philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Twitter and Google’s head of A.I. just backed a new VC fund — here’s why

• Nathan Benaich, founder and general partner of boutique VC firm Air Street Capital, has raised $17 million from investors including Twitter and Google’s head of AI. 
• The money will be used to back around 25 start-ups in Europe and the U.S. that have AI at their core. 
• Benaich has straddled the worlds of venture capital and artificial intelligence for almost a decade. Unlike many VCs, he is known for having a firm grasp on the latest developments in AI.

See the full story here: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/03/twitter-supercell-googles-ai-boss-back-nathan-benaichs-air-street.html

Canada Targets Online-Streaming Services With Cultural Levy

The move, unveiled Tuesday by Canadian officials, would also order streaming services such as Netflix Inc., Amazon.com Inc.’s Prime Video, Walt Disney Co. ’s Disney+, and Spotify Technology SA to meet certain Canadian-content requirements, such as more programming to serve the country’s francophone and indigenous populations.

Officials said the changes are meant to address a regulatory imbalance, as streaming services from abroad are making inroads in the Canadian economy at the expense of the domestic cultural industry. Under the proposed revamp, online-streaming services would be defined as broadcasters under Canadian law, and thereby subject to the same rules as legacy domestic broadcasters.

Under Canada’s regulatory framework, the broadcasting industry must contribute a chunk of its revenue to fund the Canadian production of TV shows, movies and music. In 2018, or the most recent annual figures available, Canada’s broadcasters contributed roughly 20% of revenue to finance Canadian programming. Based on their projections of revenue from streaming services, officials expect Netflix and the others to contribute at least C$1 billion toward financing Canadian programming, starting in 2023.

See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/canada-targets-online-streaming-services-with-cultural-levy-11604437390

Big Tech Snags Hollywood Talent to Pursue Enhanced Reality

PhilNote: about Paul Debevec, Hao Li, and the migration of VFX talent from Hollywood to Silicon Valley.

See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-tech-enlists-hollywood-to-boost-adoption-of-enhanced-reality-11604399401?fbclid=IwAR3GO-I54CXhqcJbwPrwaUXaEOULGvzOaqG4bXh7LrIZVIZ582fYF7ayDiA

Mark Cuban Is Seeking the Next Generation of AI ‘Superstars’

Mark Cuban has committed $2 million to expand a program he founded that aims to teach artificial-intelligence skills at no cost to high school students in low-income communities across the country.

“We don’t recognize how much talent is there,” said Mr. Cuban, who lives in Dallas. “One of my goals is to really go out and find the superstars. There are so many there that are under-appreciated and don’t have access to resources.”

Mr. Cuban’s funding will be spent on resources to educate hundreds of students in AI over the next few years, with the goal of teaching 1,000 students a year from 2023. “We’ll test it, build a curriculum, evolve it and iterate it as many times as we have to. This is important, and I’ll keep funding it,” Mr. Cuban said.

He told students he’s learned more about AI through tutorials from Coursera, an organization that offers online computer science classes, and Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services. Branches of AI he has studied include reinforcement learning, generative adversarial networks and machine learning.

See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/mark-cuban-is-seeking-the-next-generation-of-ai-superstars-11603816551

Artificial Intelligence Will Change How We Think About Leadership

“The job of the future may well be [that of] a philosopher who understands technology, what it means to our human identity, and what it means for the kind of society we would like to see,” he noted.

As we are becoming more aware, we are moving into a society where people are being told by algorithms what their taste is, and, without questioning it too much, most people comply easily. Given these circumstances, it does not seem to be a wild fantasy anymore that AI may be able to take a leadership position, which is why I wanted to write the book.

The book is not only about whether AI will replace leaders; I also point out that humans have certain unique qualities that technology will never have. It is difficult to put a soul into a machine.

We are not paying enough attention to training our leaders – our business leaders, our political leaders, and our societal leaders. We need good leadership education. Training starts with our children. [It is about] how we train them to appreciate creativity, the ability to work together with others, take perspectives from each other, and learn a certain kind of responsibility that makes our society. 

AIB: How can we move towards a future where algorithms may not lead but still be at the service of humanity?

De Cremer: First, all managers and leaders will have to understand what AI is. They must understand AI’s potential and its limits — where humans must jump in and take responsibility. Humanity is important. One of the concerns we have today is that machines are not reducing inequality but enhancing it. For example, we all know that AI, in order to learn, needs data. But is data widely available to everyone or only a select few? Well, if we look at the usual suspects — Amazon, Facebook, Apple and so forth — we see that they own most of the data. They applied a business model where the customer became the product itself. Our data are valuable to them. As a result, these companies can run more sophisticated experiments, which are needed to improve our AI – which means that technology is also in the hands of a few. Democracy of data does not exist today. Given the fact that one important future direction in AI research is to make AI more powerful in terms of processing and predicting, obviously a certain fear exists that if we do not manage AI well, and we don’t think about it in terms of [whether] it is good for society as a whole, we may run into risks. Our future must be one where everyone can be tech-savvy but not one that eliminates our concerns and reflections on human identity. That is the kind of education I would like to see.

See the full story here: https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/artificial-intelligence-will-change-think-leadership/

Facebook’s Augmented Reality hearing aids can focus on sounds you’re ‘looking at’

Research lead for Facebook’s Hearing Science lab told Digital Trends, ”Many people with hearing loss don’t use hearing aids — in part — because they don’t work well in everyday situations like a noisy restaurant, a conversation involving multiple people at a loud party, or in a moving car.”

The team is exploring how they can use beamforming technology, deep learning, noise cancellation, and AR to fix this problem.

The reason: The team is using AR glasses to know which sounds you want to focus on. The technology will then amplify that sound while drowning out the rest.

It works firstly on the AR side of things. The technology can map out the objects – or in this case a person you’re talking to. Once it understands what it needs to focus on, the rest of the system comes into play by picking up only sounds coming from the ‘object’ and amplifying it while drowning out noises from objects, not in the field of focus.

The team also said that this technology could also work with phone calls, where the person on the other end will only hear your voice and the rest of the ambient sounds will be cancelled out.

See the full story here: https://sea.mashable.com/tech/13049/facebooks-augmented-reality-hearing-aids-can-focus-on-sounds-youre-looking-at

Alibaba’s Secret Three-Year Experiment to Remake the Factory

After helping more than a million brick-and-mortar Chinese retailers modernize their operations, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. has now set its sights on a new target: the country’s outdated factories.China’s largest corporation unveiled in September its first smart factory, a secret experiment that Alibaba’s been conducting for three years on the outskirts of its hometown of Hangzhou. The three-story facility known as Xunxi — translated literally as “fast rhino” — is the company’s attempt at leveraging its consumer data and technologies to help the multi-trillion-dollar manufacturing arena improving efficiency and meet rising consumer expectations.

Alibaba has said that one in four clothes purchases in the country was shipped via its e-commerce platforms, granting it access to an ocean of data that it’s now deploying to assist domestic garment makers in design and production planning.It’s also centralizing the material procurement process to help reduce costs. Artificial intelligence, robotic arms as well as many other in-house technologies have also been put into use at the Xunxi factory prototype.

See the full story here: https://sportsgrindentertainment.com/alibabas-secret-three-year-experiment-to-remake-the-factory/https://sportsgrindentertainment.com/alibabas-secret-three-year-experiment-to-remake-the-factory/

Canada crawling toward AI regulatory regime, but experts say reform is urgent

On Thursday, privacy watchdogs revealed that five million images of shoppers' faces were collected without their consent at a dozen of Canada's most popular malls.

Real estate company Cadillac Fairview embedded cameras equipped with facial-recognition technology, which draws on machine-learning algorithms, in digital information kiosks to discern customers' ages and genders, according to an investigation by the federal, Alberta and B.C. privacy commissioners.

Canada needs to roll out concrete rules that balance privacy and innovation, said Carolina Bessega, co-founder and chief scientific officer of Montreal startup Stradigi AI.

Public trust in artificial intelligence becomes increasingly crucial as machine-learning companies move from the conceptual to the commercial stage, she said. "And the best way to trust AI is to have clear regulations."

Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains tells The Canadian Press that an update to 20-year-old privacy legislation is due "in the coming weeks" to address gaps in personal-data protection, but refused to nail down a timeline.

Bains pointed to the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation from 2018 as a model that hands citizens more control over their privacy and digital information through "clear enforcement mechanisms," he said.

See the full story here: https://www.tricitynews.com/canada-crawling-toward-ai-regulatory-regime-but-experts-say-reform-is-urgent-1.24230956

Autonomous racing car crashed before the race started

An autonomous racing car that hit the track as part of a Roborace race crashed by itself. The vehicle, turning its direction towards the wall and accelerating, hit the runway walls. Fortunately, only material damage occurred in the incident.

See the full story here: https://alkhaleejtoday.co/technology/5237482/Autonomous-racing-car-crashed-before-the-race-started.html

Personal identifiability of user tracking data during observation of 360-degree VR video

Abstract: Virtual reality (VR) is a technology that is gaining traction in the consumer market. With it comes an unprecedented ability to track body motions. These body motions are diagnostic of personal identity, medical conditions, and mental states. Previous work has focused on the identifiability of body motions in idealized situations in which some action is chosen by the study designer. In contrast, our work tests the identifiability of users under typical VR viewing circumstances, with no specially designed identifying task. Out of a pool of 511 participants, the system identifies 95% of users correctly when trained on less than 5 min of tracking data per person. We argue these results show nonverbal data should be understood by the public and by researchers as personally identifying data.

See the full paper here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-74486-y