philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Disney taps Hitachi for smarter theme park magic

Hitachi will enter a partnership with The Walt Disney Co. to provide artificial intelligence and analytics at the entertainment giant's theme parks, the Japanese technology group said Wednesday.

Hitachi Vantara, Hitachi's U.S. unit, has agreed to provide data analysis for both Disneyland and Disney World through the Lumada suite of internet of things tools. The partnership was announced at NEXT 2019, the data technology conference being held in Las Vegas.

Disney will be able to boost customer satisfaction by reducing maintenance times. Hitachi meanwhile will use the partnership as a jumpoff point to develop offshore markets in the IoT business. Right now, Lumada is 90% focused on domestic clients.

See the full story here: https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Disney-taps-Hitachi-for-smarter-theme-park-magic

Disney to ‘Spellcheck’ Scripts for Gender-Bias Using AI Technology

The Walt Disney Company will use a new artificial intelligence application to “spellcheck” scripts for gender bias in a new partnership with actress Geena Davis.

The collaboration, which was first reported by The Hollywood Reporter, will involve a new AI tool called “GD-IQ: Spellcheck for Bias,” which was developed at the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering.

GD-IQ is intended to analyze the text of a script to determine the balance of male and female characters and whether the mix is representative of reality, according to the trade publication.

The tool also can discern the numbers of characters based on ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other groups.

Davis made the announcement at a recent gender inclusion summit in Auckland, New Zealand.

See the full story here: https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2019/10/09/disney-to-spellcheck-scripts-for-gender-bias-using-ai-technology/

New Encryption System Protects Data from Quantum Computers

As quantum computing creeps closer, IBM successfully demonstrates a way to secure sensitive information.

“While quantum computers can do some things better against a particular set of problems, there are tons of other things they just do not help with—almost at all,” Lyubashevsky says. “So these are the types of problems that people are trying to build cryptography on.”

Because there are many of these types of problems, organizations such as NIST are trying to narrow down the potential options in order to develop a standardized method for quantum-proof encryption. In 2016 NIST put out a call for potential postquantum algorithms, and earlier this year it announced it had winnowed 69 accepted submissions down to 26 leading candidates. The plan is to select the final algorithms in the next couple of years and to make them available in draft form by 2024. IBM is not waiting for the results of this competition, however. In August the company announced its researchers had used its NIST submission, a system dubbed CRYSTALS (short for Cryptographic Suite for Algebraic Lattices) to successfully encrypt a magnetic-tape storage drive.

Because IBM has also made the system open-source, Lyubashevsky points out, any people interested in protecting their data can try it. “If they really do need their data to be secure 20 years from now, there really are some good options available for the cryptography that they can use,” he says.

See the full story here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-encryption-system-protects-data-from-quantum-computers/

An AI Pioneer Wants His Algorithms to Understand the ‘Why’

In March, Yoshua Bengio received a share of the Turing Award, the highest accolade in computer science, for contributions to the development of deep learning—the technique that triggered a renaissance in artificial intelligence, leading to advances in self-driving cars, real-time speech translation, and facial recognition.

Now, Bengio says deep learning needs to be fixed. He believes it won’t realize its full potential, and won’t deliver a true AI revolution, until it can go beyond pattern recognition and learn more about cause and effect. In other words, he says, deep learning needs to start asking why things happen.

“It’s a big thing to integrate [causality] into AI,” Bengio says. “Current approaches to machine learning assume that the trained AI system will be applied on the same kind of data as the training data. In real life it is often not the case.”

At his research lab, Bengio is working on a version of deep learning capable of recognizing simple cause-and-effect relationships. He and colleagues recently posted a research paperoutlining the approach.

Bengio has already transformed AI once. Over the past several decades, he helped develop the ideas and engineering techniques that unleashed the potential of deep learning, together with this year’s other Turing Award recipients: Geoffrey Hinton, of the University of Toronto and Google, and Yann LeCun, who works at NYU and Facebook.

See the full story here: https://www.wired.com/story/ai-pioneer-algorithms-understand-why/

Is Extended Reality The Future Of Digital Advertising?

Verizon Media is another company that is pushing XR advertising forward. By combining quality AR with trusted inventory, the company is powering a new level of utility for the user and performance for the advertiser. Verizon has recently extended its XR offering off the back of a successful debut of AR on Yahoo Mail, which saw average dwell times of 60 seconds.

See the full story here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/solrogers/2019/10/08/should-brands-invest-in-xr-advertising/#e1a86211912e

New Halloween extravaganza features aerial acrobatics, virtual reality and more

Collaborating with Drexel University, Sanders and his creative team crafted a 45-minute virtual reality experience – one of the several attractions comprising “2nd Sanctuary.”

As participants dress in hazardous suits, they immerse in the Phantom Portal Virtual Reality, passing through a few locations throughout the church, including fictional phone booths and spas.

Whether transporting audiences to familiar Philadelphia sites or taking them up-close-and-personal to dancers, Sanders and his team shot various footage for the virtual reality portion for almost two months. The objective, he says, was focusing people in a singular direction within a 360 degree-perspective.

See the full story here: https://southphillyreview.com/2019/10/08/new-halloween-extravaganza-features-aerial-acrobatics-virtual-reality-and-more/

VRST – 25th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology

This is a VR conference in Sydney, Australia with global reach and an interest spread of topics.

https://vrst.acm.org/vrst2019/program/

On TikTok, There Is No Time

The popular app doesn’t tell users when a video was posted. Creators say that makes it easier to steal content—but there are also upsides to forgetting what day it is.

TikTok's time-free status also has more mundane but still annoying repercussions. Katie Swanson, a Wisconsin mom better known as @coupon_katie, has amassed over 600,000 followers on the platform showing off her insanely advanced couponing skills. When she finds a good deal, Swanson often enthusiastically tells her fansto run to the store before it expires. But they have no way of knowing when that is, since viewers can’t tell when Swanson posted. “A lot of my videos are time-sensitive, so if they see one of my videos too late, they might not know if they missed out on a deal or not,” says Swanson, who has recently begun including the date in her captions. “I do like that my older content can always still be viewed, but a time stamp would be great.”

TikTok has taken that strategy to its logical extreme, which helps to explain not only its success but also some of its problems. The platform ultimately hopes that you not only stop caring when a video was posted, but perhaps forget what day it is entirely while scrolling through them.

Filming the Show: Pardon the Intrusion? Or Punish It?

“It’s turned into a battle over who belongs, and who gets to set the rules,” said Kirsty Sedgman, a lecturer in theater at the University of Bristol and the author of “The Reasonable Audience,” a book about contemporary debates over theater etiquette.

“Everyone goes into the theater thinking their own personal vision of what theater should be like is clearly the right one,” said Dr. Sedgman, who noted that expectations that audiences will be reverential date only to the 19th century, and that in Shakespeare’s time patrons were famously rowdy.

Sony Is Launching a Location-Based Ghostbusters Training Experience in Augmented Reality

Starting this Saturday, fans who can make it to Tokyo, Japan will be able to play "Ghostbusters Rookie Training" using head-mounted AR devices.

The location-based experience will use a prototype AR headset from Sony, as well as assorted accessories, to give users the power to explore a real-world setting populated by virtual ghosts and demons.

But instead of putting users in a classic single-player situation, the users will all have to work together to accomplish a series of Ghostbuster-related tasks, all while communicating with each other throughout the AR location-based gaming space.

And in case there's any doubt about the depth of the experience, would-be players should be warned that each program is about an hour-long, so only truly devoted Ghostbusters fans should even think of giving this a try.

See the full story with more video here: https://next.reality.news/news/sony-is-launching-location-based-ghostbusters-training-experience-augmented-reality-0208432/