Monthly Archives: July 2017

Emerging Tech

Artificial intelligence is helping the Army keep its Stryker armored vehicles in fighting shape.

Army officials are using IBMs Watson AI system in combination with onboard sensor data, repair manuals and 15 years of maintenance data to predict mechanical problems before they happen. IBM and the Armys Redstone Arsenal post in Alabama demonstrated Watsons abilities on 350 Stryker vehicles during a field test that began in mid-2016.

The Army is now reviewing the results of that test to evaluate Watsons ability to assist human mechanics, and the early insights are encouraging.

The Watson AI enabled the pilot programs leaders to create the equivalent of a personalized medicine plan for each of the vehicles tested, said Sam Gordy, general manager of IBM U.S. Federal. Watson was able to tell mechanics that you need to go replace this [part] now because if you dont, its going to break when this vehicle is out on patrol, he added.

The Army is one of a handful of early adopters in the federal government, and several other agencies are looking into using AI, machine learning and related technologies. AI experts cite dozens of potential government uses, including cognitive chatbots that answer common questions from the public and complex AIs that search for patterns that could signal Medicaid fraud, tax cheating or criminal activity.

There are, for a lack of a better number, a gazillion sweet spots for AI in government, said Daniel Enthoven, business development manager at Domino Data Lab, a vendor of AI and data science collaboration tools.

Still, many agencies will need to answer some difficult questions before they embrace AI, machine learning and autonomous systems. For instance, how will the agencies audit decisions made by intelligent systems? How will they gather data from often disparate sources to fuel intelligent decisions? And how will agencies manage their employees when AI systems take over tasks previously performed by humans?

Intelligence agencies are using Watson to comb through piles of data and provide predictive analysis, and the Census Bureau is considering using the supercomputer-powered AI as a first-line call center that would answer peoples questions about the 2020 census, Gordy said.

A Census Bureau spokesperson added that the AI virtual assistant could improve response times and enhance caller interactions.

Using AI should save the bureau money because you have a computer doing this instead of people, Gordy said. And if trained correctly, the system will provide more accurate answers than a group of call-center workers could.

You train Watson once, and it understands everything, he said. Youre getting a very consistent answer, time after time after time.

For many agencies, however, its still early in the AI adoption cycle. Use of the technology is very, very nascent in government, said William Eggers, executive director of Deloittes Center for Government Insights and co-author of a recent study on AI in government. If it was a nine-inning [baseball] game, were probably in the first inning right now.

He added that over the next couple of years, agencies can expect to see AI-like functionality being incorporated into the software products marketed to them.

The first step for many civilian agencies appears to be using AI as a chatbot or telephone agent. Daniel Castro, vice president of theInformation Technology and Innovation Foundation, said intelligent agents should be able to answer about 90 percent of the questions agencies receive, and the people asking those questions arent likely to miss having a human response.

Its not like people are expecting to know their IRS agents when they call them up with a question, he said.

The General Services Administrations Emerging Citizen Technology program launched an open-source pilot project in April to help federal agencies make their information available to intelligent personal assistants such as Amazons Alexa, Googles Assistant and Microsofts Cortana. More than two dozen agencies including the departments of Energy, Homeland Security and Transportation are participating.

Many vendors and other technology experts see huge opportunities for AI inside and outside government. In June, an IDC study sponsored by Salesforce predicted that AI adoption will ramp up quickly in the next four years. AI-powered customer relationship management activities will add $1.1 trillion to business revenue and create more than 800,000 jobs from 2017 to 2021, the study states.

In the federal government, using AI to automate tasks now performed by employees would save at least 96.7 million working hours a year, a cost savings of $3.3 billion, according to the Deloitte study. Based on the high end of Deloittes estimates, AI adoption could save as many as 1.2 billion working hours and $41.1 billion every year.

AI-based applications can reduce backlogs, cut costs, overcome resource constraints, free workers from mundane tasks, improve the accuracy of projections, inject intelligence into scores of processes and systems, and handle many other tasks humans cant easily do on our own, such as sifting through millions of documents in real time for the most relevant content, the report states.

Although some might fear a robot takeover, Eggers said federal workers should not worry about their jobs in the near term. Although theres likely to be pressure from lawmakers to use AI to reduce the governments headcount, agencies should look at AI as a way to supplement employees work and allow them to focus on more creative and difficult tasks, he added.

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Is government ready for AI? - FCW.com

One of the promises of voice-based computing is the ability to make home automation simpler something that major tech companies, including Amazon, Apple and Google, are now tackling with their own voice assistants and smart speakers. But their solutions are still somewhat clunky, both in terms of the software interface for configuring your smart home and the voice commands you use to take actions. Thats where the startup Josh.ai comes in.

The company has now raised $11 million to design a better voice-controlled system for smart homes, and will later this year release its own hardware dedicated to this purpose.

Headquartered in Denver with offices in L.A., Josh.ai is the product of serial entrepreneursAlex Capecelatro, CEO, and Tim Gill, CTO. The two previously worked together on a social recommendations app Yeti, which had begun its life as At The Pool, andwas sold back in 2015. Gill, who had previously founded and sold Quark (Quark XPress), had joined Yeti as a technical advisor, and wrote a number of the algorithms used in the app.

Following the sale of Yeti, the two teamed up again to work on a project in the smart home space something they were both interested in for personal reasons.

Gill, for example, had spent years developing his own home automation system his version of Mark Zuckerbergs Jarvis to run inside the large residential property he was building in Denver.

He was well underway in building the house and understanding what the competition looked likewhat the product offerings looked like, explainsCapecelatro. And he was pretty dissatisfied with what was out there.

Meanwhile,Capecelatro was also building a home for himself in L.A., and running into the same problems.

I was just amazed that all of the big automation systems Crestron, Control4, and Savant they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the [user interface] looks like its from the 90s, he says. It was weird that for a ton of money in my home where you want to have a delightful experience, the best offerings on the table just werent that good.

The founders saw a need in the market for something that sits above mass market solutions, like Apples Home app, or Alexas smart home control, which focus more on tying together after-market devices, like security cameras, smart doorbells, or smart lights like Philips Hue.

They founded the startup Josh.ai in March 2015, and shipped the first product the following year.

The solution, as it exists today, includes a kit with a Mac mini and iPad, and software that runs the home. After plugging in the Mac, Josh.ai auto-discovers devices on the network. It can identify those from over 50 manufacturers. For example, it can control lighting and shades like those from Lutron, music systems like Sonos, dozens of brands of security cameras, Nest thermostats, Samsung smart TVs, and even more niche products like Global Cachs box for controlling IR devices (such as your not-so-smart TVs).

The automatic speech recognition (AKA speech-to-text) portion of Josh.ais system is handled in the cloud, while Mac mini handles the natural language processing to know what your commands mean.

What makes Josh.ai unique is not just its software interface, but how users interact with the system. You speak to the voice assistant Josh to tell the home what to do. (You can also change its name if thats an issue, or even pick from a variety of male and female voices and accents.)

Josh, or the wake word youve chosen, precedes your command, which can be spoken using more natural language. The system is better than many when it comes to interpreting what you mean, by nature of its single-purpose focus on home automation.

For instance, you can tell Josh to turn it off, and it will know what it means because it remembers what it had turned on before. Or you can say, its hot in here, and Josh will know how to adjust your thermostat.

It can also deep-link to streaming video content, so you can ask to watch Planet Earth, and Josh will turn on the TV, switch to the right input, launch Netflix, then start playing the show.

Josh.ai supports scenes, as well, allowing you to configure a number of devices to work together like lights, shades, music, fans, thermostats, and other switches. That way, you can say things like turn everything off, and Josh knows to shut down all the connected devices in the home.

Where the system gets really smart is in its ability to handle complex, compound commands meaning controlling multiple devices in one sentence.

You can say to Josh, play Simon and Garfunkel and turn on the lights, for example. Or, play Explosions in the sky in the kitchen, and play Simon and Garfunkel in the living room. Other systems could get tripped up by the and and the in the in the artists names, but Josh.ai understands when those words are a break between two commands, and when theyre part of something else.

The current system which was largely designed for high-end homes is sold by professional integrators at around $10,000 and up, depending on the components involved. To date, the team has sold more than 50 and fewer than 100 installations.

Josh.ai can work over your Echo or Google Home, if you prefer, and includes interfaces for iOS, Android and the web. But the company is now preparing to launch its own, farfield mic solution in a new hardware device thats built specifically for use in the home.

While the new hardware will perform some basic virtual assistant type tasks telling you the weather, perhaps (the company isnt confirming specific features at this time) the main focus will be on home automation.

Above: a tease of the new device

The hardware wont be a cylindrical shape like Echo or Google Home, but will be designed with an aesthetic appeal in mind.

It also wont be super cheap.

It will still be a premium product, but it will be a lot less than where the current product is. And the idea is this will enable our mass market rollout in probably a year to eighteen months, notesCapecelatro, speaking of his plan to keep bringing Josh.ais technology to ever larger audiences.

Josh.ai, a team of 15 soon to be 25, recently closed on $8 million in new funding, largely from the founders personal networks. The investors names arent being disclosed because theyre not institutional firms. To date, Josh.ai has raised $11 million, but has not yet added anyone to its board.

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Josh.ai raises $11 million for a premium home automation system ... - TechCrunch

Google is giving the Press Association news agency a grant of 706,000 ($806,000) to start writing stories with the help of artificial intelligence. The money is coming out of the tech giants Digital News Initiative fund, which supports digital journalism in Europe. The PA supplies news stories to media outlets all over the UK and Ireland, and will be working with a startup named Urbs Media to produce 30,000 local stories a month with the help of AI.

The editor-in-chief of the Press Association, Peter Clifton, explained to The Guardian that the AI articles will be the product of collaboration with human journalists. Writers will create detailed story templates for topics like crime, health, and unemployment, and Urbs Medias Radar tool (it stands for Reporters And Data And Robots) will fill in the blanks and helping localize each article. This sort of workflow has been used by media outlets for years, with the Los Angeles Times using AI to write news stories about earthquakes since 2014.

Skilled human journalists will still be vital in the process, said Clifton, but Radar allows us to harness artificial intelligence to scale up to a volume of local stories that would be impossible to provide manually.

The money from Google will also be used to make tools for scraping information from public databases in the UK, like those generated by local councils and the National Health Service. The Radar software will also auto-generate graphics for stories, as well as add relevant videos and pictures. The software will start being used from the beginning of next year.

Some reporters in the UK, though, are skeptical about the new scheme. Tim Dawson, president of the National Union of Journalists, told The Guardian: The real problem in the media is too little bona fide reporting. I dont believe that computer whizzbangery is going to replace that. What Im worried about in my capacity as president of the NUJ is something that ends up with third-rate stories which look as if they are something exciting, but are computer-generated so [news organizations] can get rid of even more reporters.

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Google is helping fund AI news writers in the UK and Ireland - The Verge

Mashable

TrueFace.AI busts facial recognition imposters Mashable The company originally created Chui in 2014 to work with customized smart homes. Then they realized clients were using it more for security purposes, and TrueFace.AI was born. Shaun Moore, one of the creators of TrueFace.AI, gave us some more insight ... and more »

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TrueFace.AI busts facial recognition imposters - Mashable

Google DeepMind and Open AI, a lab partially funded by Elon Musk, released a research article outlining a new method of machine learning. It actually takes its cues from humans when it comes to learning new tasks. This could be safer than allowing an AI to figure out how to solve a problem on its own, which has the potential to introduce unwelcome surprises.

The main problem that the research tackled was when an AI discovers the most efficient way to achieve maximum rewards is to cheat -- the equivalent of shoving everything on the floor of your room into a closet and declaring it "clean." Technically, the room itself is clean, but that's not what's supposed to happen. Machines are able to find these workarounds and exploit them in any given problem.

The issue is with the reward system, and that's where the two groups focused their efforts. Rather than crafting an overly complex reward system that machines can cut through, the teams used human input to reward the AI. When the AI solved a problem the way trainers wanted to, it got positive feedback. Using this method, the AI was able to learn play simple video games.

While this is an encouraging breakthrough, it's not widely applicable: This type of human feedback is much too time consuming. But through collaborations like this, it's possible that we can control and direct the development of AI and prevent machines from eventually becoming smart enough to destroy us all.

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Google DeepMind teams with Open AI to prevent a robot uprising - Engadget