More than three years after Europe’s sweeping privacy law took effect, consent mismatches and illegitimate data collection continue to undermine advertisers’ and publishers’ efforts to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation. These issues bedeviled companies back in 2018, and new data shows continued gaps between the permissions people give companies to collect and use their data and what ad tech firms actually do.
On the average day between May and the end of August this year, 500,000 online ad impressions served in Europe contradicted the data-collection choices people made as required under the GDPR, according to ad security monitoring company Confiant, which sees digital ad activity across tens of thousands of websites. It’s worth noting that millions of ad requests might be processed each second by just one digital ad platform, so half-a-million ad impressions represents a miniscule portion of all the ads served every day. Read More
Monthly Archives: October 2021
AI Futures: how artificial intelligence will change music
Artificial intelligence is at the heart of a fundamental shift in music’s role in our lives, and for electronic music, the transition will be seismic. But will it result in a harmonious and utopian new landscape for creators and fans, or is intelligent automation the beginning of a new deepfake culture war? In part one of a three-part series running on DJ Mag digital this week, our online tech editor Declan McGlynn looks into how AI has become one of the most exciting developments in music since the advent of sampling Read More
Brud, Creators of Virtual Human Lil Miquela, Announce a New Direction
Five years have passed since Miquela Sousa made her first Instagram post. Since that historic day, her graphics and career have evolved, as she has continually defined and redefined what it means to be a virtual influencer. However, for half a decade the information about her managing company, Brud, has largely remained the same: a static Google document.
Anyone who has researched Miquela will recognize this screenshot of what Brud’s official website used to be. For years, this one-page Google document was the only accessible information on Miquela’s creators and content team.
Now, all of that has changed. Read More
Imtiaz Adam, Deep Learn Strategies, How AI will transform everything
How DeepMind is Reinventing the Robot
Having conquered Go and protein folding, the company turns to a really hard problem
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE has reached deep into our lives, though you might be hard pressed to point to obvious examples of it. Among countless other behind-the-scenes chores, neural networks power our virtual assistants, make online shopping recommendations, recognize people in our snapshots, scrutinize our banking transactions for evidence of fraud, transcribe our voice messages, and weed out hateful social-media postings. What these applications have in common is that they involve learning and operating in a constrained, predictable environment. Read More
Gathering Strength, Gathering Storms: The One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100)
In the five years since we released the first AI100 report, much has been written about the state of artificial intelligence and its influences on society. Nonetheless, AI100 remains unique in its combination of two key features. First, it is written by a Study Panel of core multi-disciplinary researchers in the field—experts who create artificial intelligence algorithms or study their influence on society as their main professional activity, and who have been doing so for many years. The authors are firmly rooted within the field of AI and provide an “insider’s” perspective. Second, it is a longitudinal study, with reports by such Study Panels planned once every five years, for at least one hundred years.
… Like the first report, the second report aspires to address four audiences. For the general public, it aims to provide an accessible, scientifically and technologically accurate portrayal of the current state of AI and its potential. For industry, the report describes relevant technologies and legal and ethical challenges, and may help guide resource allocation. The report is also directed to local, national, and international governments to help them better plan for AI in governance. Finally, the report can help AI researchers, as well as their institutions and funders, to set priorities and consider the economic, ethical, and legal issues raised by AI research and its applications. Read More
The 2021 Machine Learning, AI and Data (MAD) Landscape
It’s been a hot, hot year in the world of data, machine learning and AI.
Just when you thought it couldn’t grow any more explosively, the data/AI landscape just did: rapid pace of company creation, exciting new product and project launches, a deluge of VC financings, unicorn creation, IPOs, etc.
It has also been a year of multiple threads and stories intertwining.
One story has been the maturation of the ecosystem, with market leaders reaching large scale and ramping up their ambitions for global market domination, in particular through increasingly broad product offerings. Some of those companies, such as Snowflake, have been thriving in public markets (see our MAD Public Company Index), and a number of others (Databricks, Dataiku, Datarobot, etc.) have raised very large (or in the case of Databricks, gigantic) rounds at multi-billion valuations and are knocking on the IPO door (see our Emerging MAD company Index – both indexes will be updated soon).
But at the other end of the spectrum, this year has also seen the rapid emergence of a whole new generation of data and ML startups. Whether they were founded a few years or a few months ago, many experienced a growth spurt in the last year or so. As we will discuss, part of it is due to a rabid VC funding environment and part of it, more fundamentally, is due to inflection points in the market. Read More
Rick's Cafe AI 