Mapping Breakthroughs, Bayesian Big Data and the Mad Queen of Game of Thrones!

 

 

Sixteenth century Turkish admiral and cartographer Piri Reis was well positioned to pursue his passion for mapping as he was reported to be a frequent visitor to the Imperial Library at Constantinople. Admiral Reis reportedly compiled his maps by collecting data from maps dating back to the 4th Century AD when Emperor Constantius founded the great library (a background video is here). Wise Themistius, a “Hellenic philosopher-statesman”, assembled a great number of calligraphers, librarians and cartographers to document the realm of the empire. He advised moderation, advised Roman emperors, and advocated tolerance of pagan religions – and helped to assemble 130,000 volumes. Wiki notes that, “the merchant class became a force of its own,  achieved through efficient use of credit and other monetary innovations. Merchants invested surplus funds in financial products called chreokoinonia (Greek: χρεοκοινωνία), the equivalent and perhaps ancestor of the later Italian commenda. Eventually, the purchasing power of Byzantine merchants became such that it could influence prices in markets as far afield as Cairo and Alexandria.”  The Sack of Constantinople in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade destroyed the library so locating this surviving fragment of a 1513 Piri Reis map on gazelle skin is rare- it shows the Central and South America shores with his annotation offering that “the map of the western lands (is) drawn by Columbus.” Florentine intellectual Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli proposed that sailing west would lead to India eventually. So Christopher Columbus, rumored to be a charmer, zeroed in on Queen Isabella in search of funding for his “quest to find India” – instead he enslaved the Caribbean natives in search of gold and spices.

Picture Credit: World-Mysteries.com

With the launch of satellites (Sputnik 1 in 1957) and the continuous improvement of radar, mapping has become more precise. And India is taking the lead in satellite launches with a genuine achievement of putting 20 satellites on one rocket this summer. The UK Telegraph explains that, “India’s bulk launch makes clear India’s ambition to become a key player in a growing commercial space market, undercutting rivals such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. In May (2016), India tested a “reusable” space shuttle, and in 2013, launched a probe that reached the orbit of Mars for just £50m. The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has achieved a number of milestones in space including:

NAVIC: Completion of the seventh consecutive successful launch of the navigation satellite with IRNSS-1G, which is the last of the constellation that will make India self-sufficient with indigenous navigation system. With NAVIC providing vital information about the India and its surrounding terrains with a special positioning and a separate precision service, it will reduce the country’s dependency on US Global Positioning System (GPS).

Picture Credit: Navinet and ISRO NAVIC

Mangalyaan: ISRO’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM)  successfully entered the Martian orbit on September 2014 in its maiden attempt at a minuscule cost of $74M. India became the first country to successfully complete maiden Mars mission and also the fourth country to successfully venture into Mars.

Mission PSLV C28 and GLSL: In a push to service the commercial market,  PSLV C28 was the heaviest commercial mission undertaken by ISRO which successfully launched five UK satellites weighing over 1440kg. GLSO MK3 is a space crew module that will allow India to undertake a manned space program by 2020. The payload on GLSL MK4 will increase by two thirds to 6.5 tons.

Chandrayaan Lunar Exploration: The Chandrayaan-1 mission carried the Moon Impact Prob payload that discovered water on the Moon. India’s second lunar mission, Chandrayaan 2, is slated for early 2018 aboard the heavy duty GSLV Mk II rocket.

Picture Credit: Wikipedia

Forecasting and predictive modeling has useful applications in agriculture crop planning, construction insurance, infrastructure planning, stock market analysis, and other applications including trade route planning (brings back to the Byzantine trade routes). Google acquired Terra Bella in 2014 which pioneered a new approach to satellites: TB is “building an entirely new class of imaging satellites. We’ve developed a high-resolution, small satellite platform capable of rapid response, high-resolution imagery at a fraction of the cost of traditional imaging satellites. Our second generations satellites (SkySat-3-7) include a propulsion module to support orbit-stationing and enable improvements in resolution.”  ISRO’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) rocket launched the SkySat3-7 using SSC Space propulsion into a 500 km sun-synchronous orbit on June 22, 2016. Another player in the weather monitoring and prediction space is Weather Analytics with provides geo-stable data for decision and operational support. Bill Pardue conceived of a global weather and climate database back in 1983, worked on big data at Lexis-Nexis and then teamed with climatologist John Keller, a Senior Research Meteorologist at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and at AIR Worldwide.  Another third competitor, ViaScience, applies big math to solve complex business problems but also to use Bayesian modeling to analyze “Game of Thrones.” REFS™ is their software platform that automatically generates Big Math algorithms directly from data with limited human input across a wide variety of problems.

Spoiler Alert for Season 7: It’s All About the Mad Queen !

Picture Credit: HBO.com

Another Anti-Innovation: Facebook says users can’t stop it from using biometric data (!?)

Picture Credit: ibtimes.com

In an article that has since been removed from Chicago Crain’s Business, Facebook says users can’t stop it from using biometric data.

(Bloomberg)—Facebook Inc.’s software knows your face almost as well as your mother does. And like mom, it isn’t asking your permission to do what it wants with old photos. While millions of internet users embrace the tagging of family and friends in photos, others worried there’s something devious afoot are trying to block Facebook as well as Google from amassing such data.As advances in facial recognition technology give companies the potential to profit from biometric data, privacy advocates see a pattern in how the world’s largest social network and search engine have sold users’ viewing histories for advertising. The companies insist that gathering data on what you look like isn’t against the law, even without your permission.

If judges agree with Facebook and Google, they may be able to kill off lawsuits filed under a unique Illinois law that carries fines of $1,000 to $5,000 each time a person’s image is used without permission — big enough for a liability headache if claims on behalf of millions of consumers proceed as class actions. A loss by the companies could lead to new restrictions on using biometrics in the U.S., similar to those in Europe and Canada.

THE LAW: Read the Illinois Biometric Privacy Act

Facebook declined to comment on its court fight. Google hasn’t responded to requests for comment (Scroll down for a closer look at the court cases).

IN THE COURTS

Courts have struggled over what qualifies as an injury to pursue a privacy case in lawsuits accusing Facebook and Google of siphoning users’ personal information from e-mails and monitoring their web browsing habits. Suits over selling the data to advertisers have often failed. This year, the U.S. Supreme Court set a “concrete injury” standard for privacy suits, a ruling that both sides are using to argue their case ahead of a hearing Thursday in San Francisco over Facebook’s bid to dismiss the biometrics case.Google is fending off suits in Chicago, arguing that the Illinois statute can’t apply outside the state under the Constitution’s interstate commerce rules. Google also contends the Illinois law doesn’t regulate photos.

Facebook encourages users to “tag” people in photographs they upload in their personal posts and the social network stores the collected information. The company uses a program it calls DeepFace to match other photos of a person. Alphabet Inc.’s cloud-based Google Photos service uses similar technology.The billions of images Facebook is thought to be collecting could be even more valuable to identity thieves than the names, addresses, and credit card numbers now targeted by hackers, according to privacy advocates and legal experts.

While those types of information are mutable—even Social Security numbers can be changed—biometric data for retinas, fingerprints, hands, face geometry and blood samples, are unique identifiers. “Biometric identifiers are a key way to link together information about people,” such as discrete financial, medical and educational records, said Marc Rotenberg, the president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, who isn’t involved in the case. Facebook has “cleverly got its users to improve the accuracy of its own database,” he said.

THE TECHNOLOGY

Photo by Facebook

And just how good is Facebook’s technology? According to the company’s research, DeepFace recognizes faces with an accuracy rate of 97.35 percent compared with 97.5 percent for humans—including mothers.

Rotenberg said the privacy concerns are twofold: Facebook might sell the information to retailers or be forced to turn it over to law enforcement—in both cases without users knowing it.

While most of the earlier privacy lawsuits relied on federal wiretap laws, the facial recognition cases hinge on the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (The Verge asks, “Who is trying to gut this act?” Guess) The Illinois residents who sued under the 2008 law say it gives them a “property interest” in the algorithms that constitute their digital identities—in other words, that gives them grounds to accuse Facebook of real harm. Facebook got the case moved to San Francisco. “Just as trade secrets or subscriber lists can be proprietary to a company like Facebook, unique and unchangeable biometric identifiers are proprietary to individuals,” according to their complaint. They also claim an “informational injury” because Facebook didn’t get consent to collect their so-called faceprints.

Facebook says the lawsuit should be thrown out because the users haven’t suffered a concrete injury such as physical harm, loss of money or property; or even a denial of their right to free speech or religion. The plaintiffs “have offered no specific or coherent allegations explaining how this collection and storage actually affects their privacy—much less causes them concrete harm,” Facebook argued in a court filing. Facebook offered examples that might work, such as if users were identified in an embarrassing photo that cost them their jobs, were victims of identity theft, or were caught in a compromising situation that harmed their relationships.While one person might be able to bring such a case, a group lawsuit would be impossible because it would “create a sea of individualized issues,” Facebook says.

Legal experts say it’s unclear which side will benefit from the Supreme Court’s “concrete harm” ruling in a case involving search engine operator Spokeo Inc. “Spokeo is vague about what kinds of injury are concrete enough to count,” said Julie Cohen, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center. “Everybody is scrambling for advantage.”

FACEBOOK VS. PRIVACY LAW

• December 2005 — Facebook introduces photo tagging

• October 2008 — Illinois adopts Biometric Information Privacy Act

• June 2012 — Facebook acquires Israeli facial recognition developer Face.com

• September 2012 — Facebook ceases facial recognition in Europe

• 2015-2016 — Facebook, Google, Shutterfly and Snapchat sued under Illinois biometrics law. Shutterfly settles confidentially.

• May 2016 — Illinois lawmaker proposes excluding photos from biometrics law, then shelves bill after privacy advocates complain

• October 2016 — Facebook makes second attempt to get biometrics lawsuit thrown out

The Facebook case is In re Facebook Biometric Information Privacy Litigation, 15-cv-03747, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco). The Google cases are Rivera v. Google, 16-cv-02714, and Weiss v. Google, 16-cv-02870, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois (Chicago).

COURT CASES

Weiss v. Google by craignewman on Scribd

TheVerge explains: “Many of the plaintiffs suspect Google or Facebook to be behind the last-minute proposal to change the law. “We believe that Facebook is a lobbyist that is a part of this,” said Chris Dore, an Edelson partner who is working on the lawsuit against Facebook’s photo-tagging system. “The changes that have been proposed certainly mirror the arguments that have been made in our case.” Facebook’s most recent motion to dismiss confirms this impression, devoting an entire section to the argument that the Illinois law does not apply to information derived from photographs.

One of Google’s umm Larry Page’s Flying Cars Spotted ! Here come Airbus and others…

Picture Credit: San Francisco Chronicle

Waaay back in July 19, 2010, Google assigned a “priority date” to its July 19, 2011 filing (WO2012012474 A3) and a subsequent one on February 13, 2013 patent filing (US20130214086 A1) for  “a personal aircraft (that is) a safe, quiet, easy to control, efficient, and compact aircraft configuration is enabled through the combination of multiple vertical lift rotors, tandem wings, and forward thrust propellers. Then in January 2012, bicyclist Thomas Shepard notices something odd: “2700 Broderick Way in Mountain View is a completely unmarked building, the home of Aero Zee. http://www.zee.aero/ Can you say stealth? The web site talks about vehicle autonomy, advanced aerodynamics, and electric propulsion.  Vehicle autonomy and intelligent control have to do with the world of sensors, robotics, computational reasoning, Darpa,” Then, in November 2013, The San Francisco Chronicle spotted the Zee Aero 1 on a tarmac close to (the then) Google’s HQ and crowed, “Forget self-driving cars. How about flying ones? Reports have emerged of what appears to be a mysterious airborne vehicle being developed by a stealth company operating near Google’s Mountain View headquarters.”

Almost four years on, Zee Aero is hiring manufacturing and control systems engineers for Google co-founder Larry Page’s pet project:

Based in the heart of Silicon Valley, Zee is developing a revolutionary new form of transportation. Working at the intersection of aerodynamics, advanced manufacturing, and electric propulsion, we provide a stimulating environment where creative employees can explore new challenges. If you have expertise in aircraft design, electric power systems, active control, machine learning, aeroacoustics, composite structures, or systems integration, let’s talk.

Source: Zee Aero- A sketch from one of Zee.Aero’s patent filings of a personal flying aircraft

Competitor TerraFugia seeking funding at IndieGoGo for a “roadable aircraft” prototyped in 2009, and you can “reserve” a Transition for a $10K refundable deposit: “Terrafugia’s mission is to create practical flying cars that enable a new dimension of personal freedom. Terrafugia (ter-ra-FOO-gee-ah) is derived from the Latin for “Escape the Earth”. We’re Driven to Fly.™”Here’s a video of the exciting craft.

The Zee Aero personal car is a battery powered, vertical lift vehicle that fits into a conventional parking space.  The Chronicle continued, “Zee.Aero was founded in 2010, according to Delaware corporation records, and Ilan Kroo, a noted professor of aeronautics, has been on partial leave from Stanford since 2011 to run the company. He holds the aforementioned patent, among others, and has worked for NASA.” And in November 2013, Professor Kroo stated, “As you gathered, I am working on some interesting transportation ideas at an early stage start-up company in Mt. View (near Google and other tech companies, but not affiliated with them).” There are a gaggle of Google filed patents, however…

On Saturday, The Mercury News reported the Zee Areo VL vehicle was spotted (picture will not load). Google co-founder Larry Page was acknowledged as personally funding a pair of startups devoted to creating flying cars, according to Bloomberg Businessweek in June 2016 (Zee Aero in 2010 at a $100M cost so far and Kitty Hawk started in 2015 by Google X founder Sebastian Thurn). Here’s what is known:

• Zee.Aero now employs close to 150 people. Its operations have expanded to an airport hangar in Hollister, about a 70-minute drive south from Mountain View, where a pair of prototype aircraft takes regular test flights. The company also has a manufacturing facility on NASA’s Ames Research Center campus at the edge of Mountain View.

• Kitty Hawk, began operations and registered its headquarters to a two-story office building on the end of a tree-lined cul-de-sac about a half-mile away from Zee’s offices. Kitty Hawk’s staffers, sequestered from the Zee.Aero team, are working on a competing design. Its president, according to 2015 business filings, was Sebastian Thrun, th­e godfather of Google’s self-driving car program and the founder of research division Google X.

Picture Credit: Airbus A3’s Vahana

The Verge reported recently that an Uber-like air taxi is being deployed by a big competitor, according to CNN Money:

The European aerospace giant Airbus recently unveiled its secret flying-car project dubbed Vahana — a single-manned, autonomously piloted aircraft that can take off and land vertically. The concept drawing of Vahana should look familiar to anyone who follows the tiny-but-passionate flying car movement. The aircraft has eight rotors on two sets of wings, both of which tilt depending on whether the car’s flying vertically or horizontally. There’s room for a single passenger under a canopy that retracts like a visor. The project launched in early 2016 as one of the first pursuits of A³ (pronounced A-cubed), the Silicon Valley arm of Airbus, according to the startup’s CEO Rodin Lyasoff. Vahana is a Sanskrit word that refers to the vehicle or mount of a god.

A3 is clearly dedicated to disruptive innovation as it declares in its mission: “We believe that the future is created through episodic disruption with intervening periods of incremental innovation. Our mission is to build the future of flight now, by disrupting Airbus Group and its competitors before someone else does.”  This is getting interesting, Boy Elroy! (Jetsons hat tip video here)

 

The Race For AI: Google, Twitter, Intel, Apple In A Rush To Grab Artificial Intelligence Startups

Nearly half of the AI companies acquired since 2011 have had VC backing.

Nearly 140 private companies working to advance artificial intelligence technologies have been acquired since 2011, with over 40 acquisitions taking place in 2016 alone (as of 10/7/2016). Corporate giants like Google, IBM, Yahoo, Intel, Apple and Salesforce, are competing in the race to acquire private AI companies, with Samsung emerging as a new entrant this month with its acquisition of startup Viv Labs, which is developing a Siri-like AI assistant.

Read more here:

Google Guns after the $400B Mobile Phone Market- And ALL YOUR DATA

Picture Credit: Google, the Android Open Source stack

So Alphabet released the Pixel and Pixel XL smart phones today, in competition with fellow Android open source operating system suppliers LG Electronics and Samsung, but IAI decided that further investigation could show the motivation. Google used to operate in a fully outsourced hardware model under the Nexus Program, which DigiTrends lays out in great detail covering the release of 14 devices since 2010. Here is the hardware

A). Apple Threat: “Google is now the seller of record of this phone,” said Rick Osterloh, chief of the company’s new hardware division, crowed on Bloomberg – identifying this as a direct threat to Apple.  With the AI aide “Assistant” to compete against Apple’s “Siri”, “The goal is to build a personal Google for each and every user,” said Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google. First, the here’s the G or Gravity featureset and Google’s role which does not leave much of a foodchain (see an overview of Porter’s seminal value chain):

• First mobile phone conceptualized, designed, engineered and tested in-house,
• The Pixel phones feature a Siri-like virtual Google Assistant,
• A high resolution 12.3 Mega Pixel camera with picture quality correction features,
• Employs Android’s new Nougat 7.1 operating system,
• Unlimited Google Cloud storage,
• Expect Pixel-branded smartphones, Google Home, a new Chromecast, Daydream VR,
• Google now managing inventory, building relationships with carriers, sourcing components, making supply chain deals and managing distribution, and
• Google is making accessories, including cases and cables.

B). Cloud Services Proliferation:  In addition to the direct challenge to Apple, the new hardware division is clearly linked to the “G Services” and the exploitation of their “cloud services” which PC Magazine profiled on September 29, 2016 as all being subject to name changes for business-focused services, applications, technical infrastructure, and even its cloud.

Google’s cloud platform—”our user facing collaboration and productivity applications”—is now known as Google Cloud  spanning all the company’s cloud technologies and products: business productivity suite;  machine learning tools; application programming interfaces; enterprise maps APIs; and all Android phones, tablets, and Chromebooks that access the cloud. Google also announced new cloud technologies and machine intelligence capabilities, along with eight new Cloud Platform locations: Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Northern Virginia, São Paulo, London, Finland, and Frankfurt.

C). Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure for the “Internet of Things”: The Google Cloud Platform (GCP) map clearly points to a dramatic ramp in establishing the infrastructure for artificial intelligence deployments under the framework of the Internet of Things. A key focus of the Google push is “big data analytics”  In the new Oregon facility, Google claims to have achieved an 80% improvement in latency which improves application performance but especially in industrial sensors and IoT network performance. WirelessWeek goes deeper:

1. Managing and coordinating real-time performance in the IoT will pose a host of new challenges. First and foremost is the problem of scale: this will be a lot more data, coming from lots of different devices. IoT applications still must detect and react in close to real-time. This means that data must be collected and processed continuously and with controlled latency – batch processing models are ruled out.
2. Secondly, these applications are by definition highly distributed, which means you need to correlate information from many different places to understand what happened even within a single transaction. And the role of the networks that connect devices and systems together cannot be ignored. Distance-related network latency can be reduced by pushing data and processing closer to users where possible, but applications will remain susceptible to poor routing decisions and network congestion.
3. High-value IoT services will often involve systems from different firms and organizations working together to complete a task. Maintaining a system such as this involves collaboration between at least three IT teams in different firms (the parking utility, the bank and the advertiser network), each with its own ‘pool of visibility’ into one segment of the end-to-end application. Without effective data-sharing and cross-correlation, it’s all too easy for each team to conclude that it’s not their problem when things go wrong.

Well respected tech journalist Walt Mossberg explains in The Verge:

Almost a year ago to the day, I wrote a column laying out five reasons it was time for Google to make its own hardware. I missed the AI angle. Google didn’t. The company’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, called AI “a seminal moment in computing” on a par with the personal computer, the web, and the smartphone going mainstream, at roughly 10-year intervals. “It’s clear to me,” he said, “that we are moving from a mobile-first to an AI-first world.” But, even with AI merely in its infancy, Google’s move to becoming a full-fledged maker of the most important consumer tech hardware is a huge deal. It will finally give the search giant the chance to match the advantages long enjoyed by the champion of vertical integration, its arch-rival Apple.

Hold on, Google is talking about end-to-end control on its own GCP blog. CEO Eric Schmidt urges all businesses to move to real time analytics (RTA) relying on Google’s ETL (extract, transform and load) processes – that is full device control. InfoWeek explains the corporate RTA pitch: “Organizations need actionable insights faster than ever before to stay competitive, reduce risks, meet customer expectations, and capitalize on time-sensitive opportunities.” But, they counter, we accept a “multi-cloud world” – “Kubernetes, the open source container management system that we developed and open-sourced, reached version 1.4 in September 2016, and the Google Container Engine (GKE) to this new version (by year end).”

In the spring of 2015, the European Union charged Google with restraint of trade practices against consumers, but another suit emerged in 2016 requiring a mandate for hardware suppliers to commit to exclusive use of the Google search engine and other applications, but PCWeek pointed out that the complaint list was redacted (!) in the EU release provided to Reuters. “The European Union’s antitrust authority filed a so-called statement of objections against Google in April, accusing it of forcing smartphone makers to exclusively use its search engine if they want access to the Play Store, through which phone users can download and purchase other apps.”

TechCrunch’s Natasha Lomas details the real goal of Alphabet – ALL YOUR INFORMATION from A to Z (what 4th Amendment? – asks the Harvard Law Review). “At its hardware launch event in San Francisco, Alphabet showed the sweeping breadth of its ambition to own consumers’ personal data, as computing continues to accelerate away from static desktops and screens, coalescing into a cloud of connected devices with the potential to generate far more data — and data of a far more intimate nature — than ever before”

• Along with two new “Google designed” flagship Android smartphones (called Pixel), the first Androids to be preloaded with the company’s AI assistant (the Google Assistant) and also including fully unlimited cloud storage to suck users’ photos and videos into Google’s cloud.
• Then there were Google Wifi routers, designed to be bought in bundles to plug all those pesky in-home internet blackspots;
• The Google Home always listening connected speaker, which is voice-controlled via the Google Assistant and has limited support for third-party IoT devices (such as Philips Hue lightbulbs);
• An updated Chromecast (the Ultra) to ensure any legacy TV panels are internet-enabled; and
• Google’s less disposable mobile VR play, aka the soft-touch Daydream View headset — just in case consumer eyeballs seek to stray outside the data-mined smart home by escaping into virtual reality.

 

 

 

Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft come together to create historic Partnership on AI

Hmmmn…is this standard setting, oligopoly or collusion???

Picture Credit: TechCrunch tagged as “AI competition” (?)

Posted with no further comment from TechCrunch….

” The world’s largest technology companies hold the keys to some of the largest databases on our planet. Much like goods and coins before it, data is becoming an important currency for the modern world. The data’s value is rooted in its applications to artificial intelligence. Whichever company owns the data, effectively owns AI. Right now that means companies like Facebook, Amazon, Alphabet, IBM and Microsoft have a ton of power. In an act of self-governance, these five companies came together today to announce the launch the new Partnership on AI. The group is tasked with conducting research and promoting best practices. Practically, this means that the group of tech companies will come together frequently to discuss advancements in artificial intelligence. The group also opens up a formal structure for communication across company lines. It’s important to remember that on a day-to-day basis, these teams are in constant competition with each other to develop the best products and services powered by machine intelligence.

Financial support will be coming from the initial tech companies that are members of the group, but in the future, membership and involvement is expected to increase. User activists, nonprofits, ethicists and other stakeholders will be joining the discussion in the coming weeks. “We want to involve people impacted by AI as well,” said Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder and head of applied AI at DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet. The organizational structure has been designed to allow non-corporate groups to have equal leadership side-by-side with large tech companies.

As of today’s launch, companies like Apple, Twitter, Intel and Baidu are missing from the group. Though Apple is said to be enthusiastic about the project, their absence is still notable because the company has fallen behind in artificial intelligence when compared to its rivals — many of which are part of this new group. The new organization really seems to be about promoting change by example. Rather than preach to the tech world, it wants to use a standard open license to publish research on topics, including ethics, inclusivity and privacy. “The power of AI is in the enterprise sector,” said Francesca Rossi, an AI ethics researcher at IBM Research. “For society at-large to get the benefits of AI, we first have to trust it.”

The focus of the organization is a refreshing juxtaposition to more pop-culture discussions about the risks of artificial intelligence. While the jury is still out as to whether a singularity event could threaten mankind, we already face a long list of challenges in today’s world of AI. While computers are not at a point yet where they can take all of our jobs, they can amplify the negative tendencies that humans already possess. A biased world can result in biased data sets and, in turn, bias artificial intelligence frameworks. To combat this, companies like Microsoft have already formed AI ethics advisory boards. But, rather than override existing efforts, the new group augments projects already undertaken at individual companies and provides a forum for sharing valuable advice. The group plans to make discussions and minutes from meetings publicly available.

Echo and the Voice Activated Device Space – AI Vectors

Picture Credit: Amazon

Update: The massive denial of service attacks last week were traced to a takeover of smart home devices by a Chinese firm according to Anthony Mongeluzo from Pro Computer Services as he detailed on Fox Business here. Internet traffic company Dyn told CNBC it faced continued DDoS (denial of service) attacks on 21 October, 2016 were “well planned and executed, coming from tens of millions of IP addresses at the same time.” What is more worrying is the CIA claim that more DDoS attacks are “planned” for election day, according to Carmen Medina (?), the former CIA Deputy Director of Intel who’s talking points were broadcast across the main stream media repetitively since the third debate ended last Wednesday.

Like the Red Sox’s Hanley Ramirez, Amazon is on a roll. It has the online e-commerce market in a vice hold and the fast shipping and benefits of its Prime service are compelling to repeat customers. Frankly, unlike Wal-Mart or KMart or Target (stupid bathroom absurdity), Amazon has choice, price advantage and convenience. IAI is a customer and repeat buyer for these reasons but we can, in fact, ask Jeff Bezos to avoid the mistake their Internet brethren have made in their social media and Virtual Reality (VR) ventures – that is, don’t censor or manipulate or indoctrinate or lie or invade the privacy of your customers.  In fact, the biggest threat to privacy lies in the Internet of Things (IoT) being hacked (which it has been and will) as something as basic as a Samsung TV communicates actively with up to 200 IoT devices in your home, oh, and records and videos activity inside your home ! That must be buried in the “usage agreement” written by a team of lawyers who declare you lose your privacy for “free services.” But IoT is forecast to be a $290B market by 2017, maybe larger.

So, let’s look carefully at the current Amazon hit – “the Echo” which is a voice-activated device (much like ones from Apple, Google [Home] and Microsoft [Cortona] offerings) that is “always on” and “logs every sentence spoken to it,” according to the London Telegraph. But wait, my British chums, it logs every sound it hears and is a continuous transmission device relying on serial inference and contextual awareness. In fact, “voice-activated smart home systems” are all the rage and are the enablers of the IoT takeover of homes from “dumb humans.” /S But, as Slate points out, just trust the – completely…

Five things you can do with the Echo

• Control your music by saying “Alexa, play some Adele” without having to pick up your phone or walk over to your laptop
• Ask for weather information by saying “Alexa, what’s the weather?”
• Get other handy information such as the time and traffic on your commute
• Alexa can also help out in the kitchen by answering questions such as “Alexa, set a timer for 25” minutes
• Third party compatibility with Alexa means that you’ll soon be able to order a pizza or book a taxi by calling out

The story of Echo actually starts with Amazon’s acquisitions of Alexa (website rankings & “actionable analytics” – 1999) and Evi (artificial intelligence – 2013) combined with the construction of a customer-centric shopping database and the development of a massive cloud computing capability. Even though the Amazon “Fire Phone” was a late-to-the-party fail, it did get Amazon thinking creatively about bunding devices with content using the lure of a “Prime” customer relationship which has translated into customer loyalty. Consumer Intelligence Research Partners reported that the Prime customer base grew 43% by H1 16 to 63M (over half of its customer base) with a annual spend differential of $1200 (Price) to $500 (non-Prime). Unlike dumb Siri which often routes drivers into traffic or gets them lost (try the smarter Google Waze), the Echo is quite efficient and represents a precursor of an animated robot assistant for the household or business applications. The Telegraph nails it as a platform for the introduction of artificial intelligence devices into every aspect of society.

Amazon’s software also seems more reliable. The company’s prowess in cloud computing – which has spawned the colossal Amazon Web Services unit – means that the Echo has access to the near-infinite computing resources of the company’s servers: it can hear a question, send it to be processed, receive an answer and relay it in milliseconds. And Amazon’s underrated artificial intelligence chops, honed using years of shopping data and developed at an R&D base in Cambridge, have allowed it to sneak under the radar.

Waay back in April 2014, WIRED called IoT “far bigger than anyone realizes.” To dig in deeper, the research shop of the article, Burrus Research, operates with  “a philosophy of helping clients understand and profit from the driving forces of technology-driven change, enabling them to gain new competitive advantage as they create new products, markets, services and careers.” Hardly a  Johnny-Come-Lately, futurist Dan Burrus has hung his shingle since 1983 and he does not see IoT as simply ‘increased machine-to-machine (M2M) communication.

When we talk about making machines “smart,” we’re not referring strictly to M2M. We’re talking about sensors. A sensor is not a machine. It doesn’t do anything in the same sense that a machine does. It measures, it evaluates; in short, it gathers data. The Internet of Things really comes together with the connection of sensors and machines. That is to say, the real value that the Internet of Things creates is at the intersection of gathering data and leveraging it. All the information gathered by all the sensors in the world isn’t worth very much if there isn’t an infrastructure in place to analyze it in real time. Cloud-based applications are the key to using leveraged data. The Internet of Things doesn’t function without cloud-based applications to interpret and transmit the data coming from all these sensors. The cloud is what enables the apps to go to work for you anytime, anywhere.

In closing, try to think of hapless astronaut Dave when his onboard mainframe HAL refuses his commands in the classic 1968 sci-fi movie “2001: A Space Odessey.”  Legendary film critic Robert Ebert explained,

What (Director Stanley Kubrick and author Arthur C. Clarke) had actually done was make a philosophical statement about man’s place in the universe, using images as those before him had used words, music or prayer. And he had made it in a way that invited us to contemplate it — not to experience it vicariously as entertainment, as we might in a good conventional science-fiction film, but to stand outside it as a philosopher might, and think about it. Life onboard the Discovery is presented as a long, eventless routine of exercise, maintenance checks and chess games with HAL. Only when the astronauts fear that HAL’s programming has failed does a level of suspense emerge; their challenge is somehow to get around HAL, which has been programmed to believe, “This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.”

IAI leaves you with this classic scene: “Open the pod bay doors, HAL” –  [Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDrDUmuUBTo%5D

 

In future posts, I’ll direct some attention to:

• Amazon’s Evi and its Lab 126 in Silicon Valley
• Google’s Deep Mind, Magic Leap and API.AI
  
• Apple’s VocalIQ
• Facebook’s Oculus Rift
• Fossil Group’s Misfit and Recon Instruments