Daily Archives: June 14, 2017

For the last 10 years, news feeds have been the main way the mainstream user interface to discover interesting and relevant digital content.Today, news feeds, from Facebook and Twitter to LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest, are surfacing the interesting news and moments fromyour social network and favorite sources.

This is about to change. The push notifications on the lock screen of your personal mobile device are turning your lock screen into the new newsfeed. The lock screen is thus becoming the pivotal interface to access and experience any of the updates and content that you consider to beworth noticing.

Therefore, your lock screen and your mobile device, not the apps, become the nexus for all the personal data flows, feeding machine learningalgorithms soon running also on your personal hardware.

This is a fundamental change. It will change the way your digital experience is personalized. It will change the way AI systems can learn fromyou. And it will change the power balance between the big industry behemoths such as Facebook, Google and Apple.

Weve had push notifications bubbling under for some time now. Back in 2014, Christopher Mims of The Wall Street Journal predicted a bigsuccess to the Yo app because of the way it used the simple power of push notifications.

Yo didnt rise to the occasion, but the applications and influence of push notifications has been growing ever since. Today, the landscape for push notificationsis changing rapidly. Both Android and iOS have introduced updates on push features in a considerably fast pace.

Notifications are transforming from simple text-based boxes into adaptive elements that allow a richer and more nuanced experience, thus-calledrich notifications. Designers and developers are embracing these new possibilities, enabling a more engaging user experience. Todaysnotifications can contain text formatting, bigger images, video and updating infographics, as well as interactive features such as sharing. As a result,users are consuming more and more content directly on their lock screen.

The lock screen has become the place where your attention needs to be caught. And thus, every app is racing to invent more meaningful andengaging notifications. Nic Newman from Oxfords Reuters Institute calls this the battle for the lockscreen. In the process, applications are turning into micro-platforms that can provide notifications as branded and optimized mini-products.

The new richer interactions on your lock screen presents a new user interface paradigm and will have a major affect on personalization.

By appearing automatically on your lock screen, push notifications enable interesting things to find you, rather than the other way around. At the same time, the lock screen isnt tiedinto presenting things in a chronological order. Push notifications allow you to experience things ambiently: notifications materialize on your lockscreen automatically without your explicit action.

Importantly, you do not need to open the app to access content. Today, notifications from a news app allow you to follow thedeveloping news event directly on your lock screen. You can participate in a conversation, check photos, watch a live video and share contentwithout opening the app.

As weve seen in the news feeds of Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, personalization algorithms are needed to curate the continuously growingflow of updates. Soon your lock screen is filtered by personalization algorithms, too.

Already, as peoples interactions are moving from the apps to the lock screen, both iOS and Android have started to automatize the waythings are presented and accessed on the lock screen. Android provides automatically triggered smart notification bundles that collect togetheruseful notifications. iPhone highlights apps based on your personal context, such as time and location. On both platforms, widgets are part ofthis development, serving richer interactions and more content without opening the app.

As an extension of you, your personal mobile device contains all your apps, thus making it a treasure trove of personal data. As an interface, the lock screenmakes it possible to combine the data of your app-specific interactions with the rich contextual data provided by your device.

Concretely, the lock screen will introduce a new algorithmic layer for personalization. The lock screen captures your social interactions andcontent consumption patterns, your favorite apps, movies, videos, music and much more. This rich data will be used to feed machine learningsystems to make personal suggestions and recommendations more relevant and contextual.

Soon your lock screen will filter push notifications actively and automatically, deciding which updates, suggestions, messages, apps, movies,recipes and ads are visible to you. With a personalized lock screen feed your device has the potential to get truly smart and personal.

When the interactions on your lock screen become richer, the data they generate becomes richer, too. Your mobile device will learn fromeverything you do more accurately than ever before.

This introduces a new opportunity to start really understanding you as a unique individual and thus go beyond the existing personalization gaps. Any individual app, even Facebook, couldnt and cant achievethis today (note: Facebook tried unsuccessfully to create their own mobile device).

Personal hardware is becoming an essential part of personalization and machine learning.

As Gary Marcus, the founder of Geometric Intelligence and NYU professor has pointed out, AI systems should be able to learn from alesser amount of data. They should be able to learnlike a child, continuously, iteratively and from everything, being able to generalize, apply and extrapolate these learnings in a useful way.

What if the missing piece for creating such a machine learning system has been a personal AI an algorithmic angel, if you will living and running on your most personal hardware, thus being able to learnwith you like a child would.

Such a personal AI running and evolving with you on your personal device is taught and fed continuously by your rich interactions andcontextual data. It evolves by iterating itself based on your feedback and personal patterns.

While learning directly from you, personal AI canutilize specialized internal and external agents that inhabit various digital environments, simultaneously utilizing the computing power in thecloud. In addition, these individual agents can process and provide domain-specific data, information and recommendations, from stock markettips to optimized travel options. The best versions of your personal AI collaborate and compete to evolve into better versions of themselves.

Everything that happens on the lock screen is captured and can be used to enhance your experience not directly by Facebook and other apps,but mainly by Google and Apple. Google Assistant and Siri will get smarter faster.

Google is already bringing machine learning into their devices using their own algorithms and hardware. Simultaneously, they are offeringdeveloper tools to optimize notifications. Apple is following suit. Samsung is trying to keep up with its recent acquisition of Viv, the next-gen AIassistant.

Will personal AI become your algorithmic angel, making sure you maintain your personal agency in tomorrows algorithmic reality? Or will it justturn your personal device into an ultimate marketing experience, thus trying to affect every decision you make?

The new age of personalized lock screen and personal AI makes the idea of algorithmic angels, your personally controlled algorithms, moretimely than ever. Ethical committees and clauses are starting, but they dont suffice. As our decision-making is augmented by intelligent machine learningsystems, we need explainable algorithms, interfaces and methods to guide and control these smart entities in an explicit and comprehensibleway.

The lock screen as a user interface provides a new interface to do so.

What if you swipe far enough left on your iPhone to see the settings and preferences of your personal AI? What if you can access variousversions of these AIs and decide which one is active for a particular moment just by swiping your lock screen? Maybe you can have amundane chat about the reasoning behind your AIs suggestions, or then you use intuitive gestures, haptics and sounds to communicate witheach other in a mutually comprehensible manner.

The ultimate conversational UI wont be an app or a bot that you need to open or call for. Its something thats present and available all thetime, engaging in a continuous dialog with you and your digital and physical environments.

The personalized lock screen creates a unique interface connecting you and your personal AI running on your most personal device. This opensup completely new opportunities for designing next-generation human-machine communication methods and interfaces that can be applied frommobile devices to AR and VR environments. Simultaneously it is the next step to augment human and machine thinking in an inseparable way.

Read more:

AI on your lock screen | TechCrunch - TechCrunch

Automation is transforming the accounting industry in a major way. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence that include rapidly increasing AIs ability to process data, learn from it and draw increasingly complex conclusions, accountants are seeing a major change in their field. While robots slowly take over more and more of their tasks, accountants see increases in productivity but also a decrease in the total number of accountants needed to get the job done.

Like many industries, AI is not the death of the field but it does significantly impact the future employment opportunities available. Although accountants will still be needed, they will have to refine their skills to the higher-level thinking that AI has not yet reached, while most of their current duties will be taken on by computers.

More advanced processes are being automated

According to data by Accenture Strategy, by 2020 staff productivity in the finance industry will increase two to three times, while costs will decline 40 percent (and yes, some of this will come from staff decreasing). However, the staff theyll need will change significantly, and will include data scientists, economists and anthropologists. Meanwhile, traditional accountants will see their positions automated for faster and more accurate processing.

Forbes says that the accounting industry must adapt to a solutions based method rather than a tools based method - that is, companies are quickly moving towards a cloud-based operation to access tools more universally, so what they need to be offering customers as a selling point are the solutions to financial problems that they can come up with.

Cloud technology and third-party connections have vastly increased the amount of data artificial intelligence can access to learn from, which is what allows them to develop better automated tools.

Employees are being replaced by automation

Traditionally, the jobs under threat from automation have been viewed as primarily simple skill jobs. Things like waiting tables, checking out customers at the cash register and handling customer service have been automated with success in businesses across the country. But increasingly complex skills are getting automated thanks to artificial intelligences advancements. That means more and more of an accountants duties can be taken on by a robot.

Because most of the more tedious tasks of accounting will be performed by robots, employees left behind must focus on providing beneficial insight and guidance to customers. Accountants must adapt to prioritize advice and analysis over basic information and data processing.

Customers now have easy access to those services with literally any accountant, and may even be able to handle it themselves thanks to the widespread availability of cloud-based accounting tools. As a result, simple data processing is no longer a selling point or priority for the accounting industry.

Costs should drop across the board

With AI taking on more and more of the accountants basic duties more effectively and for cheaper and cheaper, the cost of running an accounting firm will go down. This isnt just because firms will need less accountants to handle the same volume, but because they will now have to spend much less time processing data to get to solutions and analysis to present to customers.

Customers will expect to see those savings passed along at one point - accountants will generally see the pricing in their industry fall over the next few years as services and needs change. But it doesnt necessarily mean that accountants will then struggle to make ends meet - with prices dropping, more and more small businesses can seek accounting services for their industries, which means the potential customer base can expand significantly.

Thanks to artificial intelligence, accounting will soon become less expensive, more solutions based and more widely accessible. This will enable the entire economy to get financially smarter and make access to accounting tools a norm rather than a burdensome expense.

Read the original here:

How AI Is Transforming Accounting - Accountingweb.com (blog)

In a very brief interview with Bloomberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook confirmed that the company has been working on an Apple car. This isnt the first time Apple talked about the companys ongoing work in the car industry.

Cook described Apples car project as the combination of three different factors self-driving cars, electric vehicles and ride-sharing. Those three things together make the car industry interesting again.

More interestingly, Cook said that Apple is more focused on self-driving technology and not necessarily the car itself. Were focusing on what we talked about were focusing on publicly is Were focusing on autonomous systems, he said.

So it looks like Project Titan is still very much a work in progress as Apple needs to figure out the technology before thinking about its marketing strategy.

This part of the interview could also confirm an earlier report that the company has been focusing on building the brain of the device instead of manufacturing fully fledged cars.

Clearly, one purpose of autonomous systems is self-driving cars there are others. And we sort of see it as the mother all AI projects, Cook told Bloomberg. Its probably one of the most difficult AI projects to work on. So autonomy is something that is incredibly exciting for us. But well see where it takes us were not really saying from a product point of view what well do. Its a core technology that we view as very important.

More recently, Apple got an autonomous vehicle test permit so that the company can start testing self-driving cars on the roads of California. So far, Apple has been using a Lexus SUV with its own sensors and devices.

Read the rest here:

Tim Cook says Apple's car project is 'the mother of all AI projects' - TechCrunch

WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange predicts an impending dystopic world where human perception is no match for Artificial Intelligence-controlled propaganda and the consequences of AI are lost on its creators, who envision a nirvana-like future.

Assange spoke of the threat of AI-controlled social media via video link at rapper and activist M.I.A.s Meltdown Festivalin the Southbank Centre, London.

READ MORE: Assange wants support for NSA whistleblower as WikiLeaks offers $10k reward to expose reporter

Speaking about the future of AI, Assange told a panel including Slovenian philosopher Slavoj iek that there will be a time when AI will be used to adjust perception.

Imagine a Daily Mail run by essentially Artificial Intelligence, what does that look like when theres only the Daily Mail worldwide? That's what Facebook and Twitter will shift into, he said.

Assange referenced the apparent intense pressure Facebook and Google were under to ensure Emmanuel Macron, and not Marine Le Pen, won last months French presidential election runoff.

When asked by M.I.A. if AI and VR technology will make society more vulnerable to becoming apolitical, Assange replied: Yes, of course we can be influenced, but I dont see that as the main problem.

"Human beings have always been influenced by sophisticated systems of production, information and experience, [such as the] BBC for example.

The technologies just amplify the power of the ability to project into the mind, he added.

The main concern in Assanges eyes centers around how AI can be used to advance propaganda.

The most important development as far as the fate of human beings are concerned is that we are getting close to the threshold where the traditional propaganda function that is employed by BBC, The Daily Mail, and cultures also, can be encapsulated by AI processes, Assange said.

When you have AI programs harvesting all the search queries and YouTube videos someone uploads it starts to lay out perceptual influence campaigns, twenty to thirty moves ahead. This starts to become totally beneath the level of human perception.

Read more

Using Google as an example, and comparing the wit involved to a game of chess, he said at this level human beings become powerless as they cant even see it happening.

Admitting his vision was dystopian, he suggested that he could be wrong.

Maybe there will be a new band of technologically empowered human beings that can see this [rueful] fate coming towards us, [which] will be able to extract value or diminish it by directly engaging with it that's also possible.

Another insight offered by the WikiLeaks founder was his opinion that engineers involved in AI lack perception about what theyre doing.

I know from our sources deep inside the Silicon Valley institution[s] that they genuinely believe that they are going to produce AI that's so powerful, relatively soon, that people will have their brains digitized, uploaded to these AIs and live forever in simulation, therefore have eternal life.

It's like a religion for atheists, he added. And given youre in a simulation, why not program the simulation to have endless drug and sex orgy parties around you.

Assange said this vision makes them work harder and the dystopian consequences of their work is overshadowed by cultural and industrial bias to not perceiving it.

He concluded that the normal perception someone would have regarding their work has been supplanted with this ridiculous quasi-religious model that's it all going to lead to nirvana.

Read the rest here:

Future of humanity under threat from AI-controlled propaganda Assange (VIDEO) - RT