Daily Archives: March 8, 2017

WHAT: "Trish," the washing machine-looking artificially intelligent spokesperson for Soylent.

WHO: Soylent, Wieden + Kennedy's The Lodge

WHY WE CARE: Soylent staked its ground in "this product is kind of creepy" territory from the moment they named their nutritional meal-replacement "soylent," after the 1973 horror-thriller Soylent Green. That film starred Charlton Heston as he attempted to discover what the processed meal replacement that people consumed was made of (spoiler: Soylent Green is people!!), which is not context you can avoid when discussing the product that bears its name.

However, if that alone isn't creepy enough for you, worry not: Now Soylent has teamed with agency Wieden+Kennedy to launch "Trish," an AI-powered spokesperson, who joins the company's sci-fi dystopian messaging like "Food That Frees You," and an eerily sterile design. According to press materials, Trish "is rational, cares about humans, knows a ton about nutrition, and above all elseis helpful." Certainly, "cares about humans" is high on the list of things that humans should look for in an AI buddy (it beats the alternative, anyway). And having a robot pal who can help customers aspiring not to eat actual meals with figuring out what to do with their tubes and/or powdered bags of sort-of food, how much to eat, what flavors they might enjoy, and more. If getting those answers from an AI bot that looks like a washing machine appeals to you, congratulations! You are definitely in Soylent's target demographic.

Read more from the original source:

Soylent Found A Way To Make Itself Even Creepier: An AI Spokesperson - Co.Create

Nvidia has a new generation of its Jetson embedded computing platform for devices at the edge of a network, including things like traffic cameras, manufacturing robotics, smart sensors and more. The Jetson TX2 has twice the performance of its predecessor, the TX1, or it can also redirect efficiency to power savings, using less than half the power consumption of the original to achieve the same processing abilities.

The TX2 uses a Pascal-based GPU, as well as two 64-bit Nvidia quad-core ARM chips, with 8GB of RAM on board and 32GB of fast flash storage. It also features built-in 802.11ac Wi-Fi networking, Bluetooth connectivity and 1GB Ethernet for wired connections. It makes it possible to push edge-of-network computing even further, allowing for the running of distributed neural networks right on edge devices that can more accurately do things like identify objects in images, recognize speech or interpret surroundings for autonomous navigation.

Alongside Jetson TX2, Nvidia is also announcing JetPack 3.0, a new version of its AI SDK for the Jetson family, which includes support for TensorRT 1.0, cuDNN 5.1 for deep neural networks, VisionWorks 1.6 for computer vision, as well as all the latest graphics drivers and APIs.

Cisco say that it can use TX2 and Nvidias Jetson to add local AI-powered features including face and speech recognition to its Spark enterprise network devices, which could potentially offer a lot of advantages in terms of security and authentication. The TX2 is also set to help students and researchers do a lot more with a lot less investment than youd typically require for getting started with AI the developer kit for the new Jetson launches today, with a $599 price tag for preorders in the U.S. and Europe, and a ship date starting March 14.

Nvidias shipping TX2 module will retail for $399 when it arrives in Q2, and the existing TX1 and TK1 Jetson embedded computing platforms will also continue to be made available, at reduced prices.

A connected city is also going to have to be an intelligent city, and not just one where the smarts are centrally located in a server facility each component needs to be somewhat intelligent to help keep things running smoothly throughout the network, without having to worry about infrastructure continuity and latency concerns. Improvements like the generational jump for Jetson TX2 help make that potential future much more achievable.

See the rest here:

Nvidia's Jetson TX2 makes AI computing possible within cameras, sensors and more - TechCrunch

Another legal tech startup coming out of the UK: Cognitiv+is applying artificial intelligence to automate contract analysis and management, offering businesses a way to automate staying on top of legal risks, obligations and changing regulatory landscapes.

Co-founder Vasilis Tsolis might therefore be forgiven for viewingBrexit as a sizableopportunity for his startup though he more tactfully describes it as a legislative challenge that we can help out with.

Theres going to be a lot of changes in legislation, theres going to be a lot of changes in regulation,and you really need to know whats going to happen to your contracts and if you need to do any changes on your legal documents or not. So its going to be a huge challenge, he says of Brexit.

I think this is going to happen more and more often, he adds, pointing to another incoming EU regulation that will be upping businesses compliance needs in the near future: aka the GDPR, coming into force (including in the UK) in May 2018.

Because you see legislation changing so fast and its getting so much bigger that actually its impossible to monitor and impossible to read it. Who can read half million of pages?

This is about day-to-day contract management but we think that compliance is going to be more and more strict, and its going to be much more difficult there are so many new regulations, about Slavery Act, about GDPR, MiFid II and so many other compliances that all thisaccumulated risk analysis from your contracts we think its not possible to be viable for humans anymore you need to bring the robots, he adds.

Cognitiv+s data-parsing toolis not being designed to interpret legislation but rather to monitor it in a structured fashion, combining that tracking with analysis of a companys own contracts with a view to flagging compliance risks and requirements.

The overarching thesis is that contract analysis space/legal process outsourcing has yet to be disrupted by technology.Tsolishas both an engineering and a legal background, as youd hope give the natureof the startup. Other co-founder, Achilleas Michos, background is in computer science.

When you do contract analysis and compliance and when you do regulatory analysis theres a lot of repetition, and the majority of the people spend a lot of time perhaps the majority of the time looking for basic stuff Legal but also admin assignments. So the majority of those tasks can be accelerated by automation, argues Tsolis.

Cognitiv+ is using what he describes as a number of AI technologies to perform the contract analysis at near real-time speeds, leaning on open source algorithms for the coretech. But hedescribes theIP as the process and all the stages we take for analyzing a contract, the training so, in other words,the legal expertise needed to get a proper handle on compliance.

We use machine learning, we use NLP [natural language processing], we use neural networks We aim to be a risk management tool; we identify as much as possible that the machine can do, he tells TechCrunch. When it comes to [analyzing an area such as] limit of liability if the contract is not very well drafted then obviously we cannot help you on this one but we can help you for the vast majority of the contracts that you have on your library.

Presumably the techmight also be able to flag up a badly drafted contract.

Contracts areuploaded to thesystem for analysis and tracking, with examples of the sorts ofcritical information Cognitiv+ can extract including the parties of the contract; the limit of liability; renewal and termination information; and jurisdiction.

Users are deliveredintel on an ongoing basis viareports, dashboards and notifications. The tool is generally being designed for use by in-house lawyers, commercial staff, procurement, financial and compliance departments.

The current industryfocus for the team is procurement in the financial sector, but next year itplans to expand to target the insurance, real estate and engineering industries too. Theyre currently also only tracking UK-related compliance, but are intending to add EU and US in the coming months.

Given the financial services focus, theyre alsolooking at how thetech could be used tohelp combat financial crime, according to Tsolis.

The early stage startup has been bootstrapping since being founded in late 2015, and has just gone through Londons Winton Labs accelerator for data-focused businesses. Its also in the midst of closing a seed round, and is running pilots of v1 of itscontract-parsing platform with a small number of UK companies.

Tsolis says the first version is a fairly generic analytical tool, but a more vertical-specific v2 is coming in September forfinancial and procurement users and anotherversion planned for March 2018 will target the other three target sectors. The aimisto begin revenue generating this year, via a SaaS business model.

Could the tech also be applied for drafting contracts in future, not just analyzing them? UK startup Juro, for example, already offers both contract authoring and management, though itlooks to have a bit of a different focus(on marketplaces and sales contracts).

The legal world is a long livedworld for centuries now, and its a very traditional sector. And actually I think you need to disrupt it step by step, saysTsolis, emphasizing the need tobring together all the stakeholders to ensure buy-in.

Its not just the lawyers a lot of people read contracts, like the financial people, commercial, procurement, compliance, so you need to bring all the stakeholders together to ensure that people understand what the machine does. And move on to new ways of interacting with the machine and NLP and new technologies.

Read the original here:

Cognitiv+ is using AI for contract analysis and tracking - TechCrunch

This is the secondof three stories in a mini-series on how artificial intelligence is affecting the work that agencies do. The nextinstallment will publish on Friday. Read the first story about Xaxis.

As marketer interest in artificial Intelligence (AI) grows, Publicis.Sapient sees opportunity to provide guidance.

It has a dedicated unit that provides AI-related advice for 30 clients, including Patrn and Dove soap. The AI practice informally launched about four years ago and has seen an uptick in spend over the past year and a half, said Josh Sutton, global head of AI at Publicis.Sapient.

A year and a half ago, there was very minimal spend [in AI], he said. In 2017, companies are acknowledging that AI and its intersection with big data is going to enable business transformation in a fundamental way.

Sutton works with a team of about 50 AI specialists who help marketers select and deploy AI tools. That work involves setting initial expectations.

Theres a fairly wide gap in most peoples knowledge based on what theyve seen and read from academic journals to Hollywood movies, he said. Setting expectations around whats real is one of the most time-consuming and critical tasks.

For example, marketers worry that AIs ability to automate certain tasks will leave them jobless. In reality, AIs ability to automate more mundane, machine-like functions makes marketers more effective and efficient at their jobs and able to focus on more high-level work like strategy in order to achieve better results, Sutton said.

Marketers can use AI to create conversational tools like voice assistants and chatbots and accelerate automated tasks within their own organizations. In programmatic, marketers can tap machine learning and natural language processing to crunch massive data sets at the individual level for more targeted media buys.

Its a tremendously large data set that, prior to AI, you wouldn't have been able to do a ton with because it wouldve taken an army of data scientists to get the information out, Sutton said.

At that level of granularity, marketers can funnel their media spend toward channels where they know an individual will be to eliminate waste. Machine learning helped a major airline client recognize waste was coming from its out-of-home advertising and reduced that spend by 15% by targeting with more accuracy.

We could create a real persona of that individual and look at where they travel, what routes they take to drive to the airport and where they live, Sutton said. We knew exactly who we were going after.

Publicis.Sapients AI team also helps clients rethink their marketing strategies and shift media spend out of product and P&L silos and toward audience-based insights. The process can be bumpy and painful, Sutton said.

Its still an early-days transformation, he said. The majority are still centered around P&L lines.

Retail and finance have shown the most initiative embracing AI and audience-based buys, while CPGs and the heavily regulated health care vertical trail behind, Sutton said.

Often, Publicis.Sapients AI practice is pitted against consultancies rather than agencies in pitches, given the systems integration and technology expertise required to deploy AI tech.

The AI Players

While the group is AI-agnostic, Publicis.Sapient works most often with the biggest players, including Google, Microsoft and IBM.

IBM has set the vision for whats possible with AI, but its advertising is a bit more aspirational than its product as an enterprise solution, Sutton said. Google, on the other hand, has great technology but isnt communicating how it can be deployed at the enterprise level. And Microsoft has quietly become to go-to solution for specific verticals.

If I was going to put my chips down on a few companies today, [IBM, Google and Microsoft are] where theyd be, he said.

Salesforce and Amazon are up-and-comers. Sutton sees the former becoming more of a niche play rather than an enterprise solution and the latter expanding on its great work in experience design with Echo.

But a clients AI stack often involves bits and pieces of integrated technologies. Publicis.Sapient keeps an ear to the ground for smaller players with better point solutions than the big guys.

Locking yourself into one partner is very dangerous, he said. I have concern with companies that are unwilling to be part of a broader enterprise infrastructure because I have yet to see anyone who can put all the pieces together. If the Googles, IBMs and Microsofts arent there yet, I struggle to think anyone else will be.

Even with the bigger players, Sutton and his team do their due diligence to make sure the technologies they select are easy to use, scalable and have worked in the past for brands.

This is an industry where unfortunately the gap between the hype and reality of what a product can deliver is fairly wide, he said. Even in the forgiving realm of technology overstatement, the AI space has taken it to a new level.

While Sutton declined to share exact numbers, he said Publicis Groupe will likely invest millions in AI this year both in its client-facing AI practice and to optimize the core functions within its own business, including media planning and buying.

And as with most centralized functions in agency holding groups, AI is beginning to trickle down into Publicis.Sapients agency brands to become core to their individual capabilities.

It gets very fuzzy as to who are or arent pure AI team members as we start to scale out, Sutton said.

Read the original:

AI And The Agency: How Publicis.Sapient Helps Marketers Navigate AI - AdExchanger