Amazon’s new driver surveillance cameras may put employee privacy in the backseat.
The way to becoming a trillion-dollar company isn’t paved with philanthropy — on the contrary, it lies in pushing legal limits to new dystopian heights.
Recently, Amazon revealed the use of constant monitoring cameras in company vehicles — to “improve driver behavior,” according to an informational video from the firm.
However, in light of how Amazon develops surveillance techniques to monitor warehouse workers — both on and off the clock — Amazon delivery drivers’ lives could become a lot harder. Read More
Tag Archives: Big7
Artificial Intelligence in Research: Where do China and USA stand?
What’s the current situation of Artificial Intelligence in the Research and funding sector?
Today, we are on the cusp of witnessing a widespread implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) across several sectors. As artificial intelligence technologies are pushing the frontiers of usability and innovation, countries are racing to diffuse its applications on public, private and social front. While we inch close to achieving total disruption, artificial intelligence becomes a key driver of productivity and GDP growth for every nation. With the USA and China having occupied the leading ranks in AI research, nations like the UK, Singapore, Japan, Brazil, India and others are striving to etch themselves on global map.
… Nations like India, Japan are powerhouses of digital data. However, according to a new report from the Center for Data Innovation, USA still holds a substantial lead globally. With tech behemoths like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and IBM investing heavily in artificial intelligence, the USA still managed to hold the axial position in AI research.
An article in Tech Wire Asia reveals that thanks to beaming investment in startups and research and development funding, the USA achieved an overall score of 44.6 points in a new study by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). Read More
Tech giants open up about their algorithms
Google, Facebook, TikTok and others are starting to talk more about how their algorithms work in a bid to win trust.
Yes, but: It’s hard to know what isn’t being revealed.
- Google on Monday published a blog post that shows users how to access more information about their search results, the day ahead of its Q4 earnings report.
- Facebook similarly released a post last week about how its News Feed algorithm works the day before its Q4 earnings.
- TikTok last year, amid the threat of a ban from the Trump administration, walked Axios and other reporters through an extensive presentation of how its prized algorithm works.
The AI Squad
According to Mark Cuban, “The companies that have harnessed AI the best are the companies dominating. To paraphrase a great movie line, ‘They keep getting smarter while everyone else stays the same ‘ It’s the foundation of how I invest in stocks these days. ‘How good is the company at AI’ ” This “AI Squad” includes the US based members of the Big 7: Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft, plus Apple. Read More
Artificial intelligence researchers rank the top A.I. labs worldwide
Artificial intelligence researchers don’t like it when you ask them to name the top AI labs in the world, possibly because it’s so hard to answer.
U.S. Big Tech — Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft — have all set up dedicated AI labs over the last decade.
There’s also DeepMind, which is owned by Google parent company Alphabet, and OpenAI, which counts Elon Musk as a founding investor.
… “Reputationally, there is a good argument to say DeepMind, OpenAI, and FAIR (Facebook AI research]) are the top three,” according to Mark Riedl, associate professor at the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing. Read More
Big Tech In Edge Computing
Forget coding, you can now solve your AI problems with Excel
Machine learning and deep learning have become an important part of many applications we use every day. There are few domains that the fast expansion of machine learning hasn’t touched. …But mastering machine learning is a difficult process. You need to start with a solid knowledge of linear algebra and calculus, master a programming language such as Python, and become proficient with data science and machine learning libraries such as Numpy, Scikit-learn, TensorFlow, and PyTorch. And if you want to create machine learning systems that integrate and scale, you’ll have to learn cloud platforms such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
… To most people, MS Excel is a spreadsheet application that stores data in tabular format and performs very basic mathematical operations. But in reality, Excel is a powerful computation tool that can solve complicated problems. Excel also has many features that allow you to create machine learning models directly into your workbooks. Read More
What Happens When AI Has An Overactive Imagination?
Tech giants are giving China a Vital Edge in Espionage
U.S. officials say private Chinese firms have been enlisted to process stolen data for their country’s spy agencies.
In 2017, as U.S. President Donald Trump began his trade war with China, another battle raged behind the scenes. The simmering, decade long conflict over data between Chinese and U.S. intelligence agencies was heating up, driven both by the ambitions of an increasingly confident Beijing and by the conviction of key players in the new administration in Washington that China was presenting an economic, political, and national security challenge on a scale the United States had not faced for decades—if ever.
Beijing was giving China hawks in the United States plenty of ammunition. Read More
Alphabet’s Loon hands the reins of its internet air balloons to self-learning AI
Alphabet’s Loon, the team responsible for beaming internet down to Earth from stratospheric helium balloons, has achieved a new milestone: its navigation system is no longer run by human-designed software.
Instead, the company’s internet balloons are steered around the globe by an artificial intelligence — in particular, a set of algorithms both written and executed by a deep reinforcement learning-based flight control system that is more efficient and adept than the older, human-made one. The system is now managing Loon’s fleet of balloons over Kenya, where Loon launched its first commercial internet service in July after testing its fleet in a series of disaster relief initiatives and other test environments for much of the last decade. Read More
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