Alistair Croll’s Top Strategies for Running Virtual Conferences
May 11, 2020
Author, entrepreneur and public speaker Alistair Croll has produced world-class conferences, including O’Reilly Media’s Strata Data & AI Conference, UBM TechWeb’s Cloud Connect and Interop’s Enterprise Cloud Summit. In a wide-ranging, interactive Crowdcast presentation, Croll introduced 11 points to frame up how to produce an engaging virtual conference. His two overriding points are that you must discover where the true value of what you are trying to produce lies and, as an organizer, where you add value. He emphasized key areas such as community, design, interacting with multiple screens, content timeliness, effective use of video and more.
See the full article here: https://www.etcentric.org/alistair-crolls-top-strategies-for-running-virtual-conferences/
Virtual reality check: Futurists dissect Amazon’s new ‘Upload’ TV series, and its digital afterlife
Glen Hiemstra is the founder of Futurist.com, an author and an expert on future trends. His timeline for some of the tech depicted in “Upload” differed from the show. The driverless cars might be more like 2040; the hand/phone screen might not be too far off; the uploading is probably decades or even centuries away; and the automated grocery store is essentially here now with Amazon Go.
Hiemstra, who echoed Anderson’s point about a high-end food replicator in a working-class character’s home, was more put off by the show’s notion that people would have to decide, in the moment, whether to go to regular death or upload. And the the idea of afterlife as a resort hotel is “a bit sad” to him.
Furthermore, Hiemstra noticed that all the tech failed to make much of a difference in income and life inequalities. He would have liked to see a future where super tech alleviates the rich-poor gap and doesn’t make it worse.
See the full story here: https://www.geekwire.com/2020/reality-check-critiquing-tech-gadgets-vr-afterlife-amazons-new-tv-series-upload/
How a crisis propelled the art world into a new virtual reality
The Frieze New York team had been plotting a virtual version of the fair before the Covid-19 outbreak, a first for Frieze, and that has been smartly retooled. ‘It was meant to be a nice addition to the physical fair,’ says Loring Randolph, director of Frieze New York, ‘an opportunity for galleries to show off special projects or just pieces they couldn’t physically show. But as soon as it became clear we would have to cancel the physical Frieze New York we just changed the whole structure and how you would look at the galleries. And it was really led by the galleries.’ What was planned as side-show is now the main, indeed only, event. ‘We have essentially recreated all of the regular programming,’ Randolph says.
But now you can easily look for works that are less than $10,000, do a search and see everything available from every gallery that’s participating in the fair. And actually, I get kind of addicted to looking at it because there is just more market transparency. We made sure that the price field shows up in the thumbnail images.’
‘Beside Itself’, which includes virtual versions of works by Bradford, McCarthy, Louise Bourgeois, Jenny Holzer, Lorna Simpson and more, launched last week. Wirth says the gallery’s new VR platform pulls together technologies usually used in architecture, construction and video-game design, building up VR imagery on a pixel-by-pixel basis. ‘We aren’t re-inventing the wheel,’ says Wirth, ‘but we have taken three technologies to build a new wheel.’
See the full story here: https://www.wallpaper.com/art/how-a-crisis-accelerated-arts-new-virtual-reality
NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING AI Could Help Researchers Determine Which Papers Can Be Replicated, Aims To Address Reproduction Crisis
More and more attention is being paid in recent years to what scholars and researchers dub the replication/reproducability crisis. Many studies simply fail to give the same significant results when replication of the study is attempted, and as a result, the scientific community is concerned that findings are often overemphasized.
If the AI system can reliably discriminate betweenreproducible and non-reproducible studies, it could help universities, research institutes, companies, and other entities filter through thousands of research papers to determine which papers are most likely to be useful and reliable.
The model actually employs natural language processing techniques to try and quantify the reliability of a paper. The system extracts patterns in the language used by the authors of a paper, finding that some word patterns indicate greater reliability than others.
The research team drew upon psychological research as old as the 1960’s, which found that people often communicate the level of confidence they have in their ideas through the words that they use.
See the full story here: https://www.unite.ai/ai-could-help-researchers-determine-which-papers-can-be-replicated-aims-to-address-reproduction-crisis/
Quantum Natural Language Processing
A sentence is not just a “bag of words”,¹ but rather, a kind of network in which words interact in a particular fashion. ...lead to a graphical representation of how the meanings of the words are combined to build the meaning of a sentence as a whole, as opposed to treating the sentence as a structureless “bag” containing the meanings of individual words.
This flow of words in sentences can, in fact, be traced back to work originally started in the 1950s by Chomsky and Lambek among others, that unified the grammatical structures, essentially of all languages, within a single mathematical structure. In particular, the network of a sentence’s meaning-flow is constructed according to a compositionalmathematical model of meaning (semantics).¹⁶
In summary, a direct correspondence was established on the one hand between the meanings of words and quantum states, and on the other hand grammatical structures and quantum measurements.
The first conference on Quantum Natural Language Processing, or “QNLP”as we’ve called it, took place in Oxford in December 2019,¹² where we presented a simulation of our experiment¹⁴ (all talks can be found online¹³).
...by employing quantum machine learning we do not directly encode the meanings of words, but instead construct a framework in which quantum states and processes learn their meanings directly from text.
Naturally, we next turned our attention toward the design and execution of an experiment that is non-trivial, not least of all since our design is predicated on the program being scalable. This means that the dimension of the meaning space grows significantly with the number of qubits available whilst the size of the circuits dictated by the grammar does not grow too large with the size of the sentence.
What's next? ...
Thirdly, and importantly, rather than being restricted to single sentences as was the case in this demonstration, we will process larger text.¹¹ We will provide further information in subsequent articles and papers as the team completes new experiments.
Fourthly, we could embark on other tasks besides question-answering, such as language generation, summarization, etc.
Finally, of course, when hardware becomes more powerful we can simply scale up the size of the meaning spaces and complexity of the tasks — which is clearly our overall objective.
See the full story here: https://medium.com/cambridge-quantum-computing/quantum-natural-language-processing-748d6f27b31d
IonQ CEO Peter Chapman on how quantum computing will change the future of AI
“For decades, it was believed that the brain’s computational capacity lay in the neuron as a minimal unit,” he wrote. “Early efforts by many tried to find a solution using artificial neurons linked together in artificial neural networks with very limited success. This approach was fueled by the thought that the brain is an electrical computer, similar to a classical computer.”
“However, since then, I believe we now know the brain is not an electrical computer, but an electrochemical one,” he added. “Sadly, today’s computers do not have the processing power to be able to simulate the chemical interactions across discrete parts of the neuron, such as the dendrites, the axon, and the synapse. And even with Moore’s law, they won’t next year or even after a million years.”
See the full story here: https://venturebeat.com/2020/05/09/ionq-ceo-peter-chapman-on-how-quantum-computing-will-change-the-future-of-ai/
Iraq’s Ancient Nineveh Re-created Via VR Technology
Stone by stone, digital artists and game developers from Mosul are rebuilding Nineveh's heritage sites in the digital world.
"Since we started the virtual reality lab, we tried to focus on Mosul's archaeological sites," said project co-ordinator Moyasser Nasseer. "It is an opportunity for people to discover archaeological sites that still exist as well as sites recently destroyed by Daesh (Islamic State) when they occupied Mosul."
The designers want to create an immersive game in which players solve mysteries to discover Nineveh's heritage sites. They hope it might draw tourists to an area recovering from recent conflicts, said artist Basma Qais.
See the full story here: https://www.voanews.com/science-health/iraqs-ancient-nineveh-re-created-vr-technology