more philosophical, but still thoughtful piece:

Talk at link below from The Edge:

Epistemic Virtues
A Talk By Peter Galison [8.21.19]

I’m interested in the question of epistemic virtues, their diversity, and the epistemic fears that they’re designed to address. By epistemic I mean how we gain and secure knowledge. What I’d like to do here is talk about what we might be afraid of, where our knowledge might go astray, and what aspects of our fears about how what might misfire can be addressed by particular strategies, and then to see how that’s changed quite radically over time.

James Clerk Maxwell, just by way of background, had done these very mechanical representations of electromagnetism—gears and ball bearings, and strings and rubber bands. He loved doing that. He’s also the author of the most abstract treatise on electricity and magnetism, which used the least action principle and doesn’t go by the pictorial, sensorial path at all. In this very short essay, he wrote, "Some people gain their understanding of the world by symbols and mathematics. Others gain their understanding by pure geometry and space. There are some others that find an acceleration in the muscular effort that is brought to them in understanding, in feeling the force of objects moving through the world. What they want are words of power that stir their souls like the memory of childhood. For the sake of persons of these different types, whether they want the paleness and tenuity of mathematical symbolism, or they want the robust aspects of this muscular engagement, we should present all of these ways. It’s the combination of them that give us our best access to truth." 

PETER GALISON is a science historian; Joseph Pellegrino University Professor and co-founder of the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University; and author of Einstein's Clocks and Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time. Peter Galison's Edge Bio Page .... '

Understand Variance

Yes, variance fundamental, a primary indication of context and causal influences.

Do You Understand the Variance In Your Data?
Thomas C. Redman in HBR

It is easy enough for managers to see that things in the business world vary. Some marketing campaigns produce great results; similar ones do not. There are times when the supply chain works effortlessly, and other times when every step is snarled. Some days the numbers look fine, and other days they just don’t add up. Variation is a manager’s natural enemy, making it more difficult to sort out what’s really going on, make valid predictions, and be in control.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Sorting out variation provides needed context, points to opportunity, and helps managers maintain their cool when something goes wrong. Managers should learn how to measure variation, understand what it tells them about their business, decompose it, and, when necessary, reduce it.

I advise managers to sort out variation and what is causing it. Doing so provides needed context, points to opportunity, and helps them maintain their cool when something goes wrong. Consider the following example. The figure below depicts the error rates for the first three weeks of an invoicing process .... " 

Intel AI Chip

Have always been interested in what can be done with AI oriented Hardware.  Now Intel has a solution:

Intel unveils first artificial intelligence chip Springhill
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Intel Corp on Tuesday unveiled its latest processor that will be its first using artificial intelligence (AI) and is designed for large computing centers.

The chip, developed at its development facility in Haifa, Israel, is known as Nervana NNP-I or Springhill and is based on a 10 nanometer Ice Lake processor that will allow it to cope with high workloads using minimal amounts of energy, Intel said. .... " 

Customer Experience and AI

On upcoming talk on CX via personalized customer experience using AI:

Buying experience and customer service “changing through AI” – SAP
Liliana Petrova - in CustomerThink

How can companies create personal, one-on-one long-lasting relationships while deploying digital, automated technology that all but eliminates the human factor? Ahead of her session at TFM 2019, Payal Raina explains how businesses can use the latest marketing technologies to deliver powerful, seamless and personalised customer experiences

In 2020, customer experience (CX) will overtake price and quality as the key brand differentiator, according to a Walker Study.

Forward-thinking companies who have invested time, effort and resources into listening, understanding, and anticipating their customers’ future needs are going to be the winners of longer-term client commitment.

Today, consumers expect more from the brands they choose to follow and engage with and are demanding smarter and savvier experiences. Big businesses are using customer insight in elevating the customer experience but, marketing technology (MarTech) presents a unique challenge. How can companies create personal, one-on-one long-lasting relationships with customers while deploying digital, automated technology that all but eliminates the human factor?

The key is to deliver a fully integrated system that intersects marketing and technology to deliver the seamless experience the consumer is already expecting. .... " 

US Air Force Prints Aircraft Parts

Continued increase in use of 3D printing

Air Force certifies first 3-D printed nonstructural aircraft parts
by Louis Briscese, Air Force Office of Scientific Research in Techexplore

The 60th Maintenance Squadron is the first field unit in the U.S. Air Force to be certified with an industrial-sized, 3-D printer that is authorized to produce nonstructural aircraft parts.

The Stratasys F900 3-D printer is capable of printing plastic parts up to 36 x 24 x 36 inches, uses a material called Ultem 9085 that is more flexible, dense and stronger than typical plastic.

The printer, which is certified by the Federal Aviation Administration and the Air Force Advanced Technology and Training Center, offers new opportunities to create needed parts while saving time and money. .... "

Model Driven Software Development

Brought to my attention.  I like the idea, as long as it does not remove transparency, especially as it relates to real-life process and context.   This is about software, with its inherent sometimes mysterious complexity, and I am always interested in making the software as near to real process as possible.  So I thought:  Can this be reapplied naturally  at a process level?  Examining.

Obscuring Complexity (Using Model Driven Software Development) in InfoQ

Key Takeaways

If done well, Model Driven Software Development can partially obscure some complexity, but you are going to have to treat the source code output as build artifacts and take ownership of the templates. Maintaining code generating templates is a kind of meta-programming that most developers are not used to doing.

Twelve Factor applications can truly achieve lower complexity, but only when integrated with mature or stable (i.e. boring) data stores.

You can lower complexity in microservice orchestration by building in some limited, cross cutting intelligence into the connectors, but you must be careful because too much intelligence creates the opposite effect.

You can write smaller applications when using a heavyweight framework, but beware that efficiency may suffer, that these kinds of services are harder to tune for performance, and that it may take longer to debug certain kinds of issues.

With reactive programming, you end up trading backend complexity for frontend complexity.  .... "

Autonomous Robot Delivery in US Universities

Makes sense to try this in the demographic and relatively contained space of a University.   Autonomous robot deliveries are coming to 100 university campuses in the U.S.   By Luke Dormehl in DigitalTrends

Pioneering autonomous delivery robot company Starship Technologies is coming to a whole lot more university campuses around the U.S. The robotics startup announced that it will expand its delivery services to 100 university campuses in the next 24 months, building on its successful fleets at George Mason University and Northern Arizona University. .... " 

Risk Aware Traffic Engineering

Analysis and use risk measures a favorite approach of mine.  Risk-aware always a good idea.  Especially considering architectures.

Using Wall Street secrets to reduce the cost of cloud infrastructure
“Risk-aware” traffic engineering could help service providers such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google better utilize network infrastructure.

By Rob Matheson | MIT News Office 

Stock market investors often rely on financial risk theories that help them maximize returns while minimizing financial loss due to market fluctuations. These theories help investors maintain a balanced portfolio to ensure they’ll never lose more money than they’re willing to part with at any given time.

Inspired by those theories, MIT researchers in collaboration with Microsoft have developed a “risk-aware” mathematical model that could improve the performance of cloud-computing networks across the globe. Notably, cloud infrastructure is extremely expensive and consumes a lot of the world’s energy.

Their model takes into account failure probabilities of links between data centers worldwide — akin to predicting the volatility of stocks. Then, it runs an optimization engine to allocate traffic through optimal paths to minimize loss, while maximizing overall usage of the network.

The model could help major cloud-service providers — such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google — better utilize their infrastructure. The conventional approach is to keep links idle to handle unexpected traffic shifts resulting from link failures, which is a waste of energy, bandwidth, and other resources. The new model, called TeaVar, on the other hand, guarantees that for a target percentage of time — say, 99.9 percent — the network can handle all data traffic, so there is no need to keep any links idle. During that 0.01 percent of time, the model also keeps the data dropped as low as possible.

In experiments based on real-world data, the model supported three times the traffic throughput as traditional traffic-engineering methods, while maintaining the same high level of network availability. A paper describing the model and results will be presented at the ACM SIGCOMM conference this week. ..... " 

What Your Voice Reveals

And of course you may be revealing things you want to keep private.   As this kind of pattern recognition advances we will see more of that.

What Your Voice Reveals About You 
The Wall Street Journal
By Sarah Krouse

Technology can detect nuances in the human voice that offer clues to a person's likely location, medical conditions, and even physical features. For example, voice-biometric and recognition software used by Nuance Communications examines factors like the pitch, rhythm, and dialect of speech, as well as vocabulary, grammar, and sentence structure, to detect the gender, age, and linguistic background of callers and whether a voice is synthetic or recorded. It helped one bank determine that a single person was responsible for tens of millions of dollars of theft. Winterlight Labs, meanwhile, parses features in speech and works with Janssen Pharmaceuticals to try to detect Alzheimer's in older patients who, for example, tend to use words they acquired earlier in life as their recent memories deteriorate.   .... "

Digital Twins Grow Up

"Digital Twins Grow Up," by Samuel @samthewriter Greengard, says that digital twins, or exact #virtual representations of physical objects and #systems, are revolutionizing #engineering, #manufacturing, and other fields.

Digital Twins Grow Up    By Samuel Greengard    August 6, 2019

One of the things that makes computers so remarkable is their ability to create digital representations of physical objects and systems. This allows designers, engineers, scientists, and others to build models and simulations that deliver deep insights into how machines operate, when systems fail, and how complex scenarios play out over time.

Exact virtual representations of physical objects and systems—a.k.a. digital twins—are redefining and even revolutionizing fields as diverse as agriculture, engineering, medicine, and manufacturing.

"We have reached a point where it's possible to have all the information embedded in a physical object reside within a digital representation," says Michael Grieves, chief scientist for advanced manufacturing at the Florida Institute of Technology and the originator of the concept nearly two decades ago.

You've got twins!
From power turbines to jet aircraft, smartphones to office buildings, organizations are now using digital twins to predict how systems will perform, when they will fail, how people use them, and how a vast array of variables and conditions factor into outcomes. These digital representations, often incorporating computer-aided design (CAD) and building information modeling (BIM) software, are becoming crucial tools for unlocking cost savings, greater efficiency, and innovation.

The value of digital twins revolves around their ability to reduce or eliminate wasted physical resources—which can include, time, energy, and materials, Grieves points out. "The use of digital twins is ushering in the next phase of operational and productivity improvements," says Joe Berti, vice president of offering management for Watson IoT IBM Cognitive Applications. He says that a growing array of data points—generated from sensors and devices residing within the Internet of Things (IoT) and pushed through machine learning and AI systems—are advancing the sophistication of digital twins at a rapid rate.

For example, NASA now uses digital twins to better understand how to design, test, and build spacecraft. The agency is developing a framework that allows it to see when a component or vehicle is operating efficiently and safely in the virtual world before commencing manufacturing in the physical world.

GE also has embraced the concept. It operates digital steam turbines and wind farms that are exact representations of all physical assets. The firm has predicted that integrating its wind power software with a 2MW wind turbine in a digital twin setup can increase energy production by as much as 20%.

Meanwhile, the City of Cambridge in the U.K. is creating digital twins to better understand traffic and manage air quality.

Gartner has predicted that "billions of things" will be represented by digital twins by 2022. "Their proliferation will require a cultural change, as those who understand the maintenance of real-world things collaborate with data scientists and IT professionals," the firm noted in an online post about strategic and technology trends.  ....  " 

Magnetic Precise Drug Delivery

Seems a very good advance.  Do we know the exact implications of precise delivery of pharma?  Practical issues?

A new way to deliver drugs with pinpoint targeting
Magnetic particles allow drugs to be released at precise times and in specific areas.

David L. Chandler | MIT News Office 
August 19, 2019

Most pharmaceuticals must either be ingested or injected into the body to do their work. Either way, it takes some time for them to reach their intended targets, and they also tend to spread out to other areas of the body. Now, researchers at MIT and elsewhere have developed a system to deliver medical treatments that can be released at precise times, minimally-invasively, and that ultimately could also deliver those drugs to specifically targeted areas such as a specific group of neurons in the brain.

The new approach is based on the use of tiny magnetic particles enclosed within a tiny hollow bubble of lipids (fatty molecules) filled with water, known as a liposome. The drug of choice is encapsulated within these bubbles, and can be released by applying a magnetic field to heat up the particles, allowing the drug to escape from the liposome and into the surrounding tissue.   ....  " 

Stop and Shop has Robots in the Aisle

How they are being used is still unclear, but this could get customers used to the idea of robots in the aisle.   Pictures of the bots show an attempt to be humorous.   Perhaps until they got in the way.

Marty the robot may take your picture, but his corporate owners say he doesn't want to spy on you. by Jessica McKenzie  in Engadget

I met Marty in the produce section of a Stop & Shop in Bristol, Rhode Island. I was looking for vegetables to grill over hot coals, while Marty roamed the aisles, big, round eyes staring vacantly ahead, searching for spills and other hazards—with electric sensors strategically placed on its tall, rectangular form. Marty, you see, is a supermarket robot.

Since January, the northeastern supermarket chain Stop & Shop has introduced more than 200 robots to stores in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Jersey. This month the company will begin rolling Marty out to stores in New York. By the end of the year, there will be more than 300 robots in Stop & Shop stores and nearly 200 more in Giant stores, another supermarket chain owned by the Netherlands-based parent company, Ahold Delhaize.  .... " 

Motivation and Goodwill

Intriguing motivation augmentation via goodwill?  How universally and continuously does this work with other goals?

New Tool Shows Goodwill May Trump Profit as Work Motivator
University of Waterloo News
June 11, 2019

Researchers at the University of Waterloo in Canada studying a new online work-sharing platform designed to give charities money found that people committing their skills and labor to a specific task tended to be more productive if they knew a preferred charity would be paid, rather than themselves. The PledgeWork platform lets employers post tasks, deposit the cost for the job, and select the charities to contribute the task’s cost to, or let volunteers choose. The volunteers select tasks, as well as the charity they want to support, unless pre-specified. Once the task is completed, the requester verifies the task results match their criteria, then approves a donation to the specified charity. Waterloo's Edward Lank suggests the platform may help people surmount perceived obstacles to charitable donations, "in a way that allows people to use their skills to benefit a charity anonymously." ... ' 

Smart Home Sensors for Alexa

A good look, many from Samsung.    Not enough in the way of collaborative capabilities and skills for these.  I want to see more collaboration,  predictive AI and usage plans for homes and their operation.

The best smart home sensors for Alexa
Samsung dominates this space.
 Via Wirecutter, @wirecutter

Among Alexa's many tricks is that it also works as a smart-home hub. And adding smart sensors to an Echo Show or Echo Plus can turn either device into more than just an opponent for 20 Questions. Different sensors detect activity such as motion, a door or window opening, and temperature, and then tell other devices how to react. We recommend the Samsung SmartThings Motion Sensor and Samsung SmartThings Multipurpose Sensor for their reliability and wide compatibility with other devices.

The Samsung SmartThings Motion Sensor stands out among the few Alexa-compatible sensors because its long range lets it easily cover a large room (or even two), it can trigger in reaction to temperature as well as motion, and it's super easy to pair with an Echo Plus or Echo Show (no SmartThings hub needed), so you can run Alexa Routines based on motion or temperature changes in the room. It's a breeze to install, and thanks to a magnetic mount that's easy to adjust, it fits almost anywhere you need it. The sensor is also water resistant (although it's recommended only for indoor use). .... " 

Brief History of Blockchain

Very nicely done,  mostly non-technical.  Good visuals of the concepts.  With some forward predictions.   This emphasizes Blockchain-Ledger rather than cryptocurrency applications,  which is good.   Unless you are into more speculative investment.

(Introductory excerpt, full article at link)

A Brief History of Blockchain: An Investor’s Perspective    By Cameron McLain in Medium

After many friends and family members asked me to explain my investments in blockchain assets, I decided to write an email. That email turned into this blog post.

The following post is intended for the uninitiated but I hope those familiar with the concepts will benefit from this lucid overview. So here is a (very) brief overview of the history of blockchain with key takeaways that I think are important for investors to understand. I do gloss over some of the more technical aspects for clarity’s sake.

Caveat: Before diving in, please understand that Bitcoin and blockchain though often used interchangeably are not the same thing. We’ll discuss this in more detail. :   .... ' 

Wal-Mart Patents a Blockchain Digital Currency

Wal-mart has already experimented with the underlying tech for produce tracking.   Is this beyond that? Or an extension of distributed ledger?  Intriguing all around.

SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR DIGITAL CURRENCY VIA BLOCKCHAIN   (Wal-Mart Patent description)

Abstract
A method include: generating one digital currency unit by tying the one digital currency unit to a regular currency; storing information of the one digital currency unit into a block of a blockchain; buying or paying the one digital currency unit; determining whether restrictions are applied to the one digital currency unit by referring to one or more documents associated with the one digital currency; recording the determination in a block of the blockchain; overlaying the one digital currency unit with customer purchase history; calculating savings based on the one digital currency unit again naked forecast; applying the savings to customer purchases; using the one digital currency unit for accepted goods or services with the saving if the one digital currency unit is restricted; using the one digital currency unit for any goods or services with the saving if the one digital currency unit is unrestricted; and storing the one digital currency into a digital currency reserve. .... " 

Gartner speculates on this and other related efforts:

Libra and Walmart “Blockchain” Tokens: Financial or Walled Garden Inclusion?   by cuzureau  

" ...... Walmart has been active in providing alternative payment and account solutions to underbanked, such as prepaid accounts. However mentioning financial inclusion is an opportunity for Walmart to move the debate toward the fees charged by banks and card networks. A Walmart token would reduce the cost of payment acceptance (by canceling merchant service charge since payments will be “on-us”).

In theory some of the savings generated could be transferred to the customer, and for example encourage the customer to save more (via rewards or higher interest rates on deposits). But clearly this will demand that Walmart lacks a banking license and they failed to acquire one in the past4. And this would be needed to deliver impactful banking services to unbanked and underbanked. That said, could a digital wallet containing Walmart tokens and receiving reward tokens at the end of given period be considered by the regulator as a deposit account? ..... "