What’s happened in AI: July 2nd-8th

By | July 10, 2018
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Quite an interesting week in AI. To start, Anthony Levandowski is rumored to be back in the game through Kache.ai, an autonomous trucking startup. This comes after the infamous legal headaches he created for Waymo and Uber’s autonomous vehicle programs.

In China, Baidu had a very busy week adding Daimler trucks to Project Apollo, which now makes 116 partners on its open source autonomous vehicle platform. They also integrated Intel Mobileye’s safety model into their autonomous vehicle software, released their first 100 self-driving buses, and unveiled their new AI Kunlun chip for edge and cloud computing.

Finally, the facial recognition issues plaguing the U.K. police force are back in the news. This time, the head police chief stated she has no problem using the faulty technology, and completely supports the continued testing of it in the field. You can only hope that this doesn’t lead to any false arrests. For those who aren’t familiar with the saga, this facial recognition technology has a breathtaking 2% accuracy rate.

Company developments:

AI algorithm can teach cars to self-drive in 20 minutes – July 7, 2018 (NewsBytes)

  • Wayve, a startup founded by two researchers from the Cambridge University, has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm that can learn how to drive a car from scratch in 20 minutes
  • Instead of relying on external sensors and custom-built hardware, the startup wants to create autonomous vehicles which are entirely software-based
  • The AI algorithm powering Wayve’s self-driving system doesn’t require any cloud connectivity or pre-loaded maps. It is a four-layer convolutional neural network that processes everything on a GPU. According to Wayve, too much hand-engineering is currently deployed to solve self-driving car problems

Torc Robotics expands its self-driving car development team – July 7, 2018 (Digital Trends)

  • Autonomous-driving company Torc Robotics may not be as well known as, say, Waymo, but that may change soon as Torc looks to expand. The company is looking to nearly double its number of employees in order to continue developing tech for self-driving cars
  • Torc unveiled its Asimov (named after science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov) autonomous-driving system last year, and gave public demonstrations at CES 2018. The company is headquartered in Blacksburg, Virginia, and continues to test self-driving cars there and in Las Vegas. Last year, it sent one of its modified Lexus RX SUVs on a cross-country trip. But the company’s history goes back further
  • Founded in 2005, Torc is actually one of the oldest dedicated companies working on self-driving cars. Its founders competed in the various Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) challenges of the early 2000s, which were meant to kickstart development of autonomous vehicles for the military. Torc placed third in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. Yet Torc has remained smaller and generally kept a lower profile than many of its competitors, something its bosses want to change

Ooh!Media to use machine learning in new automated marketplace – July 7, 2018 (AdNews)

  • Ooh!Media is launching an automated private marketplace that uses machine learning to help marketers find the best inventory to use and when to reach and engage with a target audience across its network of assets
  • It combines Ooh!Media’s network of more than 20,000 assets across roadside, retail, office towers, airports, cafes, universities fitness venues and elsewhere with audience data sets, such as Quantium, and machine learning models to work out contextually relevant media planning
  • The marketplace is part of Ooh!Media’s $15 million investment in revolutionising out of home advertising to help it gain a larger share of the media investment pie. Ooh!Media recently sealed a $570 million deal to acquire street furniture giant Adshel, which is before the ACCC – another sign the outdoor company is investing heavily to grow its proposition

Daimler can now test self-driving cars on public roads in Beijing – July 6, 2018 (TechCrunch)

  • Daimler has been granted a license to test self-driving vehicles on public roads in Beijing, making it the first international automaker to receive such permission. The owner of the Mercedes-Benz brand was given the test permit by the Chinese government after extensive closed-course testing, the company said in a statement, adding that it marks a milestone in its research and development efforts in China
  • There are other companies testing autonomous vehicles in China, notably Baidu, which has been on public roads since at least 2016. For Daimler to qualify, the company said it had to add to its Mercedes-Benz test vehicles technical applications from Baidu’s Apollo platform. Daimler had to undergo testing at the National Pilot Zone (Beijing and Hebei) for Intelligent Mobility, with test drivers receiving rigorous automated driving training
  • The Apollo program is an open-source autonomous driving platform that has been under development for years. Baidu isn’t interested in making the actual car — just the software that drives it. And it wants as many companies as possible to use its Apollo platform. Some 116 partners are now on the Apollo platform, including new partners Jaguar Land Rover, Valeo, Byton, Leopard Imaging and Suning Logistics

Baidu’s first 100 self-driving buses roll off production lines as CEO hails Year Zero for autonomous vehicles – July 4, 2018 (South China Morning Post)

  • The first 100 of Baidu’s “Level 4” self driving buses have rolled off the production lines, said Robin Li, chief executive of China’s largest search engine operator on Wednesday
  • The self-driving buses, which can seat up to 14 people, were co-developed by Baidu, which is transforming itself into an artificial intelligence (AI) company, and bus maker King Long United Automotive Industry Co. Level 4 operations means that the vehicles can take over all driving in certain conditions
  • With no steering wheel and high automation, the buses will be put into use in cities including Beijing, Xiongan, Shenzhen and Tokyo, Li said at the Baidu AI Developer forum being held in Beijing. “They will help with shuttle services around nuclear power stations and senior communities in Japan,” for example, said Li. Baidu will partner with SB Drive, a subsidiary of SoftBank Group, to export the self-driving buses to Japan

Alibaba e-commerce merchants turn to AI for content creation – July 4, 2018 (ZD Net)

  • Alibaba has introduced an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that it says can produce up to 20,000 lines of content a second, helping merchants on its retail sites generate product information without humans
  • Unveiled through its digital marketing unit Alimama, the Chinese e-commerce giant said the copywriting tool analysed “millions of existing samples” on Alibaba’s online platforms Tmall and Taobao. It used deep learning models and natural language processing technologies to produce content
  • The Chinese vendor said the AI tool had passed the Turing test, during which a computer could imitate a human sufficiently well so that another human could not distinguish the difference

Baidu unveils Kunlun AI chip for edge and cloud computing – July 3, 2018 (VentureBeat)

  • Baidu today unveiled a new chip for AI, joining the ranks of Google, Nvidia, Intel, and many other tech companies making processors especially for artificial intelligence. Kunlun is made to handle AI models for edge computing on devices and in the cloud via datacenters. The Kunlun 818-300 model will be used for training AI, and the 818-100 for inference
  • Baidu began working with field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chips especially designed for deep learning in 2011, the company said. Kunlun is about 30 times faster than the first FPGA chip from Baidu and is able to achieve 260 tera-operations per second (TOPS) and 512 GB/second memory bandwidth, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email. No date has been set for release of the chip
  • “With the rapid emergence of AI applications, dramatically increasing requirements are being imposed on computational power. Traditional chips limit how much computing power is available and thus how far we can accelerate AI technologies,” the company said in a statement. “Baidu developed this chip, specifically designed for large-scale AI workloads, as an answer to this demand.”

Google’s DeepMind taught AI teamwork by playing Quake III Arena – July 3, 2018 (VentureBeat)

  • Google’s DeepMind today shared the results of research and experiments in which multiple AI systems were trained to play Capture the Flag on Quake III Arena, a multiplayer first-person shooter game. An AI trained in the process is now better than most human players in the game, regardless of whether it’s playing with a human or machine teammate
  • The AI, named For the Win (FTW), played nearly 450,000 games of Quake III Arena to gain its dominance over human players and establish its understanding of how to effectively work with other machines and humans. DeepMind refers to the practice of training multiple independently operating agents to take collective action as multi-agent learning
  • “We train agents that learn and act as individuals, but which must be able to play on teams with and against any other agents, artificial or human,” the company said today in a blog post. “From a multi-agent perspective, [Capture the Flag] requires players to both successfully cooperate with their teammates as well as compete with the opposing team, while remaining robust to any playing style they might encounter.”

Tonara launches an AI-powered tutoring service for budding musicians – July 2, 2018 (VentureBeat)

  • AI has an important role to play in the lucrative education industry. The global private tutoring market alone will be worth more than $102 billion by the end of this year, with public education offering an equally fruitful opportunity
  • AI-powered music tutoring startup Tonara today announced the launch of its Tonaro 360 music tutoring service, along with a new music store. Throughout beta testing, music teachers reported an up to 68 percent increase in practice hours among students using Tonara 360
  • Tonara offers a mobile and desktop app that includes everything from a dashboard for teachers to a library of licensed music for students. It also features a unique scoring system that measures how students perform and rates them accordingly, which is where AI comes into play

Pearson Hires New Head of Artificial Intelligence – July 2, 2018 (Business Insider)

  • Pearson, the digital education company, today announced the appointment of Milena Marinova to lead artificial intelligence (AI) and personalized learning for the company. Milena joins Pearson in July as senior vice president, AI products and solutions from Intel Corporation, where she was Senior Director of AI Solutions
  • Milena will be focused on exploring and applying existing and new technologies in artificial intelligence, machine learning, including deep and reinforcement learning, as well as data analytics and personalized learning into current and future products and services
  • “We have the opportunity to use technology to help shape the future of education in new ways for the next generation of learners, helping more students foster the knowledge and skills they need to succeed both in school and their careers,” said Tim Bozik, global head of product at Pearson. “Milena is an extraordinary talent and brings vast experience to our team. She will play an important role in this work and in continuing the digital and AI transformation of Pearson.”

Anthony Levandowski is back with a new self-driving startup, called Kache.ai – July 2, 2018 (TechCrunch)

  • Anthony Levandowski, the former Google engineer and serial entrepreneur who was at the center of a trade secrets lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, is back. And he is connected to an autonomous trucking company that is still in stealth mode, TechCrunch has learned
  • The company, called Kache.ai (pronounced like cache), has kept a low profile since paperwork registering it as a corporation was first filed with the California Secretary of State nearly seven months ago. And at first glance, there’s no indication that Levandowski is even tied to the company
  • However, the address listed on the corporation’s state filing tells a different story. Kache.ai’s documents filed with the state lists an address in St. Helena, Calif. The property is owned by Levandowski’s father and stepmother, according to property tax and title records reviewed by TechCrunch. Levandowski’s stepmother Suzanna Musick was CEO of another one of Levandowski’s startups, called 510 Systems

M&A:

Facebook is buying UK’s Bloomsbury AI to ramp up natural language tech in London – July 2, 2018 (TechCrunch)

  • TechCrunch understands that the social network behemoth is acquiring London-based Bloomsbury AI, a startup that has built natural language processing (NLP) technology to help machines answer questions based on information gleaned from documents. According to sources, Facebook plans to deploy the company’s team and tech to work on combating fake news and to tackle other content issues
  • Bloomsbury is an alumni of Entrepreneur First, the company builder that invests in technical and domain expertise talent and helps those individuals start companies. The startup is also backed by Fly.VC, Seedcamp, IQ Capital, UCL Technology Fund, and the U.K. tax payer-funded London Co-investment Fund
  • Multiple sources say Facebook is paying between $23 million and $30 million to acquire Bloomsbury AI, in a deal that will see a mixture of cash and stock change hands. In one scenario, the startup’s investors will receive around $5.5 million, with Bloomsbury’s founding team in line for the remaining $17.5 million, paid in restricted Facebook stock. Either way, this represents a modest return for the bulk of investors, although EF — given that it invests pre-seed — is likely to have had a larger multiple

Fundraising:

Booksy, the worldwide booking system, raises $13.2 million – July 6, 2018 (TechCrunch)

  • Booksy, a Poland-based booking application for the beauty business, has raised $13.2 million in a Series B effort to drive global growth. The company, founded in 2014 by Stefan Batory and Konrad Howard, is currently seeing 2.5 million bookings per month
  • “We will use the funding to drive global growth, recruit high profile talent and develop proprietary technologies that will further support beauty businesses,” he said. “That includes the implementation of one-click booking, a feature that uses machine learning and AI technologies, to determine each user’s buying pattern and offer them the best dates with their favorite stylists, thus simplifying user experience for both merchants and their customers.”

Planck Re scores $12M Series A to simplify insurance underwriting with artificial intelligence – July 2, 2018 (TechCrunch)

  • Planck Re, a startup that wants to simplify insurance underwriting with artificial intelligence, announced today that it has raised a $12 million Series A. The funding was led by Arbor Ventures, with participation from Viola FinTech and Eight Roads. Co-founder and CEO Elad Tsur tells TechCrunch that the capital will be used to expand Planck Re’s product line into more segments, including retail, contractors, IT and manufacturing, and grow its research and development team in Israel and North American sales team
  • The Tel Aviv and New York-based startup plans to focus first on its business in the United States, where it has already launched pilot programs with several insurance carriers. Tsur says that Planck Re’s clients generally use it to help underwrite insurance for small to medium-sized businesses, including business owner policies, which cover property and liability risks, and workers’ compensation
  • Founded in 2016 by Tsur, Amir Cohen and David Schapiro, Planck Re poses its technology as a more efficient and accurate alternative to the lengthy risk assessment questionnaire insurers ask clients to fill out. Its platform crawls the internet for publicly available data, including images, text, videos, social media profiles and public records, to build profiles of SMBs seeking insurance coverage. Then it analyzes that data to help carriers figure out their potential risk

ThetaRay raises $30 million to grow its AI-powered cybersecurity business – July 2, 2018 (VentureBeat)

  • ThetaRay, a big data analytics company based in Hod HaSharon, Israel, today announced that it raised more than $30 million in a funding round led by Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP), GE, Bank Hapoalim, OurCrowd, SVB Investments, and others. That puts its fundraising total to date at about $60 million
  • “In this era when criminal activity and money laundering are increasing and becoming more sophisticated and also regulation is on the rise, there is a greater demand for our solutions,” Mark Gazit, CEO of ThetaRay, said in a statement. “As the amount of digital information grows, you just can’t protect it without artificial intelligence systems. ThetaRay offers the most advanced and mature solutions to detect threats before they happen.”
  • ThetaRay, which was founded in 2013, uses artificial intelligence to help financial institutions, cybersecurity divisions, and critical infrastructure “become more resilient” to threats like risk management, money laundering schemes, fraud, and operational issues. The company’s platform — the brainchild of professors Amir Averbuch and Ronald Coifman of Tel-Aviv University and Yale, respectively — leverages unsupervised machine learning and a “multi-domain” approach to data collection to detect anomalies, reduce false positives, and self-improve

Partnerships:

Nokia and China Mobile to set up joint AI*5G lab for further research using artificial intelligence and machine learning in 5G networks – July 6, 2018 (Global Newswire)

  • Nokia and China Mobile have signed an MoU to investigate the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to optimize future networks and enable the delivery of new Edge Cloud and 5G services. The companies will jointly establish a laboratory in Hangzhou, China to develop the demo system to verify technology use cases using Nokia 5G Future X architecture, while China Mobile will lead the research in terms of scenario selection, requirements confirmation, open API standardization and solution definition
  • At the new laboratory in Hangzhou, Nokia and China Mobile will foster an open RAN and 5G ecosystem working with third parties to leverage AI and machine learning and optimize networks for the delivery of services such as cloud virtual reality gaming. The companies’ research will use the Nokia AirScale Cloud RAN, AirFrame OpenRack, open edge server and ReefShark chipsets, as well as Nokia-developed AI middleware to access embedded intelligence. Nokia and China Mobile will also conduct technology field trials and demonstrations

Alibaba and Guess team up to marry fashion and artificial intelligence in New Retail concept – July 5, 2018 (South China Morning Post)

  • E-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding and lifestyle brand Guess on Wednesday showed off a new artificial intelligence driven concept for future fashion stores, as retailers incorporate technology into offline shopping to improve customer experience and drive sales
  • A concept store showing off Alibaba’s FashionAI technology has been set up on the campus grounds of Hong Kong Polytechnic University, will be open to the public from July 5 to July 7
  • It is built around Alibaba’s e-commerce platform Taobao. Users check in to the store with their mobile Taobao QR code and all the items displayed in-store come with corresponding Taobao product listings, so that users can add the items they would like to purchase directly to their Taobao cart

China’s Baidu integrates Intel safety model into autonomous vehicles – July 4, 2018 (Internet of Business)

  • Intel’s computer vision subsidiary Mobileye has joined Baidu’s Apollo ecosystem, in a move that will see the Chinese technology giant and its partners adopt Mobileye’s Responsibility, Sensitive Safety (RSS) model into their autonomous vehicle programmes
  • Apollo is Baidu’s “open, secure and reliable self-driving ecosystem”. Its aim is to assist members in the autonomous driving industry, and help push their systems to market. Since launching in 2017, Apollo has grown to include almost 120 partners worldwide
  • Mobileye’s RSS model is a formalised approach to developing driverless systems, which aims to mimic human judgement by applying mathematical definitions to road variables. RSS defines what constitutes a dangerous situation, what caused it, and what the proper response to it should be. With the system in place, the theory is that autonomous vehicles should actively avoid causing those dangerous situations, but will still be able to respond to them appropriately

Research / studies:

Machine learning technique may detect muscles ageing in elderly – July 8, 2018 (The Quint)

  • A novel machine learning technique that would predict the biological age of a muscle and help combat sarcopenia has been developed
  • The deep-learning based model can be used to estimate the relevant importance of the genetic and epigenetic factors driving this process within many age groups
  • Ultimately, the trained age predictors were used to identify tissue-specific ageing clocks. This combined data-driven approach demonstrates that age prediction models can become a powerful tool for identifying prospective targets for geroprotectors, the researchers said

MIT researchers automate drug design with machine learning – July 6, 2018 (Engadget)

  • The research team trained their machine learning model on 250,000 molecular graphs, which are basically detailed images of a molecule’s structure. The researchers then had the model generate molecules, find the best base molecules to build off of and design new molecules with improved properties. The researchers found that their model was able to complete these tasks more effectively than other systems designed to automate the drug design process
  • When tasked with generating new, valid molecules, each one the model created turned out to be valid. And that’s particularly important since producing invalid molecules is a major shortcoming of other automation systems — of the others the researchers compared their model to, the best only had a 43.5 percent validity rate. Secondly, when the model was told to find the best base molecule — known as a lead molecule — that is both highly soluble and easily synthesized, it again outperformed other systems
  • The best candidate molecule generated by their model scored 30 percent higher on those two desired properties than the best option produced by more traditional systems. Lastly, when the model was told to modify 800 molecules to improve them for those properties but keep them similar in structure to the lead molecule, around 80 percent of the time, it created new, similarly structured molecules that scored higher for those two properties than did the original molecules

New model for large-scale 3-D facial recognition – July 6, 2018 (Physics.org)

  • Researchers from The University of Western Australia have designed a new system capable of carrying out large-scale 3-D facial recognition that could transform the entire biometrics industry. The model could be used by any organisation or government agency for more accurate 3-D facial recognition and could lead to widespread applications, and improving security measures while potentially removing the need for personal passwords
  • The research team from the UWA Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering created the first-of-its-kind model—called FR3DNet—analysing 3.1 million 3-D scans of more than 100,000 people. They trained the model to learn the identities of a large dataset of ‘known’ persons and then match a test face to one of those identities

MIT’s PixelPlayer can isolate the sounds of instruments using AI – July 5, 2018 (VentureBeat)

  • Equalizers are one way to pump up the bass in your favorite tunes, but researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) have a better solution. Their system — PixelPlayer — uses artificial intelligence to distinguish between and isolate the sounds of instruments, and make them louder or softer
  • The fully trained PixelPlayer system, given a video as the input, splits the accompanying audio and identifies the source of sound, and then calculates the volume of each pixel in the image and “spatially localizes” it — i.e., identifies regions in the clip that generate similar sound waves
  • “We expected a best-case scenario where we could recognize which instruments make which kinds of sounds,” Hang Zhao, a Ph.D student at CSAIL and a coauthor on the paper, said. “We were surprised that we could actually spatially locate the instruments at the pixel level. Being able to do that opens up a lot of possibilities, like being able to edit the soundtrack audio of individual instruments by a single click on the video.”

Autonomous cars pose threat to road congestion, warns World Economic Forum – July 4, 2018 (GearBrain)

  • It was found that, while congestion and travel times across cities as a whole should reduce with the increased use of autonomous vehicles, downtown areas will become busier as consumers opt for self-driving taxis instead of mass transit services like trains, trams, subways and buses
  • Moavenzadeh added: “Cities need to actively explore policies and incentives, such as dynamic pricing, dedicated lanes and redesign of the kerb to ensure that autonomous vehicles will achieve the full value for society that they promise. If such choices are not made, cities risk losing more than they will gain from autonomous vehicles.”
  • The WEF and BCG created a sophisticated traffic simulation model for the city of Boston, which showed autonomous technology would see vehicle numbers and travel times change markedly – but not always for the better. It was found that neighbourhoods outside of the downtown core, such as Allston, would see traffic reduced and travel times cut. However, those travelling in downtown Boston would see their journey times increase, as the roads become more congested

AI spots legal problems with tech T&Cs in GDPR research project – July 4, 2018 (TechCrunch)

  • Technology is the proverbial double-edged sword. And an experimental European research project is ensuring this axiom cuts very close to the industry’s bone indeed by applying machine learning technology to critically sift big tech’s privacy policies — to see whether AI can automatically identify violations of data protection law
  • The still-in-training privacy policy and contract parsing tool — which is called ‘Claudette‘: Aka (automated) clause detector — is being developed by researchers at the European University Institute in Florence. They’ve also now got support from European consumer organization BEUC — for a ‘Claudette meets GDPR‘ project — which specifically applies the tool to evaluate compliance with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation
  • Google, Facebook (and Instagram), Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, WhatsApp, Twitter, Uber, AirBnB, Booking, Skyscanner, Netflix, Steam and Epic Games — saying this group was selected to cover a range of online services and sectors

Artificial intelligence accurately predicts distribution of radioactive fallout – July 2, 2018 (Eurekalert)

  • The team at the University of Tokyo Institute of Industrial Science has created a computer program that can accurately predict where radioactive material that has been emitted will eventually land, over 30 hours in advance, using weather forecasts on the expected wind patterns. This tool enables evacuation plans and other health-protective measures to be implemented if another nuclear accident like in 2011 at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant were to occur
  • This latest study was prompted by the limitations of existing atmospheric modeling tools in the aftermath of the accident at Fukushima; tools considered so unreliable that they were not used for planning immediately after the disaster. In this context, the team created a system based on a form of artificial intelligence called machine learning, which can use data on previous weather patterns to predict the route that radioactive emissions are likely to take
  • “Our new tool was first trained using years of weather-related data to predict where radioactivity would be distributed if it were released from a particular point,” lead author Takao Yoshikane says. “In subsequent testing, it could predict the direction of dispersion with at least 85% accuracy, with this rising to 95% in winter when there are more predictable weather patterns.”

Government / policy:

Hopes fade for Senate action on self-driving bill – July 8, 2018 (Automotive News)

  • Nearly a year ago, a House panel easily approved a bill, the Self Drive Act, liberalizing rules for testing and deploying self-driving vehicles, including provisions that would exempt more vehicles from rules designed for conventional vehicles, and preempt state regulation of the vehicles. A similar bill, the AV START Act, cleared the Senate Commerce Committee unanimously the following month
  • But despite the broad bipartisan support, progress has been stalled ever since. Senate backers are exploring ways to bring the AV START Act to a vote, but prospects are dim as the Senate calendar fills up with other Republican priorities
  • “Time is running out” as other regions of the world move aggressively to invest in driverless vehicle technology, Rep. Bob Latta, R-Ohio, chairman of the Energy and Commerce digital-commerce subcommittee, said in a recent interview. “We want to make sure that the technology that is out there is U.S. technology and we’re developing it here.”

London police chief ‘completely comfortable’ using facial recognition with 98 percent false positive rate – July 5, 2018 (The Verge)

  • The head of London’s Metropolitan Police force has defended the organization’s ongoing trials of automated facial recognition systems, despite legal challenges and criticisms that the technology is “almost entirely inaccurate
  • According to a report from The Register, UK Metropolitan Police commissioner Cressida Dick said on Wednesday that she did not expect the technology to lead to “lots of arrests,” but argued that the public “expect[s]” law enforcement to test such cutting-edge systems
  • Of the two correct matches the Met’s technology has made to date, there have been zero arrests. One match was for an individual on an out-of-date watch list; the other for a person with mental health issues who frequently contacts public figures, but is not a criminal and not wanted for arrest. The Met says that AFR systems are constantly monitored by police officers, and that no individuals have been arrested because of a false match

Dubai develops cybersecurity standards for autonomous vehicles – July 4, 2018 (ITP.net)

  • The standards have been developed to secure self-driving vehicles, to ensure they are fit to use on Dubai’s road. The guides have been developed based on a full analysis of the cyber threats facing autonomous vehicles (AV) and previous failings. The standards will include aspects of AV oeprations including communication security, software security, hardware security and supply chain security
  • HE Yousuf Al Shaibanai, Director General of Dubai Electronic Security Center said: “Dubai is considered one of the forefront modern examples of evolving and developing cities in the world and it is with great appreciation and aspirations of the wise leadership that has advanced us to utilize disrupting technology such as self-driven cars. The development of the autonomous vehicle’s standard draws upon the Dubai Autonomous Transportation Strategy which aims to transform 25% per cent of the total transportation in Dubai to autonomous mode by 2030

Events:

Oracle hosted its Chatbot week in nine different African cities – July 8, 2018 (Business Chief)

  • The US-based technology firm, Oracle, has hosted its Chatbot Week Africa across the continent in order to create awareness for the use of chatbots in industries
  • The event has held discussions on the technology in South Africa – Johannesburg and Cape Town –, Mauritius, Kenya, Nigeria – Lagos and Abuja –, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, and Ghana

Shanghai announces AI World 2018 – July 4, 2018 (TechNode)

  • On the afternoon of July 4th, the AI World 2018 was held in the Press Office of Shanghai municipal government. At the press conference, Wu Qing, Deputy Mayor of Shanghai introduced the conference
  • AI World 2018 will be held in Shanghai from September 17 to 19 of this year by National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the National Internet Information Office, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Chinese Academy of Engineering and the Shanghai Municipal People’s Government with the approval of the State Council under the background of the historic exchange of the new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial change and the high-quality development demand in China
  • The conference, with the theme of “New Era of Artificial Intelligence,” with the “High-end, Internationalized, Professionalized and Marketable” policy, consists of forum summit, special activities, display applications and innovation competitions, focusing on the combination of “investment in production, learning and research”