IFTTT has roughly 700 services on the platform; some 300 or so are related to the smart home. But only about 7 million of its 17 million users connect a smart home device to the platform, which means that most of the IFTTT’s end users and the companies whose services they use aren’t doing anything related to the smart home. Tibbets wouldn’t offer specific numbers around device-to-device connections or smart home usage, but I know that I have a dozen or so functioning IFTTT applets and two-thirds of them relate to my smart home devices.
I rely on IFTTT to connect devices that otherwise don’t have integrations or to do something a manufacturer might not otherwise support in its app. I’m not alone, which is why when Google said it would kill its Works with Nest program, preventing Nest devices from talking directly to other services and forcing them to instead go through Google Home hubs, I worried about IFTTT.
Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence announced Monday a plan to open an Israeli branch with an investment of NIS 30 million ($8.4 million). Founded in 2014 with funding from late billionaire and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, the institute’s goal is to conduct high-impact AI research and engineering. The Israel branch will be the institute’s first outside of the US.
Nearly 25% of Wealthfront’s tech clients in the Bay Area plan to leave Silicon Valley for New York; Austin, Texas; and other more affordable cities, a survey of the firm’s investors found.
Reuters, Investigates; Cassell Bryan-Low, Colin Packham David Lague, Steve Stecklow and Jack Stubbs
from
In early 2018, in a complex of low-rise buildings in the Australian capital, a team of government hackers was engaging in a destructive digital war game.
The operatives – agents of the Australian Signals Directorate, the nation’s top-secret eavesdropping agency – had been given a challenge. With all the offensive cyber tools at their disposal, what harm could they inflict if they had access to equipment installed in the 5G network, the next-generation mobile communications technology, of a target nation?
What the team found, say current and former government officials, was sobering for Australian security and political leaders: The offensive potential of 5G was so great that if Australia were on the receiving end of such attacks, the country could be seriously exposed. The understanding of how 5G could be exploited for spying and to sabotage critical infrastructure changed everything for the Australians, according to people familiar with the deliberations.
A Tuesday afternoon in the Mission District of America’s tech wonderland.
Michael Feno stands outside Lucca Ravioli, his beloved pasta emporium on Valencia, a vestige of old San Francisco, puffing on a cigar while posing for pictures, his customers in tears.
Living in this city’s radically shifting landscape, veterinarian Gina Henriksen found comfort by telling herself, “Thank God, Lucca is still here. If Lucca goes, I’m going to have to leave San Francisco. What do we have left?”
Lucca is no longer here.
After 94 years, doors shuttered on the last day of April. The parking lot sold for $3.5 million. A three-building parcel, including the store, listed for $8.3 million and was purchased by — need you inquire? — a developer.
“What makes Silicon Slopes unique is this unique data asset and the machine learning groups at BYU and Utah State, at Dixie, SUU and all of these universities are partnering with these private companies to create these unique assets,” said [Dave] Elkington.
That data — how it’s collected and used — has helped turn Inside Sales into a company valued at more than a billion dollars. It’s customers include Dell, American Express, Caesars Entertainment and many more large enterprises.
Elkington says that Inside Sales has more than 30 patents around different algorithms.
“Utah is going to become, if not already, known as the technology hub or the area where data and machine learning is prevalent,” Elkington added.
A user is usually asked to check a box to verify that they’re over 13 or enter their birthday before they’re allowed to enter an age-restricted website. That’s a problem for companies who need to keep compliant with federal privacy law, said Dylan Collins, CEO of SuperAwesome, a company that builds safer internet products for children.
“It’s easy to spoof if you’re a child,” Collins said. “Of course you’re going to say, ‘I’m an adult.’ The problem is, that is then taking kids into these adult environments, which might not have appropriate content. From a privacy perspective, it also means that all of their personal data is being captured.”
“Kids are then being tracked around the internet. There are laws in place that make that illegal.”
To address this, SuperAwesome announced on Wednesday it has been quietly testing an artificial intelligence system on more than 300 indicators that can determine whether a child or an adult is browsing a website, negating the need for people to check a box and verify their age before entering a site.
HSBC Holdings PLC is opening a new 50-person data lab in Toronto that will harness the city’s artificial-intelligence talent.
The London-based global bank announced the lab at the Collision tech conference in Toronto on Wednesday. As many as 50 new artificial-intelligence professionals, including data scientists, engineers and analysts, as well as students, will analyze up to 10 petabytes of data – that’s 10 million gigabytes – on 1.6 million corporate and institutional clients in more than 60 countries, in order to help HSBC develop new products and services. It will be HSBC’s second Global Data & Innovation Lab, following its first in London.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development unveiled the first intergovernmental standard for artificial intelligence policies Wednesday—and the organization’s 36 member countries including America have initially signed on along with Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Peru and Romania.
OECD, an international forum that unites stakeholders from many nations to work together to address challenges of globalization, released “Recommendations of the Council on Artificial Intelligence” to help foster a global policy ecosystem that leverages the evolving technology’s benefits, while also protecting human rights and democratic values.
Buzz about artificial intelligence has led to increased spending and put several Trump administration directives in motion, but only a handful of agencies have gotten into the early stages of AI adoption. However, a second wave of agencies may soon launch their own AI tools if they can overcome some common hurdles.
The Professional Services Council Foundation, in a report released Wednesday, highlighted some of the challenges and opportunities agencies face in using AI to deliver on their mission.
Looking across four agencies — Defense Department, the General Services Administration, NASA and the Department of Health and Human Services — the report highlights use cases where program offices have pioneered AI to reduce backlogs or increase the output of their existing workforce.
Engineers at Georgia Tech say they’ve come up with a programmable prototype chip that efficiently solves a huge class of optimization problems, including those needed for neural network training, 5G network routing, and MRI image reconstruction. The chip’s architecture embodies a particular algorithm that breaks up one huge problem into many small problems, works on the subproblems, and shares the results. It does this over and over until it comes up with the best answer. Compared to a GPU running the algorithm, the prototype chip—called OPTIMO—is 4.77 times as power efficient and 4.18 times as fast.
LexisNexis Risk Solutions, an American analytics firm, has catalogued more than 4bn phones, tablets and other computers in this way for banks and other clients. Roughly 7% of them have been used for shenanigans of some sort. But device fingerprinting is becoming less useful. Apple, Google and other makers of equipment and operating systems have been steadily restricting the range of attributes that can be observed remotely. The reason for doing this is to limit the amount of personal information that could fall into unauthorised hands. But such restrictions also make it harder to distinguish illegitimate from legitimate users.
That is why a new approach, behavioural biometrics, is gaining ground. It relies on the wealth of measurements made by today’s devices. These include data from accelerometers and gyroscopic sensors that reveal how people hold their phones when using them, how they carry them and even the way they walk.
University of California-San Diego, Jacobs School of Engineering
from
Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a high-throughput computational method to design new materials for next generation solar cells and LEDs. Their approach generated 13 new material candidates for solar cells and 23 new candidates for LEDs. Calculations predicted that these materials, called hybrid halide semiconductors, would be stable and exhibit excellent optoelectronic properties.
The combination of third-party web tracking and ad campaign measurement has led many to conflate web privacy with a web free of advertisements. We think that’s a misunderstanding. Online ads and measurement of their effectiveness do not require Site A, where you clicked an ad, to learn that you purchased something on Site B. The only data needed for measurement is that someone who clicked an ad on Site A made a purchase on Site B.
Today we are presenting a new technology to allow attribution of ad clicks on the web while preserving user privacy. We used the following principles as we designed this technology:
We know that more education usually equals more income, but as the cost of education continues to rise, the challenge to earn a college degree also increases. Based on estimates from the National Center for Education Statistics, here’s how much the cost has gone up over the years.
New York, NY May 29, starting at 7 p.m., part of World Science Festival. “The Bit Player tells the story of an overlooked genius [Claude Shannon] who revolutionized the world. The World Premiere of this film will be followed by a conversation discussing Shannon’s legacy and the impact of his work.”
Seattle, WA June 22-23 at The Ninety (406 Occidental Avenue South). “The objective of the Analytics Conference is to highlight the importance and the rising usage of analytics to help coaches and front-office executives make better decisions.” [$$$]
Amsterdam, The Netherlands October 9-10 at Taets Art and Event Park. “The movers and shakers of today’s global AI masterplans will come together for the premier gathering of artificial intelligence experts.” [$$$]
Valletta, Malta Part of IEEE VIS 2019, October 20-21. “We are interested for example in exploring how citizens can and should be involved in smart city practices, and how this will impact visualization design decisions.” Deadline for submissions is June 15.
“We are committed to fostering and sustaining an environment of respect and inclusivity. To increase participation of underrepresented or historically marginalized groups, IEEE VIS is offering need-based scholarships to enable conference attendance.” Deadline for applications is June 30.
Big Island of Hawaii January 3-7, 2020. “PSB will provide a forum for the presentation of work in databases, algorithms, interfaces, visualization, modeling and other computational methods, as applied to biological problems, with emphasis on applications in data-rich areas of molecular biology. PSB intends to attract a balanced combination of computer scientists and biologists.” Deadline for paper submissions is August 5.
Technology is changing how we practice medicine. Sensors and wearables are getting smaller and cheaper, and algorithms are becoming powerful enough to predict medical outcomes. Yet despite rapid advances, healthcare lags behind other industries in truly putting these technologies to use. A major barrier to entry is the cross-disciplinary approach required to create such tools, requiring knowledge from many people across many fields. We aim to drive the field forward by unpacking that barrier, providing a brief introduction to core concepts and terms that define digital medicine. Specifically, we contrast “clinical research” versus routine “clinical care,” outlining the security, ethical, regulatory, and legal issues developers must consider as digital medicine products go to market. We classify types of digital measurements and how to use and validate these measures in different settings. To make this resource engaging and accessible, we have included illustrations and figures throughout that we hope readers will borrow from liberally. This primer is the first in a series that will accelerate the safe and effective advancement of the field of digital medicine. [full text]
“It leverages powerful client-side encryption of any type of data, textual or binary, but without performance loss and assuring a seamless end-user experience. No cryptographic skills are required.”
AWS Big Data Blog, Vignesh Rajamani and Nikki Rouda
from
“Designed to make it easy for you to experiment and build applications with Apache Spark. In this blog post, I first cover some of the benefits that EMR Notebooks offers. Then I introduce you to some of its capabilities such as detaching and attaching a notebook to different EMR clusters, monitoring Spark activity from within the notebook, using tags to control user permissions, and setting up user-impersonation to track notebook users and their actions.”