Autonomous Driving from a Different Contextual View

From the most recent CACM Mag.   An Arab oriented view of the problem.  Instructional.

Autonomous Driving in the Face of Unconventional Odds   By Hesham M. Eraqi, Ibrahim Sobh

Communications of the ACM, April 2021, Vol. 64 No. 4, Pages 64-66   10.1145/3447729

Traffic accidents are a major unsolved problem worldwide. Yearly, it causes around 1.35 million deaths and 10 million people sustain nonfatal injuries9 in addition to having substantial negative economic and social effects. With approximately 90% of accidents being due to human errors, autonomous driving (AD) will play a vital role in saving human lives and substantial property damage. Moreover, it promises far greater mobility, energy saving, and less air pollution.

Despite the recent advances to achieve such promising vision, enabling autonomous vehicles in complex environments is still decades away.6 The problem turned out to be more difficult than expected and it is even harder in the extremely complex and challenging driving environments in many regions around the world, including most of the Arab region. In the coming subsections, we discuss the challenges facing the successful implementation of AD in the Arab region and map them to the four pillars of the Autonomous Vehicles Readiness Index.7 Finding solutions to those challenges will help deliver the benefits of AD to world regions that are in desperate need for it, as more than 90% of traffic deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries with Africa having the highest death rates.9 In addition, it is very beneficial to the automotive industry as 24% of the global automotive market sales are outside Europe, China, U.S., India, and Japan.5

Infrastructure challenges. The AD algorithmic pipeline employs a 'sense-plan-act' design,3 which is the basis of many robotic systems. Advanced sensors allowed for a more accurate sensing of the environment and the surrounding objects. Nevertheless, today's road infrastructure provides many open challenges to be fully solved in 'planning' the vehicle's actions based on understating the driving scene and eventually 'acting' by commanding the vehicle's control system. Based on our literature review, we conclude that road infrastructure quality is determined by 10 features: signs, marking, barriers, lane, shoulder, median, right-of-way, horizontal alignment, vertical alignment, and lighting. The number of features contributing to road safety problems increases considerably in the case of developing countries and the Arab region4 compared to developed countries. Arab-region specific problems include a combination of lack of lane markings, traffic signs, light poles, and roadside barriers. Add to that the higher traffic densities and unofficial pedestrian waiting areas, captured in Figure 1, and it creates a very challenging driving scene for the 'plan and act' algorithms. From another perspective, once adopted, a self-driving car is expected to generate more than four terabytes of data daily, while the communication infrastructure in many parts of the Arab region is not ready to accommodate such traffic requirements.  ... " 

Electrified Urban Transport

Recall we experimented with Segways in our innovation center,  and observed them being used in locations like the grocery store 'Jungle Jims'.      Here more about typical  human transportation. But do consider that we now expect to be able to carry things with us as well.

SEGWAYS, SCOOTERS, AND SKATEBOARDS: THE NEW ELECTRIFIED URBAN TRANSPORTATION  from Boundmotor.com

March 31, 2021

When Carl Benz applied for a patent for his “vehicle powered by a gas engine” in January 1886, he ignited what would later become a revolution in transportation. Over the centuries, improvements would be made to Benz’s idea, which ultimately led to making privately owned cars and large-scale projects like buses and subway systems central to urban mobility. Popular as they are, the traditional modes of public transportation like privately owned cars, public buses, and subways have their challenges. They are expensive to establish and maintain, result in gridlocks, pollution, and a shortage of parking in most major cities. Within the context of the challenges related to traditional forms of mass transportation, the Segway’s introduction in 2001 started a trend of replacing large-scale public infrastructure with small, one-person electric vehicles. McKinsey & Company, the management consultancy firm, calls this type of transportation micromobility. This article looks at the evolution of one-person electric modes of transport and how they have impacted urban transportation. We start by focusing on the urban transport challenges that have made one-person electric vehicles a growing urban transit option. We then look into the history of these forms of transport and some safety tips for people using them.

CHALLENGES OF TRADITIONAL PUBLIC AND PRIVATE URBAN TRANSPORTATION

The challenges associated with extensive public transportation projects are well documented. An article published by Australia’s University of Melbourne puts these challenges into perspective. It says, “Chronic losses of life on roadways, dangerous deterioration in air quality, and worldwide accumulation of atmospheric carbon can no longer resist the challenges of an increased population and its urbanization.” These challenges are partly responsible for the increasing trend where people prefer to use one-person electric vehicles.  ... "    (Much more) 

The Army Studies Real Time Conversation

Considerable, interesting piece on the topic. Leads to the open question about how we converse with our robot assistants.   And leads on to other kinds of hybrid, cooperative work.   And AI to provide useful information about the meaning of statements and commands in context.    Expect lots more in this space in the coming years.

Army researchers create pioneering approach to real-time conversational AI  by The Army Research Laboratory  in Techexplore.

Spoken dialogue is the most natural way for people to interact with complex autonomous agents such as robots. Future Army operational environments will require technology that allows artificial intelligent agents to understand and carry out commands and interact with them as teammates.

Researchers from the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, known as DEVCOM, Army Research Laboratory and the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies, a Department of Defense-sponsored University Affiliated Research Center, created an approach to flexibly interpret and respond to Soldier intent derived from spoken dialogue with autonomous systems.

This technology is currently the primary component for dialogue processing for the lab's Joint Understanding and Dialogue Interface, or JUDI, system, a prototype that enables bi-directional conversational interactions between Soldiers and autonomous systems.

"We employed a statistical classification technique for enabling conversational AI using state-of-the-art natural language understanding and dialogue management technologies," said Army researcher Dr. Felix Gervits. "The statistical language classifier enables autonomous systems to interpret the intent of a Soldier by recognizing the purpose of the communication and performing actions to realize the underlying intent."

For example, he said, if a robot receives a command to "turn 45 degrees and send a picture," it could interpret the instruction and carry out the task.

To achieve this, the researchers trained their classifier on a labeled data set of human-robot dialogue generated during a collaborative search-and-rescue task. The classifier learned a mapping of verbal commands to responses and actions, allowing it to apply this knowledge to new commands and respond appropriately....  " 

Hybrid Work Disrupting

Microsoft writes on the Next Great Disruption, interesting stats and more, at the link;

The Next Great Disruption Is Hybrid Work—Are We Ready?

Over the past year, no area has undergone more rapid transformation than the way we work, and as the world recovers, there’s no going back.

Our recently released 2021 Work Trend Index contains exclusive research and expert insights into a year of work like no other, and reveals urgent trends leaders should consider as hybrid work unfolds.

Check out the top 7 trends that are emerging, plus 5 strategies for navigating this new world of work. .... " 

Laugh More, Lead Better

Recall some of our own experiments in humor-augmented management.   

Laugh more, lead better  in McKinsey

Naomi Bagdonas and Connor Diemand-Yauman, lecturers at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, hilariously explore the power at the intersection of humor, business, and leadership. It’s no joke. ...'

See Andrew Tarvin's book.

Investing in Eco

How can more people become involved in Crypto?

Investing in Eco, Crypto

by Katie Haun and Arianna Simpson   in Andreessen Horowitz

One of the challenges in any new industry — crypto being no exception — is building things that are not just cool for the sake of cool, but that manage to reach and delight a broad set of users. Technology is at its best when it’s improving the lives of people in tangible, concrete ways. And with new technology like crypto, the strongest approach is often to give users those benefits without requiring them to get too involved in the nuts and bolts.

At a16z Crypto, we are constantly on the lookout for paths to get cryptocurrency into the hands of the next billion people. How do we think that will happen? By helping them achieve what they already want to do: spend, save, and make money — and by focusing users on tangible benefits, not on the underlying technology. 

That’s why we’re excited to announce our investment in Eco. 

Eco’s mission is to reimagine not only how consumer financial products work — but also to reimagine money itself. Eco is not a bank, checking account, or credit card. Although it has elements of each, it’s better than all of those. It begins as a single wallet that rewards you anytime you save or spend your dollars. 

Today, financial transactions involve numerous players at every level — banks, credit cards, processors, and more — introducing inefficiencies and fees along the way. Without the burden of legacy, misaligned business models, Eco is able to offer rewards that sound almost too good to be true, but aren’t. 

As investors, we’re in the business of finding and backing big ideas, and Eco has no shortage of those. The challenge is often finding teams who have the skills to back up that vision and bring it to life. 

In Eco, we found both.   ... ' 

Building 3D Earth Models: Updated

For those with interest in the recent eruptions in Iceland and with interest  in Photogrammetry 3D models of the earth, here is a 3D model of the eruptions.   Still under development. First is a simplified Youtube Demo, then a more complete system.  We had done similar and simplified models at the time with forestry asset and access views.  Want to know how your physical geographic assets can be tracked?   These constructed with aircraft captured data.  Would like to see how this could be built and maintained by LIDAR.   This overall is a good intro to what can be done.   More to follow if there is interest.   

https://youtu.be/BBDhtWyjwxw

And here is the complete model by the Icelandic Institute of Natural History:   

https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/geldingadalir-volcanic-eruption-18042021-439e33653b8142e3b7039d15c2d8bae2

3D models of the eruption site at Geldingadalir created by the photogrammetry department of the Icelandic Institute of Natural History. The photographs are taken from an aircraft and processed in Agisoft Metashape. The models are developed in collaboration with the Civil Protection and Emergency Management of Iceland, The National Land Survey of Iceland and the University of Iceland. ....

Data acquired by Birgir Vilhelm Óskarsson,     Model generated by Nils Gies

Evolution of Ransomware and Related Extortion

Thoughtful podcast and transcript from Recorded Future, Telling the evolution of extortion methods and responses.

Ransomware and Extortion Evolve More Brazen Tactics  By Caitlin Mattingly   of Recorded Future.

For this week’s show we welcome back Allan Liska, a member of Recorded Future’s CSIRT security team. Allan updates us on the latest trends he and his colleagues are tracking on the ransomware and online extortion fronts. We discuss the growing sophistication of the tools and tactics attackers are using, and the remarkable brazenness with which they do their business.... " 

First Multi-Node Quantum Network Paves the Way for the Quantum Internet

 Though still a small number of qubits,  but the connectivity into a 'quantum internet' appears to be a big step forward.

 First Multi-Node Quantum Network Paves the Way for the Quantum Internet By ZDNet  April 16, 2021

Researchers in the Netherlands have successfully connected three separate quantum processors in what is effectively the world's first multi-node quantum network. This paves the way for a large-scale quantum internet that governments and scientists have been dreaming up for decades.

QuTech, a quantum research institute based in Delft, has published new work in which three nodes that can store and process quantum bits (also called qubits) were linked. This, according to the QuTech researchers, is the world's first rudimentary quantum network.

It would be the harbinger of an entirely new medium of calculation, harnessing the powers of subatomic particles to obliterate the barriers of time in solving incalculable problems.

Connecting quantum devices is by no means a novelty: many researchers around the world are currently working on similar networks, but so far have only succeeded in linking two quantum processors. Establishing a multi-node connection, therefore, is a key step towards significantly expanding the size of the network.

 Original article.

Grants for Taming Big Data

Key aspects to manage and manage  large unwieldy data from may sources

DOE Will Spend $10M on Research to Tame Massive Data Sets   By U.S. Department of Energy

The U.S. Department of Energy will provide $10 million in funding on foundational research to address the challenges of managing and processing the increasingly massive data sets produced by today's scientific instruments, facilities, and supercomputers in order to facilitate more efficient analysis

The size of the data produced by scientific facilities across the U.S. "is creating new challenges," says Barb Helland, DOE Associate Director of Science for Advanced Scientific Computing Research. The data must be "made manageable" with techniques that are trusted by scientists, she says.

Applications for the funding opportunity will be open to universities, national laboratories, industry, and nonprofits, with awards selected competitively based on peer review. Total planned funding will be $10 million in Fiscal Year 2021 dollars for projects of three years in duration.

From U.S. Department of Energy 

Statement of Grants:  https://science.osti.gov/-/media/grants/pdf/foas/2021/SC_FOA_0002501.pdf

Phonons and Quantum Monte Carlo

More looks at material science.

A Successful Phonon Calculation Within the Quantum Monte Carlo Framework  By Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology  April 6, 2021

Phonon dispersion of diamond calculated at the variational Monte Carlo level by TurboRVB Image.

An international team of scientists has enhanced quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) computation speeds based on error reduction, and conducted proof-of-concept calculations for a periodic solid.

They found this method can lower statistical error in atomic-force evaluation by two orders of magnitude, and accelerate computation 10,000-fold.

The researchers used the technique to calculate the atomic vibrations of diamond on the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST)'s Cray-XC40 T computer, and the results were consistent with experimental values.

JAIST's Kousuke Nakano said, "The drastic reduction in computational time will greatly expand the range of QMC calculations and enable highly accurate prediction of atomic properties of materials that have been difficult to handle."

From Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

Cyber Threats to Supply Chains

Schneier reports on the DNI annual assessment.  With lots of interesting comments and other coverage in his blog.   Would also like to emphasize supply chain implications.  We move so much, from raw materials to finished products, that these components have become major threat targets as well as new dimensions of needed security.    An  increasing amount of defining and supporting data also becomes a significant target that can be stolen or manipulated.   Below just a hint at consequences:

DNI’s Annual Threat Assessment

The office of the Director of National Intelligence released its “Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community.”   Cybersecurity is covered on pages 20-21. Nothing surprising:

Cyber threats from nation states and their surrogates will remain acute.

- States’ increasing use of cyber operations as a tool of national power, including increasing use by militaries around the world, raises the prospect of more destructive and disruptive cyber activity.

- Authoritarian and illiberal regimes around the world will increasingly exploit digital tools to surveil their citizens, control free expression, and censor and manipulate information to maintain control over their populations.

- During the last decade, state sponsored hackers have compromised software and IT service supply chains, helping them conduct operations — espionage, sabotage, and potentially prepositioning for warfighting.

The supply chain line is new; I hope the government is paying attention.  ... " 

Quanta Magazine: Brain Rotates Memories to Save Them

 Made me think of how this kind of structure could be used in machine learning to perform a kind of  maintenance and change managemebt as new data is acquired.  Even lead to creativity based on current knowledge. 

The Brain ‘Rotates’ Memories to Save Them From New Sensations

Jordana Cepelewicz   Quanta Mag Staff Writer

Some populations of neurons simultaneously process sensations and memories. New work shows how the brain rotates those representations to prevent interference. 

During every waking moment, we humans and other animals have to balance on the edge of our awareness of past and present. We must absorb new sensory information about the world around us while holding on to short-term memories of earlier observations or events. Our ability to make sense of our surroundings, to learn, to act and to think all depend on constant, nimble interactions between perception and memory.

But to accomplish this, the brain has to keep the two distinct; otherwise, incoming data streams could interfere with representations of previous stimuli and cause us to overwrite or misinterpret important contextual information. Compounding that challenge, a body of research hints that the brain does not neatly partition short-term memory function exclusively into higher cognitive areas like the prefrontal cortex. Instead, the sensory regions and other lower cortical centers that detect and represent experiences may also encode and store memories of them. And yet those memories can’t be allowed to intrude on our perception of the present, or to be randomly rewritten by new experiences.

A paper published recently in Nature Neuroscience may finally explain how the brain’s protective buffer works.  https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-021-00821-9   .... ' 

Microsoft and AI Company Nuance

 A good piece on why Microsoft is squiring Nuance, which also reminded me I had tested and used their package Dragon for speech recognition applications.   But how will Cortana integrate, if at all?

 Why Microsoft’s new AI acquisition is a big deal  By Ben Dickson @BenDee983  April 17, 2021 10:25 AM

Microsoft’s recent shopping spree reached a new climax this week with the announcement of its $19.7 billion acquisition of Nuance, a company that provides speech recognition and conversational AI services. Nuance is best known for its deep learning voice transcription service, which is very popular in the health care sector.

The two companies had already been working together closely before the acquisition. Nuance had built several of its products on top of Microsoft’s Azure cloud. And Microsoft had been using Nuance’s Dragon service in its Cloud for Healthcare solution, which launched last year in the midst of the pandemic.  ... '

App Calcs Infection Risk in Rooms

Wonder at the broad claims to accuracy here,  but the components are interesting.  Note the HEADS reference below. 

App Calculates Corona Infection Risk in Rooms

Max Planck Gessellschaft (Germany), April 9, 2021

A free Web application designed by researchers at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPIDS) and the University Medical Center Göttingen can calculate the risk of coronavirus infection indoors. The app employs a method called HEADS (Human Emission of Aerosol and Droplet Statistics) to calculate infection risk via aerosols. Users input a few parameters, like the size of a room, how many people are present, and whether they are breathing, talking loudly, or perhaps singing. HEADS accounts for the fact that larger aerosol droplets can be more harmful when released, because they can contain multiple viruses. MPIDS' Mohsen Bagheri said, "With our holographic and particle tracking measurements, we now know the large aerosols very well. This allows us to determine the viral load in an indoor environment very well." ... '

Salesforce Builds an AI Platform

Interesting example of the effort and its building ... 

Building a Successful Enterprise AI Platform  By Arpeet Kale

Introduction

In 2016, I started as a fresh grad software engineer at a small startup called MetaMind, which was acquired by Salesforce. Since then, it has been quite a journey to achieve a lot with a small team. I’m part of Einstein Vision and Language Platform team. Our platform provides customers with the ability to upload and train datasets (images or text) to produce models that can be used for generating insights in real time. We serve internal Salesforce teams working on Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Industries Cloud, as well as external customers and developers.

If you’ve ever interacted with a chatbot on a leading e-commerce apparel store, financial institute, healthcare organization, or even a government agency, then it’s likely that your request was processed on our platform to understand the question and provide an answer. For example, Sun Basket customers are able to track orders or packages, report any issues with delays or damage, and get a credit or refund. AdventHealth is able to provide patients with an interactive CDC COVID-19 assessment and educate them about the disease.

I’m frequently asked about my experience building an AI platform from the ground up and what it takes to run it successfully, which is what this blog post explores.    .... " 

Whats Next in AI? From Geoffrey Hinton

This sounded interesting, have always read Hinton's pieces.  About to read this. Will give some thoughts about it later, especially how it might change practical use of AI.   Note the article is 44 pages long!  

Geoffrey Hinton Has a Hunch about What's Next for AI   By MIT Technology Review,  April 16, 2021 from CACM.

Back in November, the computer scientist and cognitive psychologist Geoffrey Hinton had a hunch. After a half-century's worth of attempts—some wildly successful—he'd arrived at another promising insight into how the brain works and how to replicate its circuitry in a computer.

"It's my current best bet about how things fit together," Hinton says from his home office in Toronto, where he's been sequestered during the pandemic. If his bet pays off, it might spark the next generation of artificial neural networks—mathematical computing systems, loosely inspired by the brain's neurons and synapses, that are at the core of today's artificial intelligence. His "honest motivation," as he puts it, is curiosity. But the practical motivation—and, ideally, the consequence—is more reliable and more trustworthy AI.

A Google engineering fellow and cofounder of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Hinton wrote up his hunch in fits and starts, and at the end of February announced via Twitter that he'd posted a 44-page paper on the arXiv preprint server.   ( See the PDF at the link)   He began with a disclaimer: "This paper does not describe a working system," he wrote. Rather, it presents an "imaginary system." He named it, "GLOM." The term derives from "agglomerate" and the expression "glom together."

From MIT Technology Review

Record Gaming Sales

 Implications? Increase of spare time? Increase of game hardware sales. Less serious work being done?   Opportunities for more gamification?    Will this continue postpandemic?

We're still spending record amounts on gaming, a year into the pandemic in Engadget  By J. Fingas  @jonfingas 

The PS5 and Switch played key roles in the sales surge.  

Video game sales are still smashing records roughly a year after the COVID-19 pandemic led many people to stay indoors. The NPD Group has determined that video game spending in the US surged 18 percent in March 2021 compared to a year earlier, hitting a new record of $5.6 billion. Hardware sales in particular jumped 47 percent to $680 million, breaking a March record that hasn't been touched since 2008 — yes, the heyday of the Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360.  ... "

Omnichannel Profitable in Post Pandemic?

 Been asked similar questions in recent interactions.  What will the change be and should retailers react? 

Can omnichannel be as profitable for retailers as in-store sales? in Retailwire  by Yogesh Kulkarni with further expert opinion.

The pandemic has accelerated the growth of online sales three to five times depending on the vertical and, even as in-store comes back, no one expects online to regress to pre-pandemic levels. COVID-19 has hastened digital initiatives by as much as five years, meaning retailers now need to leapfrog their intended technology and process development roadmap just to stay even with customer expectations and competitors.

Target saw its operating margin drop last year even as digital revenues more than doubled. 

“The biggest factor in ’21 was the supply chain and digital pressure, about 110 basis points of pressure on the year from that, but I think that’s actually a good place to illustrate some of how we think about rate because to me, it’s all about the dollar impact, not the rate impact,” said Target CFO Michael Fiddelke on the company’s recent earnings call. “Digital is a perfect example. If you would have told us we could double the digital business and only see 110 basis points of pressure last year, I think we all would have taken that outcome.”..." 

AI Development and Policymaking

Obvious, and exists well beyond AI into all decision oriented computation.    Must be done as part of a process understanding model of how decisions are made and implemented, under regulation and compliance.  So ultimately complex. 

Bridging The Gap Between AI Policymakers and AI Developers

By Analytics India Magazine, March 5, 2021in CACM

The current gap in policymakers' tech knowledge and technologists' ethics knowledge needs to be bridged to ensure AI's sustainable development.

To encourage more AI professionals to participate in public policy, the governments should encourage or invest in universities to introduce subjects on ethics, policy, and social sciences in AI and data science courses. 

Only by familiarizing themselves with AI through qualified technologists, policymakers can draft sensible regulation that strikes the right balance between developing ethical AI and maximizing its potential.

From Analytics India Magazine