For those of us who worry that Facebook may have serious boundary issues when it comes to the personal information of its users, Mark Zuckerberg's recent comments at Harvard should get the heart racing. Zuckerberg dropped by the university last month ostensibly as part of a year of conversations with experts about the role of technology in society, "the opportunities, the challenges, the hopes, and the anxieties." His nearly two-hour interview with Harvard law school professor Jonathan Zittrain in front of Facebook cameras and a classroom of students centered on the company's unprecedented position as a town square for perhaps 2 billion people. To hear the young CEO tell it, Facebook was taking shots from all sides--either it was indifferent to the ethnic hatred festering on its platforms or it was a heavy-handed censor deciding whether an idea was allowed to be expressed. Zuckerberg confessed that he hadn't sought out such an awesome responsibility.

For those of us who worry that Facebook may have serious boundary issues when it comes to the personal information of its users, Mark Zuckerberg's recent comments at Harvard should get the heart racing. Zuckerberg ostensibly dropped by the university last month as part of a year of conversations with experts about the role of technology in society, "the opportunities, the challenges, the hopes, and the anxieties." His nearly two-hour interview with the Harvard law school professor Jonathan Zittrain in front of Facebook cameras and a classroom of students centered on the company's unprecedented position as a town square for perhaps two billion people. To hear the young CEO tell it, Facebook was taking shots from all sides--either it was indifferent to the ethnic hatred festering on its platforms or it was a heavy-handed censor deciding whether an idea was allowed to be expressed. Zuckerberg confessed that he hadn't sought out such an awesome responsibility.

AI Foundry is aiming to further cut the time it takes to originate a mortgage by adding, among other things, artificial intelligence technology designed to improve on optical character recognition. The fintech firm on Tuesday launched a new "cognitive business automation platform" aimed at improving automated decision-making related to loans, and a new version of its Agile Mortgages technology, which loan officers use to automate the collection and organization of documents. The new technology classifies data and information that at a 90%-plus accuracy rate is "significantly more accurate than optical character recognition," according to a company press release. "Competition in the mortgage lending industry is intense, and while many companies have deployed point-of-sale solutions for the customer, the back-end processes have not undergone a digital transformation, until now," Steve Butler, founder and general manager of AI Foundry, said in a press release. How does your digital mortgage stack up? "We will truly disrupt the'status quo' by automating the mortgage application process and enabling lenders to complement those front-end capabilities with one-day mortgage approvals. This not only opens enormous potential for acquiring and delighting new customers; it also drives down the cost per mortgage, so lenders can be more profitable."

The most advanced wearable assistive technology device for the blind and visually impaired, that reads text, recognizes faces, identifies products and more. Intuitively responds to simple hand gestures. Real time identification of faces is seamlessly announced. Small, lightweight, and magnetically mounts onto virtually any eyeglass frame. Tiny, wireless, and does not require an internet connection.

For the next seven weeks, anyone who's inclined can go to 205 Hudson Street in New York City and take over someone else's apartment. Smart devices like the kettles, lighting and speakers of four homes connect directly to laptops in the corner of an art gallery. Cameras are trained on bathrooms, kitchens and living areas. Visitors can sit down and become a human Alexa, playing music, eavesdropping on conversations through microphones and communicating with the inhabitants via text-to-speech. Each home -- three in Brooklyn, one in San Francisco -- will be "live" for two hours a day.

The Advocate reported Saturday that the resolution adopted last month is just another link a long chain of USPS issues the city wants fixed. Plaquemine Mayor Ed Reeves says residents sometimes go days without mail. Residents say packages are sometimes thrown from delivery vans or delivered to the wrong address and expected mail sometimes never appears.

On Wednesday, a polar vortex brought bitter cold to the Midwest. Overnight, Chicago reached a low of 21 degrees Fahrenheit below zero, making it slightly colder than Antarctica, Alaska, and the North Pole. Wind chills were 64 degrees below zero in Park Rapids, Minnesota, and 45 degrees below zero in Buffalo, North Dakota, according to the National Weather Service. Schools, restaurants, and businesses closed, and more than 1,000 flights have been canceled. Even the United States Postal Service stalled mail delivery, temporarily.

Amazon Comprehend Medical is a new HIPAA-eligible service that uses machine learning (ML) to extract medical information with high accuracy. This reduces the cost, time, and effort of processing large amounts of unstructured medical text. You can extract entities and relationships like medication, diagnosis, and dosage, and you can also extract protected health information (PHI). Using Amazon Comprehend Medical allows end users to get value from raw clinical notes that is otherwise largely unused for analytical purposes because it's difficult to parse. There is immense value associated with extracting information from these notes and integrating it with other medical systems like an Electronic Health Record (EHR) and a Clinical Trial Management System (CTMS).

UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and Stanford research has created a computer program with the rather forgettable name of "computer vision" which can independently identify partially seen objects. This goes beyond the usual program/task scenario which limits normal computer behaviours. This is a super-hot area of AI research, and it's on of the most important of all AI functions, in terms of making AI operational in the physical world. The sheer scale of research in this field is indicative; just about every major research organization is putting a lot of work in to this field, and this new achievement is a big, very important breakthrough. Google, in fact, just released information about its custom optical character recognition (OCR) engine AI lens which can identify a billion products, using different tech.

Text-to-speech technology has advanced greatly over the past two decades. Once defined by the robotic sounding voices that they produced, text-to-speech voices today can sound just as lifelike as an actual human. Today, making a natural sounding text-to-speech voice is labor intensive and expensive. The two most popular methods, HMM and USS, require hours of recordings from a voice actor. Then, computer programmers with an understanding of linguistics must break down all of that audio into the tiniest possible pieces, called phonemes, and appropriately tag them and define the rules for when each individual unit of speech should be used.