Communications

Despite the dramatic changes we have seen in business recently, another level of change looms. We are headed toward a future permeated with artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML), where machines take on more of the work people have traditionally done, and then some. The potential for ML is enormous. We are at the dawn of a whole new era of intelligent devices that will revolutionize our business and personal worlds. Corporations wishing to lead with AI/ML should make plans now to establish their initiatives and their technology framework and nurture the necessary skills.

It has the potential to ruin relationships, reputations and our online reality. "Deepfake" artificial intelligence technology promises to create doctored videos so realistic that they're almost impossible to tell from the real thing. So far it has mostly been used to create altered pornographic clips featuring celebrity women's faces but once the techniques are perfected, deepfake revenge porn purporting to show people cheating on their partners won't be far behind. But more than becoming a nasty tool for stalkers and harassers, deepfakes threaten to undermine trust in political institutions and society as a whole. The White House recently justified temporarily banning a reporter from its press conferences using reportedly sped up genuine footage of an incident involving the journalist.

This documentary projects the effects and dangers of Artificial Intelligence (AI) developments for next generations. The video addresses lots of examples in both negative and positive dimensions for using and developing Artificial Intelligence. In my opinion, one of the most important messages of this movie is that speakers in the movie believe that the development of AI is beneficial but it could misuse in lots of malicious areas. Example of that might be within war machines or development of mass destruction weapons which could seriously jeopardize our lives. The message of this movie is clearly states that machines can easily reproduce and duplicate themselves therefore development of full AI could spell the end of the human race.

Facebook once teamed up with scientists at Cornell to conduct a now-infamous experiment on emotional contagion. Researchers randomly assigned 700,000 users to see on their News Feeds, for one week, a slight uptick in either positive or negative language or no change at all, to determine whether exposure to certain emotions could, in turn, cause a user to express certain emotions. The answer, as revealed in a 2014 paper, was yes: The emotions we see expressed online can change the emotions that we express, albeit slightly. Conversations about emotional contagion were quickly shelved, however, as the public disclosure of the study sparked an intense backlash against what many perceived to be an unjust and underhanded manipulation of people's feelings. Facebook would later apologize for fiddling with users' emotions and pledge to revise its internal review practices.

A new app from the former head of video-sharing app Vine hopes to repeat the success of the cult social network by making it easier to shoot and edit short clips. Trash hopes that its secret weapon will be "computational cinematography": the app, which entered closed beta on Monday, uses machine learning "to automate the un-fun parts of video editing", automatically processing video to cut together short clips with a consistent mood and feel. A similar approach, computational photography, has already radically changed smartphone photography, enabling features such as the Pixel's Night Sight and iPhone's Portrait Mode. Trash's co-founder, Hannah Donovan, who was Vine's last general manager before the service was shut down by its owner, Twitter, said she hoped the approach would lower the barrier of entry to video editing. "We're analysing the video for a bunch of different things," Donovan said.

In my last article, How to Use AI to Control Your Smart Home, I discussed the changes coming to residential automation with the introduction of AI and processing performed in the cloud. This is bringing advances to smart homes that were the dreams of science fiction only a few years ago. However, with great power comes great responsibility and there is a dark side to the power of AI in a home; privacy. Anyone watching the news is aware of the near-daily headline of privacy fiascos by major technology corporations. Unfortunately, some of these are the same corporations that are delivering a number of the most advanced AI products for smart homes.

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to demo Chisel AI's Submission Triage and Policy Check solutions at Digital Insurance's Dig In conference in Austin. In speaking with commercial insurance brokers and carriers at the event, a common theme was how to get artificial intelligence implemented. Insurers understand the necessity of innovation in their industry and are excited about the potential benefits of AI in streamlining workflows and improving the digital customer experience. But they have valid questions about how to deploy an AI solution in production, and what a successful AI rollout looks like in the real world. According to a new report conducted by CompTIA, a mere 19 percent of companies say that they have expert knowledge around AI.

Since their introduction more than a decade ago, smartphones have been equipped with cameras, allowing users to capture images and video without carrying a separate device. Thanks to the use of computational photographic technologies, which utilize algorithms to adjust photographic parameters in order to optimize them for specific situations, users with little or no photographic training can often achieve excellent results. The boundaries of what constitutes computational photography are not clearly defined, though there is some agreement that the term refers to the use of hardware such as lenses and image sensors to capture image data, and then applying software algorithms to automatically adjust the image parameters to yield an image. Examples of computational photography technology can be found in most recent smartphones and some standalone cameras, including high dynamic range imaging (HDR), auto-focus (AF), image stabilization, shot bracketing, and the ability to deploy various filters, among many other features. These features allow amateur photographers to produce pictures that can, at times, rival photographs taken by professionals using significantly more expensive equipment.

Thankfully, we've got technology on our side. A nearly endless parade of tools can not only help us remember things, but even get our brains working a bit more efficiently in general. Here are some free apps to help you ramp up your recall. Sometimes the best apps are the ones you already have. Both Android and Apple devices feature quick ways to set reminders for yourself, whether that means leveraging Siri, Google Assistant, or some other AI-powered helper.

Years ago, a mobile app for email launched to immediate fanfare. Simply called Mailbox, its life was woefully cut short -- we'll get to that. Today, its founders are back with their second act: An AI-enabled assistant called Navigator meant to help teams work and communicate more efficiently. With the support of $12 million in Series A funding from CRV, #Angels, Designer Fund, SV Angel, Dropbox's Drew Houston and other angel investors, Aspen, the San Francisco and Seattle-based startup behind Navigator, has quietly been beta testing its tool within 50 organizations across the U.S. "We've had teams and research institutes and churches and academic institutions, places that aren't businesses at all in addition to smaller startups and large four-figure-person organizations using it," Mailbox and Navigator co-founder and chief executive officer Gentry Underwood tells TechCrunch. "Pretty much anywhere you have meetings, there is value for Navigator."