Even before president Trump’s executive order on June 22, the US was already bucking global tech immigration trends. Over the past five years, as other countries have opened up their borders to highly skilled technical people, the US has maintained—and even restricted—its immigration policies, creating a bottleneck for meeting domestic demand for tech talent.
Now Trump’s decision to suspend a variety of work visas has left many policy analysts worried about what it could mean for long-term US innovation. In particular, the suspension of the H-1B, a three-year work visa granted to foreign workers in specialty fields and one of the primary channels for highly skilled tech workers to join the US workforce, could impact US dominance in critical technologies such as AI. Read More
Tag Archives: Big7
The U.S. Is Catching Up With China in AI Adoption, Kai-Fu Lee Says
The U.S. has started to catch up to China on the adoption of Artificial Intelligence technology, says AI expert Kai-Fu Lee.
When Lee—the chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures—wrote his book AI Superpowers in 2018, he argued that China was faster in implementing and monetizing AI technology. But the U.S. has started to close the gap on adopting and using AI day-to-day Lee said at Wednesday’s TIME100 Talks event. Read More
Extracting Structured Data from Templatic Documents
Templatic documents, such as receipts, bills, insurance quotes, and others, are extremely common and critical in a diverse range of business workflows. Currently, processing these documents is largely a manual effort, and automated systems that do exist are based on brittle and error-prone heuristics. Consider a document type like invoices, which can be laid out in thousands of different ways — invoices from different companies, or even different departments within the same company, may have slightly different formatting. However, there is a common understanding of the structured information that an invoice should contain, such as an invoice number, an invoice date, the amount due, the pay-by date, and the list of items for which the invoice was sent. A system that can automatically extract all this data has the potential to dramatically improve the efficiency of many business workflows by avoiding error-prone, manual work.
In “Representation Learning for Information Extraction from Form-like Documents”, accepted to ACL 2020, we present an approach to automatically extract structured data from templatic documents. In contrast to previous work on extraction from plain-text documents, we propose an approach that uses knowledge of target field types to identify candidate fields. These are then scored using a neural network that learns a dense representation of each candidate using the words in its neighborhood. Experiments on two corpora (invoices and receipts) show that we’re able to generalize well to unseen layouts. Read More
Apple is building an operating system for health
When people think about Apple and health, the first thing that comes to mind is the Watch.
But the real lynchpin of Apple’s health strategy is the OS it is building for Health.
Specifically, they’re building a system to aggregate data from modern connected devices (like watches, scales, fitness equipment, mattresses, etc) and integrate it with traditional health records (lab results, conditions, medications, procedures) in order to unlock a new, comprehensive view of your body’s health. Read More
Google Teaches AI To Play The Game Of Chip Design
If it wasn’t bad enough that Moore’s Law improvements in the density and cost of transistors is slowing. At the same time, the cost of designing chips and of the factories that are used to etch them is also on the rise. Any savings on any of these fronts will be most welcome to keep IT innovation leaping ahead.
One of the promising frontiers of research right now in chip design is using machine learning techniques to actually help with some of the tasks in the design process. Read More
Where A.I.’s Next Big Breakthrough May Come From: Eye on A.I.
A pioneer in artificial intelligence says conventional companies can still distinguish themselves in A.I. despite worries that tech giants like Google and Amazon have already won.
Andrew Ng, a prominent Silicon Valley executive and investor who previously led some of the biggest A.I. projects at Google and its Chinese rival Baidu, says the next wave of A.I. will be in industries in which the tech giants aren’t firmly rooted. Think manufacturing, agriculture, and healthcare. Read More
Sidewalk Labs, Waterfront Toronto to proceed with Quayside project, but with significant changes
Sidewalk Labs’ controversial proposal to build a high-tech district on Toronto’s waterfront is moving forward but major changes will be incorporated by Waterfront Toronto as it moves to assert more control over the project.
The development has been criticized by Ontario’s premier, privacy advocates and those suspicious of Big Tech.
In a significant climb down, Google sister firm Sidewalk Labs has agreed to a “realignment” of its original master plan, one that had called for broad development in Toronto’s Port Lands area and a public commitment from Waterfront Toronto to secure funding and deliver the extension of Light Rail Transit on the eastern waterfront. Read More
This Israeli Face-recognition Startup Is Secretly Tracking Palestinians
Anyvision Interactive Technologies is one of Israel’s most curious startups. It has shown extraordinary growth, and its technology is being used by the army to monitor West Bank Palestinians at checkpoints on the way into Israel — while using a network of cameras deep inside the West Bank. The company’s co-founder and chief executive, Eylon Etshtein, told TheMarker that his company is sensitive to racial and gender bias and only sells to democracies.
Anyvision is Israel’s most high-profile biometric recognition firm, particularly in facial recognition. The company notes that its software can be hooked up to cameras of all kinds and be installed and used immediately, requiring little computing capacity. Read More
Alphabet In AI: How Google Went From A Search Engine To An $800B Global AI Powerhouse
Alphabet is disrupting healthcare, auto, government contracts, and more with AI. We look at how it got here, where it’s headed, and what this means for incumbents.
Google was relentless in its pursuit of artificial intelligence even before the current wave of AI commercialization took off. Read More
Quantum supremacy using a programmable superconducting processor
The promise of quantum computers is that certain computational tasks might be executed exponentially faster on a quantum processor than on a classical processor1. A fundamental challenge is to build a high-fidelity processor capable of running quantum algorithms in an exponentially large computational space. Here we report the use of a processor with programmable superconducting qubits2–7 to create quantum states on 53 qubits, corresponding to a computational state-space of dimension 253 (about 1016). Measurements from repeated experiments sample the resulting probability distribution, which we verify using classical simulations. Our Sycamore processor takes about 200 seconds to sample one instance of a quantum circuit a million times—our benchmarks currently indicate that the equivalent task for a state-of-the-art classical supercomputer would take approximately 10,000 years. This dramatic increase in speed compared to all known classical algorithms is an experimental realization of quantum supremacy8–14 for this specific computational task, heralding a much-anticipated computing paradigm. Read More
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