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Category Archives: Ai

Pinterest uses AI and your camera to recommend pins – Engadget

Posted: February 9, 2017 at 6:13 am

But the idea of Lens doesn't stop at shopping. For example, that picture of a table could list to a bunch of room decor ideas. Or you can take a photo of a pomegranate, for example, and it'll spit out recipes that uses pomegranate as a main ingredient. A picture of a sweater could lead to different styles of it and how to wear it. Basically think of Lens as a way to search for something when you just don't have the words to describe what it is you're looking at.

Of course, the technology is imperfect. Not all of us take crystal clear photos on our phones, and blurry and awkward shots will probably churn out the wrong results. That's why Pinterest says Lens is still in beta, and is considered somewhat experimental technology.

Pinterest launched a couple of other visual discovery features today as well. One is called Shop The Look, which uses object recognition to automatically detect and search for items in a photo. So a picture of a living room might prompt Pinterest to bring up a list of Buyable pins for the couch, the lamp, the table and the rug. The pins won't be for that brand of furniture specifically of course, but just items that look very similar.

Pinterest says that Shop The Look will also give you styling and decor ideas too. So far, the company has partnered with folks like Curalate, Olapic, Project September, Refinery 29 and ShopStyle to curate the looks. Brands and retailers that are on board include CB2, Macy's, Target, Neiman Marcus and Wayfair.

Last but not least, Pinterest also rolled out Instant Ideas, which is represented by a tiny circle at the bottom right of a pin. Tap it and you'll see a list of related ideas. The more you tap the pins you're interested in, the more customized your recommendations will be over time.

All of these features is live on Android and iOS starting today. It's available in the US for now, with more countries to be announced at a later date.

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Chinese Firms Racing to the Front of the AI Revolution – TOP500 News

Posted: at 6:13 am

While US-based firms such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft still dominate the artificial intelligence space, Chinese counterparts like Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba are quickly catching up, and in some cases, surpassing their US competition. As a consequence, China appears to be on a path to reproduce its success in supercomputing in AI.

As should be apparent to anyone following this space, the technology duo of supercomputing and AI are not unrelated, the most recent example being the triumph of the Libratus poker-playing application over four of the best players in the game. Libratuss software was developed at Carnegie Mellon University, but schooled at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center using the Bridges supercomputer. In fact, Libratus was tapping into Bridges at night during the poker tournament, refining its poker tactics, while the human players slept. In fact, all the technologies discussed below rely on some sort of HPC platform.

But while its relatively straightforward, although not necessarily easy, to build supercomputing systems, developing AI software requires more cutting-edge talents. And until a few years ago, much of that talent resided inside US-based companies and universities. No more. In fact, a US government report determined that the number of academic papers published in China that mentioned deep learning exceeds the number published by US researchers.

Another visible indication the Chinese are catching up is the number of AI-related patents being submitted there. In an article published last week in Nikkei Asian Review, an analysis showed that Chinese patent applications in this segment rose to 8,410 over the five-year period between 2010 and 2014, represent a 186 percent increase. During that same timeframe, US-sourced AI patent applications reached 15,317, a rate of increase of only 26 percent. The article quotes Shigeoki Hirai, director general at the Japanese government-affiliated New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization, who believes the patent growth in China is not only quantitative, but also qualitative. "China's progress is remarkable in hot areas like deep learning," he said. "It's not like they are only growing in numbers."

Last month CNBC reported that venture capital investment in China is being spurred by AI, robotics and the internet-of-things. According to a study by tech auditing firm KPMG, VC investments there will move increasingly into artificial intelligence in 2017. The study noted that venture capital money in China reached a record high of $31 billion last year, despite a global slowdown in VC investment in 2016.

Some of that money is flowing into Chinese startups like iCarbonX, a company specializing in mining medical data and using machine learning analysis to optimize health outcomes. The company, which was founded in 2015 by Jun Wang, has since received a whopping $600 million in investment capital. Wang, who is an alum of Shenzhen-based genomics giant BGI, says he will be able to collect more data and do it much less expensively than US-based rivals working in this area. According to a write-up in Nature, he expects to get data from more than a million people over the next five years. That, he maintains, will allow the algorithms the company is developing to understand how this data correlates with disease states, and be able to dispense advice on lifestyle choices to improve the health of its users.

Other Chinese up-and-comers like iFLYTEK, a firm that focuses on speech and language recognition, and Uisee Technology, a self-driving car company, have also received some notoriety, most recently in a New York Times article. While that report focused primarily on Chinas rapidly maturing AI-based military defense capabilities, it noted that much of the technology is freely flowing across borders. As a result, AI knowledge is rapidly assimilated in countries like China because much of that expertise originated with US-based multinationals and the academic community, neither of which hold a particular allegiance to US government interests.

More well-known Chinese firms like Tencent, the countrys biggest provider of Internet services, and Alibaba, the countrys largest e-retailer, are quickly ramping up their AI efforts. Last August, Alibaba announced a new AI suite, dubbed ET, which includes everything from audio transcription and video recognition to financial risk analysis and traffic forecasting. Tencent, meanwhile, has established an AI lab, which while still relatively small (about 30 researchers) by Google standards, represents just the start of the companys push into this space. In an article published last December in MIT Technology Review, the labs director, Xing Yao, said he thinks domestic companies have an advantage in acquiring AI talent. Chinese companies have a really good chance, because a lot of researchers in machine learning have a Chinese background, he said. So from a talent acquisition perspective, we do think there is a good opportunity for these companies to attract that talent.

To date though, the biggest Chinese success story in artificial intelligence has to be Baidu, which commands the biggest Internet search platform in its homw country. As one of the first firms to recognize the potential of AI technology, it opened a deep learning institute in Silicon Valley in 2013, a move designed to tap into US-based expertise and computing resources. The next year it expanded its investment, to the tune of $300 million dollars, establishing the Silicon Valley AI Lab (SVAIL), which is now one of the premier AI research centers in the world.

Baidus pioneering work in speech recognition, with its Deep Speech and Deep Speech 2 platforms, is considered the best in the business and is quickly closing the gap between human transcribers and automated speech recognition. At the same time, the company has moved forward on many other fronts, including autonomous driving, image recognition, ad matching, and language translation (especially Mandarin to English) many of which are now in production serving its domestic users.

Baidu also recently recently hired Qi Lu, a former Microsoft executive who was at the center of the software makers move into AI and bots. Lu is now Baidus chief operating officer (COO) tasked with overseeing the companys business and research operations. According to company founder Robin Li. Lus immediate focus will be to work on beefing up Baidus search business with AI technologies,. For his part, Li has said he intends to make Baidu a global leader in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Even given all that, US-based AI is likely to remain dominant for some time. Multinationals like Google, Facebook and Microsoft still have a bigger audience, and thus a bigger data collection pipeline and deployment potential than the largest Chinese web-based companies. But not that much bigger. Chinas internet user base is estimated to be in the neighborhood of 800 million people and if these companies can expand elsewhere in Asia or beyond, those numbers could quickly shift. In which case, that Mandarin-to-English translator is going to be especially useful.

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SumUp co-founders are back with bookkeeping AI startup Zeitgold – TechCrunch

Posted: at 6:13 am

The next time you go to your favorite restaurant or cocktail bar, talk with the manager about bookkeeping. Chances are that theyll tell you that they waste a ton of time collecting and recording various documents. German startup Zeitgold wants to automate this pesky process so that you can spend more time on your actual business.

The startup was founded by two of the co-founders behind SumUp Stefan Jeschonnek and Jan Deepen who left the mobile payment company in 2014. Kobi Eldar is the third co-founder. Zeitgold just raised $4.5 million from Battery Ventures and Holtzbrinck Ventures Invest (4.2 million).

So what is Zeitgold exactly? Its an all-in-one financial solution for small shop owners. The company sends you a physical box. You can put all your receipts, bills and invoices in this box. Somebody will come and pick up the box every week. The startup then scans and archives all these documents to process them Zeitgold also accepts digital documents.

This way, Zeitgold can build a structured database of all this paperwork and provide you actionable information. For instance, you can then open the Zeitgold app and accept all payment requests from your suppliers. The startup can also help you when it comes to invoice collection, payroll and everything your tax advisor will need.

You can also use the app as your one-stop shop to search for that one document youre looking for. Thanks to OCR, you can just type keywords. Zeitgold also tells you if there are missing documents.

Eventually, Zeitgold wants to automate most of it with optical character recognition, text analytics and a bunch of algorithms. Its not there yet, and a lot of work is still done by humans. But the startups team of accounting experts will train Zeitgolds algorithms over time so that it relies less on humans.

We spent the last 18 months on R&D. Now, our AI is able to create clean data sets out of unsorted physical documents, Jeschonnek told me.

The company also didnt just want to tackle one aspect of the financial paperwork. This is an interesting approach and Im curious to see if it can scale indeed.

The startup is launching in Germany first, but Zeitgold is already thinking about expanding to other countries around Germany as all shop owners face the same issues.

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Five Trends Business-Oriented AI Will Inspire – Forbes

Posted: at 6:13 am


Forbes
Five Trends Business-Oriented AI Will Inspire
Forbes
Until recently, artificial intelligence has looked like a new and exciting fad. Technology innovators showcased flashy ways to harness intelligence and apply it in the real world (e.g. self-driving cars, the marketing stunts of Watson, Google's AI ...

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Five Trends Business-Oriented AI Will Inspire - Forbes

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Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk endorse new AI code – Irish Times

Posted: at 6:13 am

These 23 principles were agreed upon at the recent Beneficial AI 2017 conference at the Future of Life Institute in Boston

A list of 23 principles related to the ethics, research strategies and long-term issues arising from developing artificial intelligence technologies has been endorsed by high-profile scientists and technologists including Stephen Hawking; Elon Musk; Ray the Singularity Kurzweil; Demis Hassabis, founder and CEO of DeepMind; and Prof Yann LeCun, director of AI research at Facebook.

Curiously, actor and film-maker Joseph Gordon-Levit has also signed this list and actor-turned-science communicator Alan Alda is on the scientific advisory board.

These 23 principles were agreed upon at the recent Beneficial AI 2017 conference at the Future of Life Institute in Boston and state that the goal of AI research should be to create beneficial intelligence rather than undirected intelligence, adding that plans should be put in place in case AI systems pose catastrophic or existential risks to human life.

There was also a stipulation that strict safety and control measures are in place for self-improving and self-replicating AI systems; nobody wants swarms of determined, superintelligent nanobots deciding that planet Earths greatest threat (humans) should be eradicated.

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Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk endorse new AI code - Irish Times

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3 common jobs AI will augment or displace – VentureBeat

Posted: February 7, 2017 at 10:23 pm

Its clear artificial intelligence (AI) and automation will dramatically affect the job market, but theres conflicting ideas on just how soon this will happen. Some believe its imminent possibly fueled by developmentslike the Japanese insurance company replacing over 30 employees with robots but its not that cut and dried. Many of the jobs that will be automated are the same jobs companies have been outsourcing for years: customer support, data entry, accounting, etc. Others are jobs they simply cannot fill due to decreases in headcount.

Either way, as transactions and expectations for real-time output increase, businesses are struggling to meet this demand and must digitize their operations to remain competitive. Its the future of human labor. Its not black and white, or good and evil, its simply the natural cycle of automation, just like we saw in the industrial revolution and will see again after AI becomes commonplace.

Adoption of AI and automation will be highest in regulated industries and those that must process thousands of transactions and customer requests daily. They are industries like banking, financial services, insurance, and health care those with repetitiveprocesses like copying and pasting that do not really require human intelligence. Its the types of jobs/task within an organization that are repeatable and admin-heavy that will be automated first. In fact, in three examples in particular, were already seeing automation play a big role.

The cost of fraudulent claims across all lines of insurance amounts to $80 billion a year, and well over half of insurers predict an increase in such fraud. Yet, despite the well-known pressures insurers face to correctly verify claims, they also get a bad rap for not doing so fast enough. Thats why the insurance industry is looking to advances in AI to both reduce fraudulent claims and improve customer service by speeding up the process.

Using machine learning, a subfield of AI, insurers can auto-validate policies, matching key facts from the claim to the policy and using cognitive analysis to determine whether the claim should be paid. These technologies can even transmit data into the system for downstream payment automatically and in a fraction of the time it would take a human to complete the same task. Humans are then elevated to tasks that really require their human intelligence and their customer service expertise.

Consumers have become accustomed to talking to bots, whether its asking Siri to find the closest dry cleaner or asking Amazons Alexa to add bananas to the grocery list. And the financial services and banking industries are no exception. More banks are reducing manual service efforts by offloading repetitive inquiries to AI-powered chatbots.

Theyre training these bots on historical conversations so they can perform the same tasks as a human agent, conversing with customers to determine their needs and then, in the best scenarios, actually executing a business process to deliver against their intent. More complex conversations are escalated to a human agent, where they now have the time to handle with care; meanwhile,the chatbots are working in the background to learn from the outcome. Customers are happy because their needs are taken care of seamlessly and quickly, and banks are able to reduce the backlog of customer service requests.

The ultimate goal of every health care plan administrator is to ensure claims are received and processed accurately and on time. The sheer volume of claims makes this a difficult task. Making it harder, claims are submitted in various formats fax, email, handwritten, etc. and must be put in a standardized format before theyre processed. In fact, billing and insurance-related paperwork costs an estimated $375 billion annually.

Using advanced AI/machine learning technologies, health care providers can reduce the amount of time it takes to process a claim and respond to patients and providers. Not only does this improve patient satisfaction, it also lessens errors that can result in hefty financial losses and regulatory fines. While it wont replace all health care administrators, it will help them redirect their resources toward critical, customer-facing activities.

According to a recent report by McKinsey Global Institute, almost every job has the potential to be automated, but more often than not, these jobs will require a combination of automation and human intelligence. There will be a tsunami of job loss relating tocertain tasks but this will push people into higher value work. Data entry may be automated, but creative thinking wont be replaced by bots. AI is creating new efficiencies that will ultimately change the types of jobs that are in demand. This reality is happening more quicklyin some industries than others, but it is unequivocally transforming the way work gets done.

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3 common jobs AI will augment or displace - VentureBeat

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Samsung Galaxy S8’s Bixby AI could beat Google Assistant on this front – CNET

Posted: at 10:22 pm

My AI is smarter than your AI.

That's the taunt that Samsung Galaxy S8 owners may be able to lob at Google Pixel users if the S8's rumored Bixby Assistant launches with seven or eight languages, as reported by SamMobile.

Samsung's Bixby AI will go after Google Assistant, Apple's Siri and Amazon Alexa for phones

In the Google Pixel, Assistant currently supports two languages, according to Google's website: English and German. The Google Allo app, which also uses Google Assistant and works on more phones, supports five languages: English, German, Hindi, Japanese and Portuguese. (You can still use Google's voice search/Google Now with many more languages on the Pixel phones, but the Google Assistant launch gesture turns off when you switch your primary language to, say, Spanish.)

Launching its own smart AI assistant is an important move for Samsung and its future Galaxy and Note phones. The company, which strives to dominate the smartphone world against Apple's iPhone, stands to win fans if its Bixby assistant can outperform Google's Assistant, Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa, which will land on its first phone later this month.

This isn't the first time that Samsung has tried to out-Google Google either. The company hoped to supplant Google's voice search tool with Samsung's branded S Voice app, and introduced other software services of its own. The company has largely pulled back on preloaded apps and shuttered some of the services, so it'll be interesting to see how well Bixby AI will be able to compete with more established assistants, especially in these early days of AI on phones.

Bixby is rumored to:

The Samsung Galaxy S8 is expected to launch March 29 and sell in mid-April.

Samsung did not immediately respond to CNET's request for comment.

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With a $16M Series A, Chorus.ai listens to your sales calls to help your team close deals – TechCrunch

Posted: at 10:22 pm

Just about everyone can benefit from an extra ear listening in at the right time. And while an ear dedicated to helping me remembertheitems my housemate asked me topickup at the store last week has yet to be commercialized into a startup,Chorus.ai is riffing off the concept to deliver a solution to help sales teams close more deals. The Chorus team is announcing a $16 million Series A today led by Redpoint.

Taking a page from companies like Cogito and Deepgram,Chorus.ai is first and foremost a system for extracting insights from audio. But unlike Cogito that got its start servicing call centers,Chorus.ai is setting its sights on sales.

In the style of X.ai, Chorus simply joins conference calls, in the same way a human would, to record and transcribe content in real-time. The platform flags important action items and topics that came up over the duration of calls.

We have invested in algorithms that are tuned to sales, but evensome simple keyword matching adds a lot of value, explainsRoy Raanani, co-founder and CEO ofChorus.ai.

The platform that the Chorus team built broadly serves two functions. Because it transcribes calls, it serves as a valuable reference for sales reps when completing follow-ups on action items. But Chorus can also add enterprise value by acting as a training ground for reps to share best practices and closing strategies.

Chorus.ai is the latest example of an AI startup finding vitality through verticalization. ThoughRaanani was careful not tocommit to any numbers, he explained that Chorus is likely better than products like IBMs Watson at thespecialized task of sales support.

Intuitively, mastery of general speech recognition is a harder task than mastery of language commonly used in the domain of sales.Even today, with speech recognition mostly a solved problem, many systems still struggle to parse the complexities (or lack there of) in the speech of young children for example.

In just four months, the company transitioned through the gears of a seed stage startup. Its first institutional round, led by Emergence Capital, who also participated in todays round, closed in October of last year for $6.3 million. All the whileRaanani, and his co-founderMicha Breakstone, continuedpolishing off the Chorus platform. The team built out key integrations with a number of meeting and support platforms like Zoom, BlueJeans, WebEX and Salesforce. And they closed customers likeQualtrics andMarketo.

In the future,Raanani and his team want to double down on the real-time advantage of the Chorus platform. The idea being that sales reps pitching to potential clients could leverage the speed of machines to pull up content in real-time to help close deals. If a customer on the phone references a competitor, Chorus could flash an informational aid on screen with known differentiators andpast successful pitches to give the sales rep a smarterace card.

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Microsoft AI’s next leap forward: Helping you play video games – CNET

Posted: at 10:22 pm

Could you be playing the next big video game with your voice?

Voice assistants can seem supersmart. Ask my Amazon Alexa why the sky is blue, and you'll get a lesson in light refraction through the atmosphere.

Ask it what CNET is and things start to break down.

"In addition CNET currently has region-specific and language-specific editions."

Well, sure. Then I asked Alexa when the Super Bowl was, right before Sunday night's game. It responded:

"Super Bowl 50's winner is Denver Broncos."

That's one of the biggest contradictions with voice assistants. They can control your lights, play music and even tell you silly jokes. But despite their growing presence in our lives, their capabilities are still very limited.

So far, the way many companies have made them better is to hand-code each response. For example, someone at Amazon could go into Alexa's code and teach it what CNET is and when the next Super Bowl will take place.

Microsoft thinks it's found a different way. It's inviting app developers and companies to use its technology, feeding questions, giving responses and learning what needs to be fixed along the way.

The software giant isn't the only one looking for new uses for artificial intelligence, which, in shorthand, is essentially software that can learn, adapt and act in more subtle, sophisticated ways. Facebook is training its AI with all sorts of software tools, including one in its Oregon data center that's trying to teach a computer to create an original piece of art after looking at a series of pictures. Google, meanwhile, is teaching its AI to play board games. And IBM is refining its AI, called Watson, by feeding it data from all manner of businesses.

Microsoft has had its share of public AI efforts too. It offers a voice assistant in its Windows PC and phone software called Cortana, which will happily jot down reminders and answer trivia questions.

It has also released experiments like Tay, a Twitter chatbot that learned from conversations with people. The experiment, however, was quickly taken offline after people taught it to hate feminists, praise Adolf Hitler and solicit sex.

This time around, Microsoft is taking a more measured approach by offering its AI tools to developers. So far, the results have been encouraging.

A security footage startup called Prism has started using Microsoft's tools to help organize playback video. Prism identifies when there's an object in the video that wasn't there before. Then it sends an image from that clip to Microsoft to identify what's in the picture and gets responses back like "dog" or "package."

This could take hours for a person to do, but combining Prism's technology with Microsoft's AI means a search to see how many packages came to the front desk that day takes mere moments. "It's unfathomable to think about how much data there is," said Adam Planas, a creative director at Prism.

Microsoft's doing the same with voice commands, offering apps not just transcriptions of what I say, but an estimation of what it means, too. That is, if a video game is expecting to hear me say "how old are you" and I say "you look really young," it'll know I basically mean the same thing.

That's a big improvement over the voice command software Alexander Mejia and his team at Human Interact were using before they turned to Microsoft. Their project, Starship Commander, is a new virtual reality game entirely controlled by the player's voice.

"When people put on the headset, they start role-playing, they get into character," he said. "They want to be the starship commander and go forth and have an adventure."

The goal, he said, is to make players feel completely natural talking to the game. Part of that is by creating a slick-looking game that immerses the player to the point that they feel as though they are on a starship. Then, the game has to coax the player into talking enough that after a while, it's just natural. The only downside is that the game will require an internet connection to send your voice commands to Microsoft for processing.

But the upside is that process is "crazy fast," said Sophie Wright, vice president of business development at Human Interact (who also doubles as a character in the game).

Microsoft believes that by inviting developers to use its technology, they can help train its AI. Aside from the 5,000 engineers Microsoft has working on artificial intelligence, more than 424,000 outside developers have signed up to try it out too.

"I think we're on the cusp of a breakthrough," said Andrew Shuman, a corporate vice president at Microsoft who leads the company's AI research group. Once AI is able to understand us better, they can start truly helping in our daily lives. Imagine being able to ask a security camera where you left your car keys.

"You can set up for real user delight," Shuman said.

Does the Mac still matter? Apple execs tell why the MacBook Pro was over four years in the making, and why we should care.

Tech Enabled: CNET chronicles tech's role in providing new kinds of accessibility.

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A Heroic AI Will Let You Spy on Your Lawmakers’ Every Word – WIRED

Posted: at 8:16 am

Slide: 1 / of 1. Caption: Getty Images

No one knows better than Sam Blakeslee that your elected officials operate in the shadows. No one is sure what they do or what they say.

He knows because he used to be one of them. As a Republican state senator and assemblyman in California, Blakeslee worked on negotiating the state budget and drafting bills around the energy sector and lobbying reform. And he did itas did his fellow legislatorsfar from the prying eyes of the very people he was representing.

Thats one reason why, when Blakeslee left government, he began working with students on a way to automate government accountability. Digital Democracy is like YouTube for local government hearings, bolstered with a splash of artificial intelligence. Bots create transcripts of lawmakers every official utterance at the state house and use face recognition software to keep track of whos speaking. Voters can search the transcripts by speaker and subject while at the same time getting a glimpse of legislators financial ties. The non-profit effort launched in California back in 2015, and today, its expanding to New York.

Were keenly aware that most legislators operate in the dark and with impunity, says Blakeslee, now founding director of the Institute for Advanced Technology & Public Policy at Cal Poly. Their constituencies dont know what they say or what they do behind closed doors.

Most legislators operate in the dark and with impunity.

The Digital Democracy platform, funded by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation and the Rita Allen Foundation, is a collaboration between man and machine. Students at Cal Poly review each transcript for accuracy before it goes live. They also compile a profile page for each legislator, complete with an itemized list of gifts that person has received.

Government in the past has been, you vote, I decide,' says Gavin Newsom, the lieutenant governor of California, former mayor of San Francisco, and co-founder of Digital Democracy. That model is in peril, and Donald Trump exploited it brilliantly.

Not surprisingly, Newsom says California lawmakers were none too thrilled when the platform launched. We wax on about the importance of transparency in public forums but we dont always practice what we preach, he says.

The expansion of Digital Democracy comes at an opportune time. Not only is the public hungry for accountability both inside and outside of Washington, DC, but as Trump works to roll back federal legislation on everything from healthcare to environmental protections, the future of those policies will be in states hands.

The Trump administration is making a number of decisions that would push issues back to state houses across the country, says Blakeslee. This is a perfect moment if you want to make a difference to engage in the politics in your state.

That may be true, but in other crucial ways, the Digital Democracy platform couldnt be more of a mismatch for this particular time. Most people today will share a link without ever reading the story it references. Americans consume their news in bite-sized tweets and push alerts. In California, journalists with the patience and time to sift through transcripts have been Digital Democracys most frequent users. Even Newsom acknowledges its not exactly user-friendly.

Its a data dump, he says. But both Newsom, a Democrat, and Blakeslee, a Republican, worry that curation could threaten the platforms objectivity. Its harder to cry fake news about a video thats presented in full without commentary.

The founders are also joining up with other organizations that have become instrumental to holding politicians accountable. Cal Poly students will soon run their hearing transcripts through an AI tool called ClaimBuster, which automatically detects assertions of fact, and then feed those statements to PolitiFact for fact-checking.

The non-profit is also rolling out an enhanced version that will enable other organizations to embed the videos directly on their websites. Meanwhile, Digital Democracy has plans to expand to Florida and Texas, at which point the platform will reach one-third of the countrys citizens. In time, Newsom hopes that Digital Democracy will be a platform on which developers of politically minded tech build other apps.

That will take time. For now, putting these videos in citizens hands is simply a much needed step toward transparency at a time when so much policy-making is anything but. Its not a perfect system. Then again, neither is democracy.

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