philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

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/

Arabic networks focus on US election coverage with augmented reality

See the full story here: https://www.newscaststudio.com/2020/11/04/arabic-us-election-augmented-reality/

Ryerson University in Toronto to use NexTech’s Augmented Reality solutions for its 2020 fall graduation

NexTech AR Solutions, a provider of augmented reality (AR) for eCommerce, AR learning applications, AR-enhanced video conferencing and virtual events, has announced that Ryerson University, a public research university based in Toronto, Canada with over 46,000 students, has chosen NexTech AR to transform its 2020 Graduation taking place; November 17, 2020, into a completely virtual experience using augmented reality.

Ryerson University has previously partnered with NexTech to launch RALE – the ‘Ryerson Augmented Learning Experience’ platform – based on NexTech’s InfernoAR platform. According to NexTech, due to a very positive reaction of students and faculty to the AR labs, the contract has been expanded by 50% from 20 AR experiences to 30.

See the full story here: https://www.auganix.org/ryerson-university-in-toronto-to-use-nextechs-augmented-reality-solutions-for-its-2020-fall-graduation/

Massachusetts passes ‘right to repair’ law to open up car data

Massachusetts voters approved a measure requiring car manufacturers to let
people access vehicle data for repairs. Question 1 amends a landmark 2012
“right to repair” law in the state. After it’s adopted, manufacturers will
have until car model year 2022 to install a standard open data platform.
The platform will let vehicle owners and independent mechanics access
telematics, wirelessly transmitted data that is typically sent directly to
a remote server.

Right to repair advocates hailed the measure — which passed with 75 percent approval — as a victory.

See the full story here: https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/4/21549129/massachusetts-right-to-repair-question-1-wireless-car-data-passes

New AI-Based Google System Converts Webpages to Video

Google announced it has developed URL2Video, an AI-enabled system that automatically converts webpages into short videos by extracting text and images. The system also harvests design styles such as colors, fonts, graphics and layouts from HTML sources and organizes all the elements into a sequence of shots that looks and feels similar to the original webpage. Google is targeting businesses with websites for their products and services, enabling them to easily create marketing videos out of existing resources.

To keep the video concise, the system “presents only dominant elements from a page, such as a headline and a few multimedia assets, and constrains the duration of elements.” URL2Video “transfers the layout of elements into the video’s aspect ratio and applies the style choices including fonts and colors, adjusting the presentation timing of assets and rendering the content into an MPEG-4 video.”

See the full story here: https://www.etcentric.org/new-ai-based-google-system-converts-webpages-to-video/

Who does A.I. think will win today’s election?

Most of these systems look at data from social media and then use sentiment analysis—which categorizes the emotions expressed in a text—to figure out whether a particular post is in favor or against a certain candidate. The systems then try to find a correlation between the quantity and quality of these expressions and voting patterns.

Studies have shown that A.I. systems designed in this way can predict election outcomes, sometimes more accurately than polls. In 2016, several A.I. systems based on social media analysis accurately forecast Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton, even though most poll-based forecasts put Clinton in the White House.

But such systems aren’t infallible. The same A.I. software that worked well for India and Pakistan, for instance, failed to accurately forecast an election in Malaysia.

So what are such systems saying about today’s vote? A system designed by a company called KCore Analytics forecasts that Biden will win the popular vote handily, but that his Electoral College margin will be razor-thin.

Similarly, the Italian-based A.I. company Expert.AI saw Biden in the lead, but only by a few percentage points—a much smaller margin than the seven-point lead Biden has in an average of national polls. 

But Polly Pollster, an A.I. system created by Advanced Symbolics that correctly forecast both the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the 2019 Canadian elections, predicts that Biden will win easily, with Trump having only about an 8% chance of pulling off an upset. This forecast is similar to the non-A.I. one based on combining various state-level polls that is put together by FiveThirtyEight. It predicts that Biden has a 90% chance of winning. 

These systems work in different ways. One system used deep learning to successfully predict the Indian election results, categorizing sentiment and then feeding those results into another neural network that correlates that sentiment with an election result.

See the full story here: https://fortune.com/2020/11/03/who-will-win-todays-election-a-i-knows/