Tech Nuggets with the Technology

Monday, August 5, 2019

A look at the 14 US states that used paperless voting machines in 2018, which experts say can easily be hacked, and the slow and uneven efforts to replace them (Politico)

Politico:
A look at the 14 US states that used paperless voting machines in 2018, which experts say can easily be hacked, and the slow and uneven efforts to replace them — Paperless voting devices are a gaping weakness in the patchwork U.S. election system, security experts say.

Scale AI and its 22-year-old CEO lock down $100 million to label Silicon Valley’s data

Big artificial intelligence companies are promising an automated future but many of their products rely on the labeled training data coming from Scale AI, a startup that highlights machine learning’s intimate bond between human contractors and algorithms.

The three-year-old startup announced Monday that it had closed a $100 million Series C round of financing led by Founders Fund with participation from Accel, Coatue Management, Index Ventures, Spark Capital, Thrive Capital, Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger and Quora CEO Adam d’Angelo. A report in Bloomberg details that this funding will bring Scale’s valuation past $1 billion.

“In general, AI and machine learning is just growing so quickly as a field, that it’s appropriate to raise this amount that will allow us to capitalize on our ambitions,” the company’s 22-year-old executive Alexandr Wang told TechCrunch in an interview. “We don’t want to be in the business of constantly needing to raise capital, so ideally this is the last fundraise for us.”

Scale, whose army of humans annotate raw data to train self-driving and other AI systems, nabs $18M

Scale has around 100 employees, according to Wang, but its limited full-time staff is a small fraction of the human-power behind the services Scale offers. The startup has nearly 30,000 contractors aiding in the labeling process. “The humans are pretty critical to what we’re doing because they’re there to make sure that all the data we provide is really high quality,” Wang says.

Companies provide Scale with data via their API and the startup puts its resources to work labeling the text, audio, pictures and video so that its customers’ machine learning models can be trained.

The startup’s customers include Waymo, OpenAI, Airbnb and Lyft.

For a customer working with autonomous driving data, Scale’s services may mean taking collected video frames and manually segmenting out individual cars, humans or other obstacles. For another customer, it can mean making common sense language connections to ensure natural language processing models can understand language in context.

scale nlp entityrecognition

The “human insight” can help minimize labeling bias and give customers data that is more precise and more accurate though, as with just about all AI startups, the hope is that these insights will gradually usher in a future where reliance on these humans-in-the-loop will be lessened. In the meantime, Scale sits atop an army of contractors that might hold the key to bulking up Silicon Valley’s machine learning intelligence.

“AI companies will come and go as they compete to find the most effective applications of machine learning. Scale AI will last over time because it provides core infrastructure to the most important players in the space,” Founders Fund partner and former Trump advisor Peter Thiel said in a statement.

U.S. Treasury just designated China as a currency manipulator, so expect more economic shocks

The U.S. Treasury has just taken the extraordinary step of designating China as a currency manipulator, something no administration has done since the days of Bill Clinton.

With the action, the trade war between the U.S. and China has entered a new phase that will likely see both countries stepping up both their rhetoric and actions in the trade dispute that has now dragged on for over a year.

As a result of the ongoing hostilities between the U.S. government and China, the flood of investment dollars that once came from Chinese technology companies and investors into U.S. technology companies has slowed. Acquisitions and investments made by Chinese companies have been unwound over concerns from the Committee of Foreign Investments in the U.S. and tariffs slapped on Chinese imports have hit U.S. stock prices (including in the technology sector).

Tech stocks walloped as China retaliates in the latest salvo of its trade war with the US

The news of Treasury’s move comes less than 24 hours after the Chinese government announced a complete halt on U.S. agricultural imports. More significantly, the Bank of China has let the country’s currency slide in value against the U.S. dollar to above the seven-to-one figure that was considered a line-in-the-sand for trade.

Given the escalation, economists’ fears that global markets could slip into a recession within the next nine months are more likely to be realized, according to reports from Morgan Stanley, quoted by CNBC.

“We take its literal message of planned tariffs quite seriously. There’s a pattern of responding to insufficient negotiation progress with escalation,” Morgan Stanley said in an analyst report.

The move to label China as a currency manipulator means that the U.S. will plead its case before the International Monetary Fund to take steps to curb what Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin called “the unfair competitive advantage created by China’s latest actions.”

If anything, China’s actions have actually been to prop up the country’s currency in the face of internal pressures to break the seven-to-one floor that had previously been set on the Renminbi’s value versus the dollar. China’s economy is slowing — in part due to tariffs imposed by the U.S., but also because economies in Europe and Asia are slowing down, which is hitting exports in the country. Indeed, much of the current growth in China’s economy has been fueled by debt-financed big infrastructure projects.

That could change as Chinese goods become cheaper thanks to the falling value of the nation’s currency. However, as Axios notes, what China is doing doesn’t actually fall under the definition of currency manipulation as it’s legally defined.

Because to be a currency manipulator a country needs to spend 2% of its gross domestic product over a 12-month period on currency manipulation. If anything, China was boosting the yuan in the face of calls to reduce its value until the President called for sanctions last week.

Even if the country’s currency devaluation does juice exports, it could have unforeseen consequences on China’s infrastructure spending and could backfire as a tool in the ongoing trade dispute.

A weaker currency means that Chinese consumers and businesses have to pay more for goods and services that are dollar-denominated. It also means that while the country is awash with cash, it could lose its competitive edge in a fight to lure top talent to the country. Losses in spending power could push the developers and programmers the country needs to transition from a manufacturing-focused economy to look elsewhere.

Stock markets are already taking note of the new U.S. action on trade. Futures show the Dow trading down about 350 points and the Nasdaq and S&P 500 indices both trading sharply lower.

As Germany's economy slows, a look at efforts to compensate for its outdated internet infrastructure by aggressively rolling out 5G and gigabit internet (Sara Germano/Wall Street Journal)

Sara Germano / Wall Street Journal:
As Germany's economy slows, a look at efforts to compensate for its outdated internet infrastructure by aggressively rolling out 5G and gigabit internet — The country ranks 33rd in the world by one measure of broadband connection speed; ‘too unstable, too slow’

Sunday, August 4, 2019

Hobbs and Shaw, The Lion King Rule the Worldwide Weekend Box Office

Fast and Furious: Hobbs and Shaw ruled the worldwide box office this weekend with an estimated haul of $180.8 million, the third largest opening in the franchise. In India, Hobbs and Shaw grossed $7.4... https://ift.tt/2YIjBLs

Cloudflare Terminates 8chan as Customer Over 'Hate-Filled' Content

Cloudflare said it will terminate 8chan as its customer after a shooter used the forum just before killing 20 people at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas on Saturday. https://ift.tt/2KkBG96

Infinix S4 4GB RAM, 64GB Storage Variant Launched in India

Infinix S4 new 4GB RAM + 64GB storage model has now been launched and it will go on sale during the Flipkart Independence Day sale. https://ift.tt/2YrIifS

Chandrayaan-2 Spacecraft Shares Its First Pictures of Earth

ISRO on Sunday took to micro-blogging platform Twitter to share the first pictures of Earth captured by the LI4 camera installed in Chandrayaan-2. https://ift.tt/2OFxsyu

Huawei Y9 Prime 2019 vs Realme X vs Vivo Z1 Pro vs Redmi Note 7 Pro

Huawei Y9 Prime 2019 price in India is set Rs. 15,990, while the Realme X price starts at Rs. 16,999, Vivo Z1 Pro at Rs. 14,990, and Redmi Note 7 Pro at Rs. 13,999. https://ift.tt/2KiVfin

Huawei Tests Phone With Its Own OS, Possibly for Sale This Year: Report

Huawei is testing a smartphone equipped with Hongmeng, which could potentially go on sale by the end of this year, Chinese state-media reported. https://ift.tt/2YvPTKF

Didi Chuxing’s autonomous driving unit is now an independent company

Didi Chuxing’s autonomous driving unit is now an independent company, the Chinese ride-sharing and transportation giant said today. Didi’s autonomous driving team was created in 2016 and now has more than 200 employees in China and the United States. Didi’s announcement comes about a month after The Information reported that Didi was in talks with investors including SoftBank, its largest shareholder, to raise money for the unit.

In its announcement, Didi said the new company “will integrate the resources and technological advantages of Didi’s platform, continue to increase investment in R&D of core innovative technologies, and deepen collaboration with upstream and downstream auto industry partners” and also promote self-driving technology to transportation authorities.

The Financial Times reported last year that Didi had been approved to test self-driving vehicles in California, where it has a research facility in Mountain View. But Didi has to catch up with other companies that have been testing autonomous cars both in the U.S. and China. In California, it was the 53rd company to get a permit to test self-driving vehicles, behind technology rivals like Uber and Waymo.

Didi has already been testing autonomous vehicles, developed in partnership with car manufacturers and suppliers, in China, but its testing lagged far behind Baidu last year, which registered 140,000 kilometers in Beijing, or about 91 percent of the 153,600 miles test-driven by autonomous fleets owned by eight companies, including Didi, Pony.ai, Tencent and automakers NIO, Audi, Daimler AG and BAIC Group.

Aside from being able to license its technology to other transportation and vehicle companies, the launch of robo-taxis may help Didi’s ride-sharing service make up for a shortage in drivers. Stricter screening criteria was put into place after two female passengers were murdered by drivers on Didi’s ride-sharing platform and Didi said last month that it had removed more than 300,000 drivers who didn’t meet its standards since its safety overhaul began last year.

The CEO of the new autonomous driving company will be Zhang Bo, who is also the CTO of Didi. Meng Xing, former executive director of Shunwei China Internet Fund, is its COO, while software engineers Jia Zhaoyin, the head of its technical efforts for Didi’s smart-driving project, and Zheng Jianqiang will head its research and development teams in the U.S. and China.