philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Virtual reality takes users back to a 15th-century community of religious women

USC Dornsife’s Sabina Zonno and Lynn Dodd receive a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to develop an immersive experience around a Renaissance-era manuscript. [4¾ min read]

To create a virtual reality for the manuscript and its context, Zonno and Dodd, along with Eric Hanson, associate professor of cinematic practice at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, will first take thousands of still photography images of the manuscript and beguinage, the latter of which still exists. Those photos will be used to build three-dimensional models, which are then brought to a game engine unit (a framework used by developers to construct video games), which renders them so they are ready to use in a virtual reality headset, Hanson said. He added that virtual reality gives an experience far deeper than that of film.

Dodd said that in addition to connecting people with the past, virtual reality can help bring them together in the present. A virtual recreation of a prayer session at a mosque, for example, could show translations of the prayers and songs involved, and let users watch adults and children in their everyday interactions within the building. Such an experience might help “demystify” Islam and counter Islamophobia, she added.

See the full story here: https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories/3348/virtual-reality-manuscript/

Why 5G May Not Need a Killer App—for Now

The big increase in speed and network capacity may be enough to attract customers

“If I put 5G everywhere in the urban area that there’s 4G cells—without adding any extra real estate—I now can double, or triple or quadruple the amount of data that I can put down those pipes,” says Mr. Thode. “So do you actually need a killer app? No.”

See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-5g-may-not-need-a-killer-appfor-now-11604952000

Regulation of Artificial Intelligence in Europe and Japan

AI regulation in the EU

In 2019, the European Commission published Ethical Guidelines for Trustworthy AI in order to instruct businesses and the public about their expectations concerning the proper development and use of AI.  The Guidelines, together with the General Data Protection Regulation, place the EU once again in the position of setting high standards for those who wish to do business in the EU and perhaps globally. 

The principles include:

• Human agency and oversight³
• Robustness and safety⁴
• Privacy and data governance⁵
• Transparency⁶
• Diversity, non-discrimination and fairness⁷
• Societal and environmental well-being⁸ and
• Accountability⁹

The EU Guidelines include a pilot Trustworthy Assessment List for use by companies when developing AI systems. It is important to note that the Guidelines do not include any legally binding mandates for the moment but the European Commission has indicated that it will review this position in 2020.¹⁰

The challenge in the EU is that there is no single system of regulation that covers AI. Instead, there are various laws that are applicable (or potentially applicable) to the development and implementation of AI technologies. These laws include but are not limited to intellectual property law, data protection law, consumer protection or product liability laws, computer misuse laws, and human rights laws.

In February 2020, the European Commission released a White Paper on AI.¹¹ Releasing a White Paper is a common first step in the preparation of EU legislation. The purpose of the AI White Paper is to seek input and proposals on the development of a common EU framework for the regulation of AI. However, it is not unusual for the final legislation to look very different to the initial White Paper. The AI White Paper notes that a number of EU Member States have adopted inconsistent approaches to AI regulation at a national level.

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AI regulation in Japan

1)    Japanese laws

a)    Social Principles of Human-centric AI¹²

Similar to the experience in Europe, there is no comprehensive regulation of AI in Japan at this time.¹³Nevertheless, a number of existing laws are applicable to AI including the Constitution and laws pertaining to contracts, torts, certain economic statutes, intellectual property, personal data, privacy and the criminal code. While there is debate as to whether the current legal framework is suitable for the future development of AI (as described in more detail below), the Cabinet Office and various ministries have sought to influence AI by promulgating various strategies and guidelines. 

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See the full story here: https://www.whitecase.com/publications/insight/regulation-artificial-intelligence-europe-and-japan

Chinese AI Unicorn Giants SenseTime and Megvii Survive US Ban and Makes It Washington’s Entity List!

Chinese AI Unicorn giants SenseTime and Megvii recently escaped the US Ban on Foreign Technology Companies from operating in the country without regulations or US Ownership. The two companies from China are even included in Washington's Entity List in October but are now planning to move away from the surveillance business that services the government.

What Megvii did is to directly purchase from third-party suppliers of the same technology they were prohibited from accessing. Several Chinese startups are using this method to go around the US Entity Ban and even sell their products to American clients and soil.

The surveillance startup companies survived the US' Entity List ban and are still fairing satisfactorily on the global market and even in several of the country's business ventures.

See the full story here: https://www.techtimes.com/articles/253979/20201108/chinese-ai-unicorn-giants-sensetime-megvii-survives-ban-makes-washingtons.htm

IS IT ETHICAL TO SCRAP STAR TREK’S COMMANDER DATA FOR RESEARCH?

In a thought-provoking essay, San José State University philosopher Anand Vaidyaasks, should it be okay to dismantle Star Trek‘s robotic crew member Data for research purposes, as proposed in the “The Measure of a Man” episode in Star Trek: The Next Generation? Some of the Trek brass seemed to think so:

As real artificial intelligence technology advances toward Hollywood’s imagined versions, the question of moral standing grows more important. If AIs have moral standing, philosophers like me reason, it could follow that they have a right to life. That means you cannot simply dismantle them, and might also mean that people shouldn’t interfere with their pursuing their goals.ANAND VAIDYA, “IF A ROBOT IS CONSCIOUS, IS IT OK TO TURN IT OFF? THE MORAL IMPLICATIONS OF BUILDING TRUE AIS” AT THE CONVERSATION (OCTOBER 27, 2020)

See the full story here: https://mindmatters.ai/2020/11/is-it-ethical-to-scrap-star-treks-commander-data-for-research/

What Would A Future Range Rover For Urban Life Look Like In A Fully Autonomous World?

A number of companies are working on autonomous shuttles and Tomas Zumalakarregui recently completed his master’s thesis which envisions a fully autonomous Range Rover for 2027.

The 1970 Range Rover was the first European luxury SUV that was capable both on- and off-road. Today, it has been turned into a family of models including the Range Rover Sport, Evoque and Velar. The latter two have a “clear urban character” and that’s reflected in Zumalakarregui’s Range Rover Urban concept.

See the full story here: https://www.carscoops.com/2020/11/range-rover-urban-concept-envisions-a-fully-autonomous-future/

Facebook Tested a New A.I.-Powered Misinformation Detector Months Before the Election

 Instead of just looking at an account’s posting history or friend list to determine whether that account is a fake or inauthentic account, look at both the friend list and the post history.

The suggested algorithm works by predicting how likely an account is to be fake or how likely a post is to be hateful by creating a kind of timeline of interactions from the account or with the post, according to the paper. The algorithm breaks each interaction into parts, including who was involved, what kind of interaction took place, and when it took place. The algorithm then tries to match the timeline to past examples of bad behavior.

The research paper also revealed that some of the company’s existing algorithms built to detect fake behavior were laboriously built by hand. ... A deep learning approach would largely allow the algorithm to learn those signals itself.

See the full story here: https://onezero.medium.com/facebook-tested-a-new-a-i-powered-misinformation-detector-months-before-the-election-37c0477f2fa3

How Introducing AI Across the Curriculum May Address Key Equity Concerns

Now, no matter what field you go into, you are likely to be using AI tools to do your job effectively. We want all students to have an equitable opportunity to succeed, to know what those fields are like and see if they might identify themselves as being there. If we don’t have diverse voices going into the creation of tools—for medical purposes, in the criminal justice system, environmental problems, etc.—we will continue to have products out in the market that are discriminatory against different populations. We really want equity at the front of what we’re doing. The idea that AI education is for every student is a message that we get out all the time, that that’s just the core of what we’re doing and the materials that we produce.

The messaging that ISTE has had consistently, not just in this program, is that computational thinking is for every student in every classroom. That is huge. And what we’ve seen is that our participants—the majority of whom are not computer science educators—are now putting it into all those other classrooms. Even our computer science teachers have started to partner with other subject area teachers to get that AI message out earlier.

Funded by General Motors, this ISTE program provides professional learning for educators to support student-driven AI explorations. http://isteaiexplorations.org

See the full story here: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2020-11-05-how-introducing-ai-across-the-curriculum-may-address-key-equity-concerns

Teaching AI agents to communicate and act in fantasy worlds

Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology and Facebook AI Research have recently explored the possibility of equipping goal-driven agents with NLP capabilities so that they can speak with other characters and complete desirable actions within fantasy game environments. Their paper, pre-published on arXiv, shows that combined, these two approaches achieve remarkable results, producing game characters that speak and act in ways that are consistent with their overall motivations.

LIGHT, the platform that the researchers used to train their goal-driven conversational agent, offers a vast number of fantasy worlds containing a rich assortment of characters, locations and objects. Nonetheless, the platform itself does not set particular objectives or goals for each of the characters navigating these environments.

See the full story here: https://techxplore.com/news/2020-11-ai-agents-fantasy-worlds.html

WITH AUGMENTED REALITY, YOU CAN NOW SUPERIMPOSE PUBLICLY EXHIBITED ARTWORKS IN YOUR HOME

See the full story here: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/augmented-reality-you-can-now-superimpose-publicly-exhibited-artworks-your-home-180976195/