Monthly Archives: September 2019

Unknown's avatar Rick's Cafe AI 10:43 am on September 30, 2019
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China’s hottest startups are having trouble raising cash

YOU know it’s bad when even China’s hottest startups are having trouble raising capital.

A trio of technology innovators have postponed or pulled back on fundraising this year after venture capital pools dried up – the latest sign the country’s remarkable tech startup boom is beginning to peter out.

China’s tech industry has flourished over the past decade. …

That all changed in 2019 after Washington-imposed trade curbs soured investors on the world’s No. 2 economy, suppressing deal flow. Read More

#china-ai

Unknown's avatar Rick's Cafe AI 10:39 am on September 30, 2019
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Distributing AI to the edge cloud and on-device

5G is about a lot of things that have a key commonality–the devices that connect to 5G will consume and create a lot of data of myriad profiles. Fortunately 5G is designed to handle all that data but people are not. Enter artificial intelligence, a rapidly developing set of tech that Qualcomm’s CTO Jim Thompson said “is going to have a much bigger impact at the edge of the network.”

Thompson and other company execs and communications staff, speaking throughout the Future of 5G workshop this week, called out “edge cloud” and on-device AI as key technologies to enabling both consumer and enterprise use cases. Read More

#5g

Unknown's avatar Rick's Cafe AI 1:50 pm on September 28, 2019
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Why Google's Quantum Victory Is a Huge Deal—and a Letdown

They finally did it. After years—no, decades—of declaring their hopes and dreams with hardly any practical results, researchers in the quantum computing community have delivered on a promise. Or have they?

Last week, news leaked that researchers at Google and other institutions had solved a problem on a quantum computer 1 billion times faster than a classical computer. Google did not respond to a request for comment, but according to a draft manuscript describing the experiment, they have realized “quantum supremacy,” an achievement that “heralds the advent of a much-anticipated computing paradigm.”

The reactions from the rest of the quantum community, however, have been downright contradictory. Read More

#quantum

Unknown's avatar Rick's Cafe AI 8:27 pm on September 27, 2019
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10 Ways AI And Machine Learning Are Improving Endpoint Security

Traditional approaches to securing endpoints based on the hardware characteristics of a given device aren’t stopping breach attempts today. Bad actors are using AI and machine learning to launch sophisticated attacks to shorten the time it takes to compromise an endpoint and successfully breach systems. They’re down to just 7 minutes after comprising an endpoint and gaining access to internal systems ready to exfiltrate data according to Ponemon. The era of trusted and untrusted domains at the operating system level, and “trust, but verify” approaches are over. Read More

#cyber

Unknown's avatar Rick's Cafe AI 11:38 am on September 26, 2019
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How Artificial Intelligence Could Make Nuclear War More Likely

f you are a millennial, computers have been trying to get you killed since the days you were born.

On September 26, 1983, the satellites and computers of the Soviet Air Defense Forces, tasked with using data to determine if the United States was launching a nuclear attack, told the humans in charge exactly that was happening—five U.S. ballistic missiles were incoming and the time for the USSR to prepare to launch a retaliatory attack was now.

The reason why you are alive today to read this item is that the human involved, then-Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov, believed that the computer was wrong. Read More

#explainability

Unknown's avatar Rick's Cafe AI 11:24 am on September 26, 2019
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The Fantasy of Opting Out

Consider a day in the life of a fairly ordinary person in a large city in a stable, democratically governed country. She is not in prison or institutionalized, nor is she a dissident or an enemy of the state, yet she lives in a condition of permanent and total surveillance unprecedented in its precision and intimacy. …

If the apparatus of total surveillance that we have described here were deliberate, centralized, and explicit, a Big Brother machine toggling between cameras, it would demand revolt, and we could conceive of a life outside the totalitarian microscope. But if we are nearly as observed and documented as any person in history, our situation is a prison that, although it has no walls, bars, or wardens, is difficult to escape. Read More

#surveillance

Unknown's avatar Rick's Cafe AI 7:42 pm on September 25, 2019
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We See in 3D – So Should Our CNN Models

Summary: Autonomous vehicles (AUVs) and many other systems that need to accurately perceive the world around them will be much better off when image classification moves from 2D to 3D.  Here we examine the two leading approaches to 3D classification, Point Clouds and Voxel Grids.

One of the well-known problems in CNN image classification is that because the CNN classifier sees only a 2D image of the object it won’t recognize that same object if it’s rotated.  The solution thus far has been to train on many different orthogonal views of the same object and that vastly expands the problem of training data and training time. Read More

#human, #image-recognition

Unknown's avatar Rick's Cafe AI 7:37 pm on September 25, 2019
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China’s momentum and challenges in artificial intelligence investments yield telling lessons for its worldwide observers.

China’s ambition in artificial intelligence is often framed as a tech rivalry between two important centers for digital innovation — the east coast of China and the U.S. West Coast. But this rivalry is an undercard for the main event: AI’s largest and most enduring contributions will be in non-technology sectors, as traditional companies unlock value in regions far away from Silicon Valley and the string of coastal cities that constitute China’s innovation corridor.

For non-tech sectors, our research indicates that Chinese companies’ approach to adopting AI differs from those in other regions, raising important questions. Read More

#china-ai

Unknown's avatar Rick's Cafe AI 7:33 pm on September 25, 2019
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Artificial Intelligence: Why It's Essential For Digital Platforms

Companies widely recognize the potential power of artificial intelligence (AI). They instinctively understand that it feels like we’re on the cusp of something that will change our lives and our businesses in a profound way. Yet, many struggle with where to apply it. Executives can’t shake the feeling that they should have use cases for AI and use it productively today, even recognizing that AI is not mature yet and will be far more powerful tomorrow and in the future. If you’re looking for how and where your company should use AI, let me give you a perspective on a great application of AI today: your digital platforms.

A good way to understand what is happening in digital transformation is that businesses are moving from process orientation to platform orientation. Read More

#strategy

Unknown's avatar Rick's Cafe AI 11:58 am on September 25, 2019
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MLflow: an Open Source Machine Learning Platform

Everyone who has tried to do machine learning development knows that it is complex. Beyond the usual concerns in the software development, machine learning (ML) development comes with multiple new challenges. MLFlow is an open interface, open source machine learning platform, released by DataBricks in 2018, that can be used to create an internal ML platform for tracking, packaging, and deploying ML models.

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#devops