Shamayita Acharya

Companies With Large AI Projects are Calling Alegion to Help Prepare Needed Data via Crowdsourcing Nathaniel Gates (see photo) is CEO of Alegion, which he co-founded in 2012. Prior  to Alegion, he founded Cloud49, a cloud computing solutions provider focused on the public sector. He lived and worked in Alaska for 36 years before moving to Austin, Texas in 2012. He recently spoke with AI Trends Editor John P. Desmond. Q. What is the mission of Alegion? A. The mission of Alegion is to get work done and get work distributed out to a workforce across the world and across this country. And when we do that by providing a service, and that service is to bring exceptional human and machine intelligence to bear against very large business challenges, largely around transitioning to an AI data-driven environment. Our goal is that we can hold the hand of customers and take them over the bridge to AI. We meet them on the near side of it, which is human judgment and human intelligence, an...

Alexa, do you swear to give the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Data from smart devices is increasingly helping law enforcement build criminal cases. With the growth of the internet of things market, smart connected devices play a vital role in our day to day lives now. From fitness trackers, voice assistants and smartwatches to cameras in our fridges, doorbells, and not excluding wearable medical devices - there is a lot of data out there being gathered about our lives. More so than we probably realise. These ‘things’ could play a vital role in criminal prosecution by tracking either victim’s or perpetrator’s movements and collecting incriminating data points. Ross Compton was recently found guilty of arson and insurance fraud after the data from his pacemaker was investigated and used against him in court. The evidence was stacked against him regardless; his house smelt like gasoline, fires began in multiple areas around the home, and his medical condition rende...

Across many different industries, drones represent a whole host of opportunities. Such is the potential of this tech that the market for drones is expected to reach $100 billion in the next five years, with a billion drones predicted to be inhabiting our skies by 2030. There are a huge array of companies investigating the possible impact of drones upon their industries, including retail giants like Walmart and Amazon, as well as tech companies like Google. Here are seven different uses for drones that are just around the corner. 1. Retail Delivery by drone is one of the most common perceived uses for drones in the future, although some companies are looking to take this concept even further, with Walmart and Amazon waging war over an airborne warehouse. The large blimp-like UAV proposed by both companies would travel at around 500-1000 feet above ground, launching smaller drones to deliver goods straight to your doorstep. 2. Transportation Drones also represent immense pr...

The European General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) will come into force on May 25, 2018. These regulations will have a significant impact on existing data collection and analysis methods.  Many businesses have become reliant on customer data collection for marketing and product designing. These businesses would need to formulate a new strategy on how to keep their business operations going while dealing with the EU regulations. The GDPR Regulations The main objective of GDPR is to ensure that organizations implement strict privacy rules and stronger data security when it comes to protecting personal data. The regulations will make it mandatory to obtain consent from users before acquiring or using their personal data.  Organizations will also be required to inform their customers and users about the personal data that they are collecting and using. Data subjects will have the complete right to withdraw their consent at any time, and organizations will be required ...

A 2017 LinkedIn report lists statistical analysis, data mining and data presentation among the top ten in-demand skills in the United States. The skills, which are a part of the data science field, emerged from an amalgamation of the computer science and statistics disciplines. Data scientists combine computer modelling and statistics to transform information into actionable reports that aid organisations in achieving objectives. The field is considered one of the most attractive career tracks in the modern marketplace. Through 2018, experts forecast the start of a shortage in the deep analytical data science field where demand outpaces talent by 50- to 60-percent and leads to 140,000 to 190,000 vacant post openings in addition to a deficiency of 1.5 million analysts and information managers. The field has gained status due to its high salary as well as ample marketplace opportunities and post openings. Resultingly, the data science career marketplace is fertile ground for freshl...

Steve Ardire presents at #Think 2018 on the topic of Augmented Intelligence. from AI Trends https://ift.tt/2jfhzfJ via IFTTT

By Lance Eliot, the AI Trends Insider How fast can you think? If I give you a jigsaw puzzle and ask you to assemble it, you would likely take some amount of time to look at the puzzle pieces and mull over in your mind which piece might go where. You might create a kind of mental picture of how the pieces could potentially fit together. Even before you pick-up a single piece, you might have done a lot of mental calculations and cranial contortions about the pieces and the overall jigsaw puzzle. Suppose there are just ten pieces to the jigsaw puzzle. Imagine how long it would take for you to mentally envision how those ten pieces will fit together. In contrast, suppose I give you a jigsaw puzzle of 100 pieces, or 1,000 pieces? I’m betting that the amount of mental calculus would go up for those larger-sized jigsaw puzzles. Suppose further that I give you a jigsaw puzzle that is a picture of farm and has distinctive features such as the farmhouse, cows, horses, and the like. This wou...

Google’s heavy investment in a rtificial intelligence has helped the company’s software write music and beat humans at complex board games. What unlikely feats could be next? The company’s new head of AI says he’d like to see Google move deeper into areas such as healthcare. He also warns that the company will face some tricky ethical questions over appropriate uses for AI as it expands its use of the technology. The new AI boss at Google is Jeff Dean (shown above). The lean 50-year-old computer scientist joined the company in 1999, when it was a startup less than one year old. He earned a reputation as one of the industry’s most talented coders by helping Google become a computational powerhouse with new approaches to databases and large-scale data analysis. Google colleagues once created a joke website of “Jeff Dean facts,” including his purported role in accelerating the speed of light. Another had it that Dean doesn’t really exist—he’s an advanced AI creat...

Google rolled out of a new version of Gmail this week, including better security and artificial intelligence, which was developed in the internet giant’s office in Kitchener, Ontario. (shown above) The 1.4 billion active monthly users of the email service will notice a new look, better security, artificial intelligence and easy-to-use features that boost productivity, said Matthew Izatt, a product manager with Gmail, who is based in Kitchener. Users can select “confidential mode” in the new version of Gmail. They can also decide whether their message can be forwarded or downloaded by the recipient. And the sender can select a date when the email will automatically be deleted. “We allow users to set an expire date for their content,” said Izatt. High-risk messages that could be phishing emails will now come with an “in your face warning.” Artificial intelligence was used in three new features. “We have been working very heavily on trying to figure out how to apply machine intelli...

The need for competitive advantage sees companies increasingly turning to analytics to operationalize their data. Leveraging analytics from insight to artificial intelligence (AI), business leaders can make sense of their rapidly-growing piles of data to improve their operations. Here are my tips for using analytics to create a measurable business impact. #1: Put the decision before the data With a decision-first strategy you define the business objective first, then determine what data and analytics you need to achieve the goal. Extrapolating insights from huge amounts of data can be interesting, but it can also be a tremendous waste of time and resources if it doesn’t solve a specific business challenge. If the modeling and data analytics requirements are defined by the business outcome first, data exploration and analytic development is faster and more productive. This helps enterprises narrow in on meaningful outcomes, shutting out extraneous noise and focus on the insights that...

The competition between the US and China around AI is playing out on multiple fronts that include the cloud. Leading cloud providers in China – Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu – are ready to compete with US giants Amazon, Google and Microsoft to deliver AI services online. Amazon and Alibaba representatives recently faced off directly at EmTech China, an event held by MIT Technology Review in Beijing recently. Jian Wang, president of Alibaba’s technology committee and a senior figure at the company, spoke of the business potential cloud AI. “I’m convinced that AI or machine learning will be the major consumer of applications [in the cloud]” Wang said through a translator, quoted in MIT Technology Review. “It will offer many scenarios.” The largest cloud provider in the US, Amazon Web Services, today offers a number of AI services via the cloud. Animashree Anandkumar, principal scientist at AWS, said at the event, “Currently, running experiments on AI requires huge computer resources. T...

Python is touted as one of the fastest-growing major programming languages in the world at the moment. It is quickly becoming the most visited tag on Stack Overflow as well. One of the major reasons of its exponential growth is that Python is an incredibly versatile language. It can be used to develop websites, machine learning algorithms, as well as autonomous drones. A large number of programmers around the globe use Python as it empowers them to create almost anything. However, Python is not as easy as it seems to be. You really need to put in a lot of effort to master the language.  Factors contributing to Python’s growth One of the main reasons why Python is growing at a great pace is that it can be utilized for a large array of purposes, starting from web development to data science to DevOps. Therefore, it has become very important and useful to understand the concepts of Python development.  Programmers who were earlier using programming languages, like C, and ne...

Just like any other in the technological industry, the mobile application development field is changing and advancing at a rapid pace. Developing an app for the services that you offer has become an essential part of running a business, big or small. Furthermore, if you develop one such app by using the Internet of Things (IoT), it can only boost your chances of improving your business. The entire idea of using the IoT is meant to make our lives easier, by integrating it into everything that we do. And what is one thing that we do almost all the time? That’s right, we have reached a point in today’s society when we use smartphones for the majority of daily activities that we conduct. Here is a quick look at how the IoT impacts the mobile app development: The Mobile Network According to recent studies, the average American adult spends almost 3 hours per day using the smartphone. Given the fact that every moment people spend on their phones is through an app, the demand for this k...

As the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica data scandal cools down somewhat, the revelation that yet another tech giant has mishandled user data is still fresh in the minds of regulators and senators as CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent meeting with Congress wraps up. Where this meeting will lead the tech and data industry is anybody’s guess. For data protection advocates, this could be the dawn of a new and hopeful day, heralding the birth of tighter regulations and penalties for tech giants involved in data debauchery. On the other hand, this could just be another drop in the bucket, a going-through-of-the-motions, so to speak. The latter is believable, because this isn’t the first time that the CEO of a major corporation was made to testify in front of Congress. Richard F. Smith, the former CEO of Equifax, was in a similar situation as the head of the company when a data breach exposed lifetime data of over 146 million Americans. He found himself, much like Zuckerberg was, grilled by a ...

This post was originally published on the DataWorks Summit Blog.  I had the honor and pleasure to moderate the panel for the “Women in Big Data Lunch” on April 18, during Dataworks Summit in Berlin. Our distinctive panelists included: Mandy Chessell – Distinguished Engineer, IBM Ellen Koenig – Data Scientist, formerly of Europace AG Tina […] The post Women in Big Data Lunch Panel @ DataWorks Summit Berlin appeared first on Hortonworks .

This week, I spoke at the Global Blockchain Conference in Kuala Lumpur and at Windays 2018 in Porec, Croatia and I had some very interesting discussions with the participants on the enormous potential of Blockchain. Blockchain has a lot of potential for organisations to improve their bottom line, but it also offers an opportunity to improve the state of our world. Currently, however, the focus is predominantly on how blockchain can be used in the financial world or how cryptocurrencies are used by criminals. This is a shame because blockchain has so much more to offer. That is why Dr. Philippa Ryan and I have written a book on how Blockchain can be used for social good. Our book, Blockchain: Transforming Your Business and Our World, will be published in August in English and soon after in Chinese. As a little teaser, you can find the abstract of our book here, and if you are interested to be notified when the book is available, you can subscribe to my newsletter, the f(x) = e^x, here...

The technology with the internet is continuously evolving which has brought significant changes in the lives of the people and it is even more fascinating to imagine what the future has in store for us. Living in the technological era we are surrounded by the technologies that are disruptive in nature still has the potential to transform our everyday lives. Blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT) have been the most prominent advent till date. According to Intel by 2020 there will be about 200 billion devices connected to each other. IoT has blown up creating a tremendous impact on devices like wearables, smart homes, cars, smart cities, manufacturing facilities, farms, healthcare devices. But there will always be a concern for security and safety when it comes to so many devices working on their own with the help of internet. The current ecosystem of IoT is governed by centralized security model and data management model which is very common in the enterprise today. All the devices...

Back in the day — artificial intelligence was nothing more but a fancy toy. It was mocked for its clumsiness and inability to perform even the most basic of actions. But things have changed drastically since then. Today artificial intelligence slowly but surely overtaking the majority of basic operations in various industries with a grace of ravishing rickshaw. It is easy to see why — over the years AI had evolved into a sophisticated and elaborate tool that is at times almost indistinguishable from the human being. It helps to handle whole lotta time-consuming and otherworldly mundane, repetitive stuff that workers are often forced to do instead of something more valuable. How AI helps business? Despite common this woeful misconception, artificial intelligence isn’t going to take anyone’s job anytime soon. At least in an overarching managing manner. It is not how AI works. Essentially, artificial intelligence is merely a set of automated algorithms designed to perform certain ...

Internet use is ubiquitous. From our phones to our toaster ovens, almost all devices are connected to the Internet today. We use the Internet for everything from basic tasks and complex business needs. But what do you really know about the Internet? Here are five facts about the Internet you may not have heard before: 1. A not-for-profit is in charge of domain names and addresses The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the biggest registrar for the Internet. And all of its information is reported to the U.S. Department of Commerce. What does this mean? A not-for-profit that reports to the U.S. government is an interesting balance of power. No country technically owns the Internet, but the U.S. government seems to have a big stake in the current Internet as we know it. But the future of regulating the Internet is a delicate balance and a big responsibility. 2. It's underwater... Large cables that transmit Internet connections can be found in the wo...

As much as data marketplaces seem viable, they have not gained traction still. There are some marketplaces that are available for industry/public data sets like D&B Data Exchange, AWS Public Datasets etc. However, the vision for ecosystems to start sharing enterprise data sets is yet to materialize. More than any of the other technical reasons […] The post Data Marketplaces Powered by Blockchain appeared first on Hortonworks .

By Lance Eliot, the AI Trends Insider Have you ever heard of the phrase “citizen scientists”? The phrases first entered into our lexicon in the mid-1990’s, and generally refers to the notion that ordinary everyday people can potentially contribute to the work of science, in spite of the fact that they aren’t professional scientists. We usually have some disdain for amateurs or non-professionals that try to enter into a professional realm, and we tend to denigrate whatever kind of contribution they might try to make. What do they know about real science, some ask. They are prone to fake science, some accuse. The word “citizen” in this context is meant to suggest the lay public. In more recent times, we’ve generally seen that the word “crowd” has perhaps overtaken the now quainter use of the word citizen. We have crowd sourcing, and many refer nowadays to the “wisdom of the crowd” whenever we see lots of people band together on social media such as Facebook or Twitter. The crowd has ...