KrattAI: Estonia’s National Artificial Intelligence Strategy
In Estonia, there are around 30 Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions deployed in the Estonian public sector that were identified as active as of the beginning of June 2020. The Baltic nation aims to have at least 50 AI use cases by the end of 2020.
... all part of e-Estonia.
But, how did Estonia, a small Baltic nation in Northern Europe, led by a female president, managed to be recognized as the most advanced digital society on the planet?
In Estonian mythology, a Kratt is a magical creature. A Kratt is a creature brought to life from hay or metal household objects, and it is animated by a human soul. Essentially, the Kratt was a servant made by its maker out of hay or old household items to help with tasks. The Estonian government uses this character as a metaphor for Artificial Intelligence and its complexities.
"A Kratt is a living being consisting of various objects. An interesting caveat is that you have to keep the Kratt busy. If you don't keep it occupied, it will focus all of its ability on attacking its owner. So, giving the Kratt lots of tasks is essential, the harder the better. And to complete the parallels with reality, the only way to get rid of the Kratt in its entirety is to give it impossible tasks. A very nice series of analogies for technology, if you ask me," Florian Marcus told me.
Suve: The Estonian chatbot for digital public services
The Suve chatbot is a relatively new addition to Estonia's digital services. Suve was an idea that came from the Hack the Crisis hackathon, which was organized by Garage48 and Accelerate Estonia.
The hackathon was organized to beat the global pandemic affecting Estonia. "Startup-government collaboration is in the DNA of our Estonian digital society," President of Estonia, Kersti Kaljulaid said.
Hack the Crisis is a global community that centralizes all the local events and information to participate in the online hackathons. The startups believe that the power of community has the power to fight and beat the pandemic. To achieve this, and after their local success, they also organize events to help countries around the world.
Estonia counts with approximately 1,000 startups, which positions the country among the top countries with more startups per capita. According to a study by Index Ventures in late 2018, Estonia is the best in the world in terms of startup regulation.
"Imagine you’re in a foreign country, pregnant, and you feel you’re about to go into labour. Wouldn’t it be great to just tell Siri or your Google Assistant that you’re about to have a baby, and in the background, the AI calls an ambulance to your location, forwards your medical data to the nearest hospital, alerts the Estonian embassy in that country, creates a new electronic ID for your baby, and also starts child benefit payments? Then, the voice assistant calmly informs you that everything has been sorted out and that the ambulance will reach your location in two minutes. This is amazing," says Marcus.
If you are thinking that the above has been taken from a science fiction book or movie, think again. Because it is exactly what the Estonian government is working on right now as you are reading this.
See the full story here: https://interestingengineering.com/krattai-estonias-national-artificial-intelligence-strategy
The Time Machine: A Virtual Reality review – a sleek voyage through the fourth wall
The Time Machine’s first run at the London Library, intended to celebrate HG Wells, was abruptly cut short due to Covid-19. Now it has been re-imagined as an interactive online experience by the ever-enterprising Creation Theatre.
See the full story here: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/jun/07/the-time-machine-review
TOP 10 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE COMPANIES TO WORK FOR IN 2020
[PhilNote: The article contains 1-paragraph descriptions of each company's AI activity.]
Amazon
Graphcore
Altar.io
Nvidia - GauGAN, named after post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin, is a deep-learning model that acts like an AI paintbrush, quickly changing over text descriptions, doodles, or fundamental representations into photorealistic, professional-quality images. Nvidia says art directors and concept artists from top film studios and video-game organizations are as of now utilizing GauGAN to prototype thoughts and roll out quick improvements to digital scenery. Computer scientists may likewise utilize the tools to make virtual universes used to train self-driving vehicles, the organization says.
HiSilicon
Syntiant
SoftServe
Intel
Kasisto
See the full story here: https://www.analyticsinsight.net/top-10-artificial-intelligence-companies-to-work-for-in-2020/
VR Can Be the Film Industry’s Future, but the Barriers to Entry Are Surreal
[PhilNote: this very good article is about VR experiences, not creating experiences in VR.]
A stately man identified only as Tom, who helped Simon organize the event after meeting him at a weekly VR town hall event called “The Evening News,” put the globe-spanning gathering in context. “This is just a cool exemplification of what VR can be,” Tom told the crowd. “An event in one part of the world is now an event for the entire world. It’s amazing that someone living 5,000 miles away would find this personal.”
In early March, as it became clear that crowded events would become impossible for quite some time, I purchased an entry-level ticket to VR with the Oculus Go. As it turns out, there is a whole world entirely free from COVID-19 hiding in plain sight.
VR can’t replace Cannes, but it will play host to Cannes XR, a virtual reality market with virtual parties; VR can’t replace moviegoing, but it has hosted premiere screenings and Q&As for films that had been scheduled to play at canceled festivals. And VR can’t replace filmmaking, but it’s a platform for storytellers finding new ways of exploring the medium.
[VR is] the ultimate panacea to sheltering in place, where people can gather without inhaling the same air in immersive spaces.
One quiet Saturday night a few pandemic weeks ago, I dropped into a Reggie Watts performance in Altspace and had a blast. Watts, whose boundary-pushing performances blend standup, beatboxing, and jazzy, discursive music layered across a dense set of tracks in real time, has exactly the kind of category-busting persona that makes sense for the VR space. As I watched his cartoon avatar flit about the stage, addressing multiple rooms at once while the audience gathered around him, I was swept up in the euphoria of experiencing spur-of-the-moment creativity in a crowded room. Watts used the technology to his advantage, leading us out to a virtual balcony for his climatic performance, where he invited the audience to set off fireworks that exploded into large images of his face across the sky. It was a dazzling, surreal, and otherworldly feat.
See the full story here: https://www.indiewire.com/2020/06/virtual-reality-could-save-film-industry-1202234384/
Artificial intelligence reaches the ‘podcast’
Maybe inspired by all these stories, the writer Manuel Bartual has just released Biotopia, a newsletter-like sound fiction that he began working on during confinement: “Biotopía is a center of investigation and advanced technological development in which the matter, the time and the space behave in a strange way. It is actually a sound fiction.
Speaking one night with the actress Nikki García while we were having dinner on Skype, it occurred to us that we could prepare a podcast to get my head busy with something in those days, so I started to think about how that could be podcast, taking advantage of the fact that she had the means to record herself from home and then I could edit everything from mine ”. Biotopia It is a project that is born from certain limitations and makes them a narrative virtue. For example, to incorporate other voices into Biotopia, Bartual was using the resource of phone calls, which has allowed the rest of the actors and actresses who have participated to record themselves from their homes, using most of their mobile phones.
One of the peculiarities of Biotopia is the use of algorithmic voices: “We have used a text reading application that allows you to choose between different voices. One of the Biotopia characters is AmaIA, an artificial intelligence developed by an entertainment science team whose latest work is Inside Biotopia, a series on the origin of this scientific community ”.
The idea of listening to a podcast complete whose host Be a non-human voice is not something crazy. James Ryan, a student at California’s Santa Cruz University, presented this idea as part of his doctoral thesis. ... It is almost a podcast infinite, because its plots are automatically generated by a software.
See the full story here: https://theunionjournal.com/artificial-intelligence-reaches-the-podcast-blog-wine-days-and-podcasts/
Manned Fighter To Face Autonomous Drone Next Year In Sci-Fi Movie-Like Showdown
The Air Force is hoping to pit an autonomous drone equipped with an artificial intelligence-driven flight control system against a fighter jet with a human pilot in a little over a year. The service has described this effort in the past as a "big moonshot" that could revolutionize air-to-air combat in ways that have so far been limited to the realm of fiction - at least as far as we know.
At its most basic, a UCAV would be able to perform many of the same functions as manned aircraft, but would be able to make key decisions faster and more accurately, taking into account much more information in a shorter period of time, without any concern about being distracted or confused by the general chaos of combat. They can also be networked into swarms that work cooperatively to maximize their combat effectiveness at any given time far beyond what a human-piloted formation could.
See the full story here: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33866/manned-fighter-to-face-an-autonomous-drone-next-year-in-a-sci-fi-movie-like-showdown
WalkinVR is Looking to Make Virtual Reality More Accessible for Handicapped Users
Essentially, WalkinVR allows users to finely tune certain aspects of VR experiences. The developers behind the software say that it can “enhance [a] person’s movement and adapt them to play existing Virtual Reality games.” This takes the form of additions that allow easier turning, leaning, and crouching in games to go along with extended movement range when it comes to your hands. The program also can increase the dynamic of hand movements meaning that actions that could be slower in the real world could be seen as faster in the VR realm.
WalkinVR also lets users opt to use various pads to perform actions in games rather than the native buttons that appear on controllers. Plus, hand tracking via Kinect or Azure has also been implemented to the software so that those who can’t hold controllers can still have their motions followed.
WalkinVR website here: https://www.walkinvrdriver.com
See the full story here: https://www.vrfitnessinsider.com/walkinvr-is-looking-to-make-virtual-reality-more-accessible-for-handicapped-users/