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The Task of Rebuilding AI Infrastructure: Machines and the New Reality

The Task of Rebuilding AI Infrastructure: Machines and the New Reality
Rebuilding AI Infrastructure? A lot of AI models were built for a world that no longer exists. But the status quo has changed with COVID-19.

A lot of AI models were built for a world that no longer exists. We trained algorithms to interpret consumer behaviour and user patterns based on a certain notion of normality. But the status quo has changed with COVID-19. Let’s talk about the task of rebuilding AI infrastructure.

Online search terms, purchases, location data – every metric right now is suggestive of a society that has nothing to do with what our world looked like a few months ago.

What would you think of early-2020 humans if you were to just look at raw data? Sedentary creatures, obsessed with acquiring toilet paper and prompt to anger over social media.

That’s what Will Douglas Heaven, senior AI editor for MIT Technology Review, focuses on in his article this week.

We’re adapting to the new normal. The machine learning algorithms powering the modern enterprise will need to be revised as well.

Rebuilding AI Infrastructure

Customised Google search

Just like we resort to Google or any other search engine to unearth all the existing information on a certain topic, companies have for long struggled to make it easier for their employees and end-users to search for information across internal data silos.

This week, Amazon announced the general availability of Kendra, its own solution to this problem. The platform leverages natural language processing to let users search for anything they need through natural questions rather than keywords.

And so, automation keeps on permeating and refining enterprise systems.

News from the frontlines

Another week means a new host of tech initiatives meant to combat the spread and effects of the pandemic. 

Some weeks ago, Twitter announced a series of tools intended to dissuade users from posting harmful content. This week, Facebook made public early results outlining how its AI-based, hate-speech countermeasures are working. Promising, albeit still a ways to go.

Experts in every discipline are relying on tech to come up with ways of avoiding future catastrophes and carry better, collective lives. The Financial Times examines what one of these experts has to say about re-thinking cities for a better future.

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Weekly News Digest #4

Weekly News Digest
Weekly News Digest

Good morning! So… Thursday. Quite the week, right?

The UK is officially no longer part of the EU. The Wuhan coronavirus is spreading almost as quickly as the xenophobia it has sparked. Oh, and Trump finally managed to turn the State of the Union address into a full-blown reality TV show.

We have prepared a whole new batch of resources and interesting reads for you to explore this week. But, first things first. Let’s see what the tech world has been up to.

A week in retrospect…

In case the Iowa caucuses weren’t complicated enough, the app designed to collect and share the vote results for the US Democratic Party went absolutely bonkers. It wasn’t hackers, though.

Apparently, someone was so excited to implement new voting technologies that they went ahead with an untested app developed by the aptly named company Shadow. No training for volunteers either. Because, you know — why. They spent the rest of the week manually counting the results. Oh, blessed be paper backup.

Meanwhile, somewhere over the rainbow…

The Cloud Wars wrapped up this fiscal year’s offensive as the big players announced Q4 earnings.

AWS retains its leadership, with Microsoft on second place and narrowing the gap. In third place, Google Cloud, which released its first official cloud earnings report earlier this week.

The FY2019 revenue table for the top 3 cloud divisions stands as follows:

  1. Amazon — $35 billion (37% more than in 2018)
  2. Microsoft — $16.4 billion (39% yearly increase)
  3. Google — $8.9 billion (53% spike from last year)

Also —IBM recently changed CEOs, promoting its head of cloud to the top position in an effort to catch up with the competition.

Let the 2020 race begin.

Big news for the SAP community this week — The company is extending free ECC support throughout 2027, with optional maintenance until 2030.

Looks like SAP has finally accepted an extension as inevitable if it wants more of its customers to migrate to S/4HANA. The ERP vendor has vowed to support the new iteration until 2040.

Finally, human trials of the first AI-designed drug will soon start in Japan.

Targeted at patients suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), the new compound represents a major technological and medical achievement. While the average drug development takes about 5 years to get to trials, AI did it in just 12 months.

Let’s hope it actually works. That would mean better, faster, and cheaper medicine for all.

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Press review Tech Magazine

Weekly News Digest #2

Weekly News Digest #2
Weekly News Digest #2

A week in retrospect…

Recently got a dog although you “don’t really have the time” for it?

Do not fret, irresponsible dog owners — AI’s got your back.

Now you can leave your pet unattended for hours, possibly days, and not have to deal with the slightest remorse. Go enjoy that weekend at a ski resort without leaving your apartment keys with a friend. When you return home, this AI-powered dog trainer will have your pet obedient and ready for a flawless Instagram photo session.

I guess the important question here is whose orders your pet will obey. Good news, Skynet — Now you have dogs on your side.

On a more serious note…

This week, the Swiss town of Davos hosted the annual World Economic Forum. This year’s edition put, again, much of its focus on technology.

As the meeting marked its 50th anniversary, the organisers wanted to reflect on how much technology has changed everything in the past half century. Experts at the Forum’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution called for careful and ethical use of emerging technologies, while outlining 9 reasons to be optimistic about tech in 2020.

Taking advantage of the media spotlight ahead of the event, Microsoft made a pledge to remove all of the carbon it has emitted since the company was founded in 1975. All that by 2050. That goes way beyond Amazon’s pledge to be carbon neutral by 2040.

Ha! Take that, Jeff. The cloud wars keep raging — Ironically, this time the battle is over actual (CO2) clouds.

Meanwhile, in another part of Europe…

The EU is considering a 5-year ban on the use of facial recognition technology in public spaces, citing concerns over data privacy and the potential nefarious uses of a technology that’s not yet fully understood. Caution is good. At least as long as it is to allow for enough time for companies and governments to establish regulations and protocols that protect us citizens.

Google and Microsoft are already wrangling over the proposed ban. Microsoft, which happens to sell this technology to governments and state agencies, is, not surprisingly, against the ban. On the other side of the ring, Google is advocating for the ban, in a clear effort to get on the good side of the EU after growing signs of the Union’s mistrust of the Internet giant.

Taking a more subtle approach to AI, Apple has paid $200 million for the AI start-up Xnor.ai, a company specialising in on-device AI. The acquisition reinforces Apple’s strategy to build an AI that operates within the device, rather than in the cloud, to achieve greater levels of privacy and security.

All in all, this has been the week of AI. Even Davos jumped on the AI bandwagon by making available an AI toolkit for corporate boards.

Oh, and —

Remember last week’s service cut for Windows 7 and its potential security ramifications? Well, not even a week later, Microsoft is announcing a patch for an Internet Explorer security bug that is already being targeted by attackers.

The problem? You guessed it. MS doesn’t offer support for Windows 7 anymore, so the old OS won’t get the patch. Oopsie!

And so it begins….

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Weekly News Digest #1

Weekly News Digest #1
Weekly News Digest #1

A week in retrospect…

Surprise, surprise! It has been another busy week in the world of tech. Elon Musk seems to have put his flamethrowing days behind and is now set on making his Teslas talk to nearby pedestrians. He didn’t go into much detail about what they’ll actually say, though he did confirm they will be able to fart in people’s general direction.

Classic billionaire joke.

On a more serious note — and in what effectively proposes a major shift in how we approach AI — U.S. researchers announced this week that they have successfully created the first biological robot. The Xenobot is made from frog stem cells and powered by evolutionary algorithms. It can also heal itself. Potential applications are certainly sci-fi worthy: micro-plastic cleaning bots, highly targeted drug delivery…

However, the researchers are hoping to use these robots to understand the interaction and communication between cells. After all, the human body as a whole is one of the most developed and effective forms of collective intelligence known to us.

Just imagine what could be achieved by uncovering its secrets and applying them to the advancement of robotics and AI.

RIP Windows 7….

Nothing new here — As of Tuesday, Microsoft is finally discontinuing support for what some consider the company’s best OS to date. Beyond such considerations, the phase-out leaves a good chunk of Windows users vulnerable to security breaches and other nasty hassles. Aware that some business-critical applications only run on Windows 7, Microsoft is offering to continue support for the old OS iteration until 2023. At a cost, of course.

Ironically, this happened the same week we discovered that the NSA alerted Microsoft of a security bug involving CryptoAPI that affects millions of Windows 10 computers.

We’d be curious to hear what you cybersecurity experts think could be the worst potential complications following the Windows 7 service cut. What are your thoughts?

Well, guess who’s not going to be happy with Google’s decision to end third-party cookies by 2022. Here’s a hint: our blue, furry friend above is not alone in this one.

As Google wrestles with Chrome user demands for greater privacy, it risks compromising the advertising-based revenue model that has served as the foundation of its empire. Folks at the Internet giant are already rushing to calm down advertisers while proposing they all work together to build an alternative that meets both privacy and profitability concerns.

What do you think could substitute third-party cookies and increase user privacy at the same time?

Last but not least — New developments coming straight from the front lines of the cloud wars.

Microsoft unveiled new ad tools for retailers at New York’s NRF, one of which Home Depot has already been using for the past year. The result of Microsoft’s acquisition last August of NY-based PromoteIQ, the new Microsoft PromoteIQ will allow retailers to promote products by combining intent-based data with audience insights.

The immediate goal is clear: to help MS customers increase sales at scale. The main goal? To grab some of Amazon’s cloud market share by pushing services to retailers who’d rather not deal with Mr. Bezos and his e-commerce monopoly.