This is the problem facing any autonomous device –
cars, drones, Rumba vacuums, etc.
Toyota
announces artificial intelligence research collaboration with MIT and
Stanford
You may have seen Google’s
self-driving pod car, or the Audi
RS 7 that hot lapped Sonoma Raceway, and thought they were pretty
clever. But while these cars
may be smart, they are not intelligent.
All autonomous vehicles built so far rely on
programming to make decisions. If
engineers did not write software for a given scenario, the car simply
does not know what to do. One possible solution is
developing artificial intelligence capabilities for future robot
cars, and at a press conference in Palo Alto today, Toyota said it
will take the first steps to develop that.
The Japanese carmaker will invest $50 million over
the next five years to establish joint research centers at MIT and
Stanford. Researchers will work to develop artificially-intelligent
systems and investigate how they can be applied to future
self-driving cars.
Sometimes it's hard to keep all the reasons people
are suing straight. At least we are getting some interesting new
legal terms like “biometric slurpage.”
Alexander J. Martin reports on the
latest class action launched against Facebook over face prints.
Facebook has been hit with a class-action complaint over its biometrics slurpage, with millions of possible plaintiffs who may claim damages if the advertising giant is found to have acted unlawfully.
The complaint (PDF) states that “Facebook has created, collected and stored over a billion ‘face templates’ (or ‘face prints’)”, which, ostensibly, are as uniquely identifiable as fingerprints. These have been gathered “from over a billion individuals, millions of whom reside in the State of Illinois”.
It is alleged that in doing this, the ZuckerBorg is in violation of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), which was passed by the state legislature in 2008.
Read more on The
Register.
Background for my IT Governance students. We call
them “Best Practices” or “Frameworks.”
Use
Checklist Templates & Tools to Prevent Mistakes
Checklists
aren’t very exciting, [In
the world of Computer Security, the opposite of dull & boring is
outright panic. Bob] but there’s evidence that they can
make a huge difference in how well you do something. Nine hospitals
in Michigan instituted a checklist system for reducing the number of
infections in their intensive care units (ICUs), and infections
went down by 66%, saving 1,500 lives and 75 million dollars in
healthcare expenses over an 18-month period.
The
hospitals’ checklist was only five items long, and
included things that everyone already knew they should be doing. But
just because they knew that they should do them didn’t
mean that they actually did them. They often just forgot.
And if doctors in the ICU are forgetting simple things, it stands to
reason that you are, too.
I'm not taking sides, I'm just saying there are
lots of languages to choose from.
Facebook’s
New Spam-Killer Hints at the Future of Coding
… Brandy is a software engineer at Facebook,
and alongside a team of other Facebookers, he spent the last two
years rebuilding the system that removes spam—malicious, offensive,
or otherwise unwanted messages—from the world’s largest social
network. That’s no small task—Facebook juggles messages from
more than 1.5 billion people worldwide—and to tackle the problem,
Brandy and team made an unusual choice: they used a programming
language called
Haskell.
… Indeed, they already are. Newer languages
such as Google
Go and Mozilla’s Rust
are designed so that developers can build massively parallel code and
build it at speed. And as Brandy points out, other projects are
building Haskell-like software libraries for additional languages,
including “reactive” programming projects like RxJava.
Perspective and a few “Things” for my
students.
Internet Of
Things Projected To Explode With Massive Quadruple Growth By 2020
… Market research firm ABI Research predicts
that the number of business-to-business (B2B) IoT connections will
more than quadruple to 5.4 billion by 2020. The stat is cited in a
Verizon reported
titled, "State of the Market: The Internet of Things 2015."
It's aimed at enterprises that might be underestimating the IoT
sector by not having a strategy in place.
… Based on its research, Verizon estimates
that just 10 percent of enterprises have adopted IoT extensively,
though it expects that number to grow. By 2025, organizations that
dive deep into IoT will be at least 10 percent more profitable than
competitors that don't, Verizon says.
You can read the report
here (PDF).
(Related) Is football really a high tech game?
The
Internet of Things comes to the NFL
… On Thursday, when the defending Superbowl
XLIX champion New England Patriots host the Pittsburgh Steelers to
open the 2015 football season, each player will be equipped with a
set of RFID sensors about
the size of a quarter [Why
so huge? Bob] embedded in his shoulder pads, each
emitting unique radio frequencies. Gillette Stadium (and every other
stadium used by the NFL) has been equipped with 20 receivers to pick
up those radio frequencies and pinpoint every player's field
position, speed, distance traveled and acceleration in real time.
… The NFL
plans to use the data generated to power the NFL 2015 app for Xbox
One and Windows 10, allowing for things like "Next Gen Replay"
that will allow fans to call up stats for each player tied into
highlight clips posted on the app. But that's just the beginning.
The data will be fed to broadcasters, leveraged for in-stadium
displays and provided to coaching staff and players.
… What do you need in order to effectively
track professional athletes? You need the ability to track a motion
in subseconds. Our tags can blink up to 85 times per second."
You also need the capability to deliver data from
a tag to a server with very low latency. She notes that it takes
about 120 milliseconds between the time a tag blinks on the field and
when it hits a server. The location data is accurate
to within six inches. [Not
good enough! Bob]
(Related) For my Computer Security students.
Gartner:
Internet of Things will change cybersecurity dramatically
Another source of “Best Practices” for my
Computer Security students.
Linux
Foundation Security Checklist: Have It Your Way
The Linux Foundation's recently published security
checklist may draw more attention to best practices for
protecting Linux workstations, even if IT pros do not embrace all of
its recommendations.
… "Checklists and best practices
documents are how Linux
Foundation IT works internally. We are just taking an extra step
of making generalized versions of these documents available to others
under free documentation
licenses, in hopes that they are useful to other teams.
The
“gig economy” is a bit bigger than I thought. Or is this a
micro-bubble?
Uber China
raises $1.2 billion in ongoing fundraising round
Uber Technologies Inc's
China unit has
raised $1.2 billion
as part of an ongoing fundraising round, the U.S. ride-hailing
service's CEO Travis Kalanick said on Monday, even as its Chinese
rival Didi Kuaidi raises $3
billion.
Perspective.
(and a quote for my students)
Pew – 8
facts about American workers
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Sep 6, 2015
“Although the U.S. economy is recovering and
appears to be on stable ground compared with other parts of the
world, there’s still a lot of debate over how to best secure the
future for American workers. Some Democrats have pushed for raising
the federal minimum wage, and the Obama administration has
proposed new overtime rules that would make millions of Americans
eligible for extra pay. Meanwhile, some
Republican presidential candidates have maintained that labor
unions are too powerful and impede business. Just in time for Labor
Day, here are eight
facts about the state of American workers….”
[From
the report:
5 On virtually every measure of economic
well-being and career attainment, young college graduates are
outperforming their peers with less education to a greater extent
than in the past.
Might make an interesting App to transcribe my
lectures for my students.
How To
Create Advanced transcription and analytics with Voicebase and Tropo
… Tropo
provides an API for automating communications by connecting code to a
phone network for both voice and messaging. This service is able to
transcribe any recording, including multi-party conference calls.
This
tutorial by Adam Kalsey on the Tropo blog guides followers
through creating advanced transcription with analytics using Tropo
with VoiceBase’s audio indexing and transcription API.
Something to point to in several classes? Could
amuse my students.
Our World
in Data
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Sep 6, 2015
“Life around the world is changing rapidly –
here you find the data visualizations that show you how. Poverty,
violence, health, education, the environment and much more. Our
World In Data covers a wide range of topics and visualizes the
empirical evidence of how living standards changed over the last
decades, centuries, and millennia. A web publication authored by Max
Roser. (work in progress)”
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