Shamayita Acharya

NFTs are here, and they’re the future of cryptocurrency. NFTs will empower users to build unique, creative solutions to both practical and conceptual problems. NFT’s can be used as a tool for social interactions, the downfall of blockchain-based assets like Bitcoin, and digital scarcity which is a key factor in launching any market economy.As the years go on and we become increasingly accustomed to online currencies and tokens, the popularity of BNFT’s has grown. Truth be told, without the concept of cryptocurrencies, it would have been quite hard for NFT’s to gain the popularity they have today. NFT transactions in 2020, according to NonFungible.com, have skyrocketed, reaching $250 million. This is three times the amount of transactions recorded in the previous year. (Image Source: Fusible)What is an NFT?NFTs are not another cryptocurrency or token, they’re a brand new way to store and exchange data. NFTs hold information within protocols that are designed to make their use both se...

It was inevitable, and in the back of our minds, we knew there were some jobs robots would come and take over as technology advanced at lightning speed over the years. But there are others we never even considered, that is until now. For some time now, most professionals have been worried about how new technology will implicate and impact their professional working lives, putting jobs on the line and livelihoods.We have seen the adoption of robots replace humans in factories at scale and streamline work, making processes more efficient, removing humans and human error altogether. For example, Amazon's warehouses today have over 200,000 robots, all working in unison with one another. However, less manual laboured jobs seemed untouchable thanks to their complexity, that is, of course, until now, thanks to technologies like Augmented Reality, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Virtual Reality. (Image Source: Bloomberg Law)Like many other professions, lawyers are beginning to fear the...

(Reuters) -Amazon.com Inc-backed electric vehicle start-up Rivian Automotive is in talks with ministers about building a factory in the UK that could include a big state support package, Sky News reported on Saturday. The company, which is also backed by Ford Motor Co, has been in negotiations with the British government for weeks about the construction of a plant near Bristol, the report https://bit.ly/3zT7Ron added. The talks are not yet at an advanced stage but any investment decision would likely be worth well over 1 billion pounds ($1.39 billion), the report said, citing sources. The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) declined to comment on "individual investments". In an emailed statement to Reuters, BEIS said: "While we are working to attract inward investment into the UK to accelerate the ... Read More on Datafloq

Freeing machine learning professionals from mundane labelling and tagging tasks, outsourcing data annotation diverts quality attention on ML development, offers contextual flexibility and agile execution, thereby driving operational excellence required for building performance-driven AI ecosystems.Retail giant Walmart successfully cataloged 2.5 million items, 98% of their products, with help of a data annotation service provider that helped them with accurate training datasets for their AI/ML models.Enterprises spend five times more cost on internal data annotation as compared to what they incur when they outsource the activity. The high cost is due to lack of right expertise to tactically drive data annotation. Outsourced data annotation helps factor in resource shortage, coast and skewed timelines; thereby never making the ML application development come to standstill.Establishing a close loop between data annotators and machine learning engineers, data annotation executed in a seaml...

By Ann Saphir (Reuters) - Federal Reserve Governor Lael Brainard on Friday laid out a range of reasons for "urgency" around the issue of developing a U.S. central bank digital currency, including the fact that other countries such as China are moving ahead with their own. "The dollar is very dominant in international payments, and if you have the other major jurisdictions in the world with a digital currency, a CBDC (central bank digital currency)offering, and the U.S. doesn't have one, I just, I can't wrap my head around that," Brainard told the Aspen Institute Economic Strategy Group. "That just doesn't sound like a sustainable future to me." Fed officials are taking a deep dive into the digital payments universe, collecting public feedback on the potential costs and benefits as well as design considerations with a view to publishing a discussion paper ... Read More on Datafloq

By Sheila Dang (Reuters) - Twitter Inc said on Friday it will launch a competition for computer researchers and hackers to identify biases in its image-cropping algorithm, after a group of researchers previously found the algorithm tended to exclude Black people and men. The competition is part of a wider effort across the tech industry to ensure artificial intelligence technologies act ethically. The social networking company said in a blog post that the bounty competition was aimed at identifying "potential harms of this algorithm beyond what we identified ourselves." Following criticism last year about image previews in posts excluding Black people's faces, the company said in May a study by three of its machine learning researchers found an 8% difference from demographic parity in favor of women, and a 4% ... Read More on Datafloq

Cybercriminals characteristically prefer planning and orchestrating attacks that will cause the most disruption to the targets and associated parties. That’s why it’s no surprise that the healthcare industry is consistently among the sectors most at risk for problems.Here are some actionable strategies to improve healthcare cybersecurity. Even people who don’t work directly in the sector will find these tips useful, especially since better cyberdefense strengthens the medical system for everyone who may need to call on it, now or in the future.Look at Data to Determine Cybersecurity ShortcomingsData enthusiasts know that examining trends within information can be an excellent way to uncover insights that people may otherwise miss. That reality also applies to people who want to prevent cyberattacks in the medical sector.For example, historical data might show that most of an organization’s cybersecurity blunders over the past five years happened due to mistakes made by external service...

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China will ramp up its scrutiny of online ride-hailing firms under plans to strengthen the protection of worker rights and require firms to amend any non-compliant operations, the Ministry of Transport said on Friday. The ministry said in a statement which did not name any companies that it had found that some ride-hailing firms were infringing driver rights while other platforms were disrupting fair competition in the market. Online ride-hailing firms with "illegal" operations will be required to put forth timetables and work plans on how they will expedite the removal of non-complaint vehicles and personnel, it said. The ministry is planning to publish policies to protect the rights and interest of workers in the transport sector, it said. Didi Global, China's largest ride-hailing ... Read More on Datafloq

By David Shepardson WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A U.S. agency on Friday rejected a protest by Blue Origin and defense contractor Dynetics Inc over NASA's decision to pick a single lunar lander provider. The companies challenged the $2.9 billion award to SpaceX for the lander, arguing NASA was required to make multiple awards. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) said it "denied the protest arguments that NASA acted improperly in making a single award to SpaceX." Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, did not immediately comment. It had contended NASA gave SpaceX an unfair advantage by letting it revise its pricing. Dynetics, a unit of Leidos Holdings, also did not immediately comment. On Monday, Bezos offered to cover up to $2 billion in NASA costs if the U.S. space agency awarded ... Read More on Datafloq

By Krystal Hu (Reuters) - Rick Ornelas got into Robinhood Markets Inc's initial public offering (IPO) every way he could. As a user of the trading app, the Houston-based author of life-coaching books applied for and received 50 Robinhood shares in its IPO. When the shares traded down more than 10% in their debut on Thursday, he doubled down by acquiring 75 more shares through Fidelity Investments, where he holds his main trading account. "I know IPO shares can be volatile, but I just don't want to miss the opportunity in case this pops. I believe in the company's long-term valuation," Ornelas said. More than a fifth of Robinhood's $2.1 billion IPO was snapped up by the app's users such as Ornelas. Some put on a brave face after ... Read More on Datafloq

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia on Friday launched administrative proceedings against Facebook's WhatsApp for what it said was a failure to localise data of Russian users on Russian territory, the Interfax news agency reported. There was no immediate comment from Facebook. A day earlier, a Russian court fined Alphabet Inc.'s Google 3 million roubles for violating personal data legislation and registered administrative proceedings against Facebook and Twitter for the same offence. The cases are part of a wider spat between Russia and Big Tech, with Moscow routinely fining social media giants for failing to remove banned content and seeking to compel foreign tech firms to open offices in Russia. WhatsApp could be fined between 1 million and 6 million roubles ($13,700 to $82,250), Interfax reported, citing court documents. A ... Read More on Datafloq

(Reuters) -Tesla Inc Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk on Friday showed his support for "Fortnite" maker Epic Games that has challenged Apple Inc's fees on its App Store. "Apple app store fees are a de facto global tax on the Internet. Epic is right," he said in a tweet. (https://bit.ly/3xeuuBS) Apple is battling a lawsuit filed last year by Epic Games, alleging that the iPhone maker has abused its dominance in the market for mobile apps. Epic broke Apple's rules when it introduced its own in-app payment system in "Fortnite" to circumvent Apple's commissions. Apple, which has defended its App Store practices both in court and to lawmakers in hearings, did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. Separately, Musk denied a report that he once had a chat with Apple boss ... Read More on Datafloq

Case Management is a 24 x 7 job in the Insurance sector. So is Care Giving in the Healthcare domain. Coupled with shift operations, with a marked handover between different stakeholders in different groups, it becomes an extremely tedious process when there are thousands of concurrently active cases to be managed. Manual record keeping is a laborious process with chances of error and slips are a higher probability. A digitally enabled platform evens out the challenges and frees up the stakeholders from administrative and data entry operations to focus on their core jobs.What is Digitally-enabled Case Management?Digitally-enabled Case Management is a technology platform powered by Intelligent Document Processing, Robotic Process Automation, Workflows, Rules, Analytics, and Cloud, which allows planning, process, implement, and monitor the services delivered to insureds, in-patients, out-patients, or care-home residents. Majorly used in the Insurance and Healthcare domains, a digitally-en...

By Byron Kaye SYDNEY (Reuters) -A fire broke out in a Tesla Inc Megapack battery unit in Australia on Friday during testing of one of the world's biggest energy storage projects, run by France's Neoen SA, fire authorities said. The fire erupted during an initial trial of the high-profile energy project known as the Victorian Big Battery near Melbourne on Friday morning local time, authorities said, adding that nobody was injured and the facility was evacuated. "Neoen and Tesla are working closely with emergency services on site to manage the situation," Neoen Managing Director Louis de Sambucy said in a statement. The site had been disconnected from the grid and "there will be no impact to the electricity supply", added de Sambucy. ... Read More on Datafloq

By Tom Wilson LONDON (Reuters) -Major cryptocurrency exchange Binance said on Friday it would wind down its futures and derivatives products offerings across Europe, the latest move by the platform as pressure grows from regulators across the world. With immediate effect, Binance users in Germany, Italy and the Netherlands would be unable to open new futures or derivatives products accounts, the exchange said in a statement on its website. Increasingly worried over consumer protection and the standard of anti-money laundering checks at crypto exchanges, a string of regulators across the world - including Britain, Germany, Hong Kong and Italy - have in recent weeks ratcheted up pressure on Binance, one of the world's largest exchanges by trading volumes. "The European region is a very important market for Binance, and it is taking proactive ... Read More on Datafloq

BEIJING (Reuters) -China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said on Friday that big tech companies should step up the management of exporting "critical data" as well as their risk assessment of data security. The Internet Society of China, a non-governmental organisation, has met representatives from Alibaba and its fintech affiliate Ant Group, Tencent, ByteDance, Meituan, Baidu and others to address the implementation of China's Data Security Law, under the authorisation of MIIT, the ministry said in a statement. China has been revamping its policy towards data security and user privacy. In September it will implement its Data Security Law, which requires companies that process "critical data" to conduct risk assessments and submit reports to authorities. It also calls on organizations that process data affecting China's national security to submit to annual reviews. ... Read More on Datafloq

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Malaysia has taken enforcement action against cryptocurrency platform Binance to stop it operating in the country, the Securities Commission said on Friday. The Commission said it had issued a public reprimand against Binance Holdings Limited, its CEO Zhao Changpeng and three other entities registered in the United Kingdom, Lithuania and Singapore, for continuing to operate in Malaysia despite being added to the regulator's investor alert list a year ago. The regulator ordered Binance to disable its website and mobile applications, cease media and marketing activities, as well as restrict Malaysian investors from accessing its Telegram group. "Those who currently have accounts with Binance are strongly urged to immediately cease trading through its platforms and to withdraw all their investments immediately," it said. Binance said on Friday ... Read More on Datafloq

(Reuters) - Shares of Pinterest Inc fell about 20% before the opening bell on Friday and were set to start trading at more than a three-month low, after the company warned of slowing user growth in the United States, its largest market. At least eight brokerages cut their price target on the stock, which fell to $57.60 in pre-market trading. If the losses hold, about $9 billion would be swiped off its market capitalization which currently stands at about $36.8 billion. J.P.Morgan made the most aggressive cut and slashed its target by $27 to $68, pushing it well below the current median price target of $77, citing lower-than-expected user additions in the latest reported quarter and disappointing third-quarter outlook. The brokerage also cut its rating on the stock to "neutral" from "overweight". ... Read More on Datafloq

Cloud infrastructure is a platform that holds the progression conditions and inside it, you would find administered working with an environment where various applications are built. Here you would find that you can utilize rethought administrations and you don't need to purchase any product or any organization hardware or space in the information place.On-Premises Cloud InfrastructureOn-premises cloud infrastructure is a meaning that is identified with opposite computing, which appears to repudiate a focal guideline of cloud administrations, to be specific, that cloud administration are commonly given off-site as a principal part of cloud innovation plan. On-premises cloud framework would be equipment that is identified with cloud administrations or exercises, that is in any case situated nearby at the customer's actual business area.Worldwide Market Insights gauges that cloud suppliers will have most of the data warehousing loads by 2024. Yet, don't trust them. Gartne...

(Reuters) - Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk's brain-chip startup, Neuralink, has raised $205 million in a funding round led by Dubai-based venture capital firm Vy Capital, with participation from Alphabet Inc's Google Ventures, the company said on Thursday. Neuralink aims to implant wireless brain computer chips to help cure neurological conditions including Alzheimer's, dementia and spinal cord injuries and fuse humankind with artificial intelligence. The company released a video in April showing a male macaque playing a videogame "Mind Pong" after getting chips embedded on each side of its brain. "First @Neuralink product will enable someone with paralysis to use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone using thumbs," Musk tweeted in June. "The device is implanted flush with skull & charges wirelessly, so you look ... Read More on Datafloq

By David Ljunggren and Moira Warburton OTTAWA (Reuters) -Canada's auction of 3500 MHz spectrum, which is key for next generation 5G networks, generated a record C$8.9 billion ($7.2 billion), with the country's three dominant telecom companies accounting for more than 80% of the amount raised. Out of 1,504 available licenses, 1,495 were awarded to 15 Canadian companies, including 757 licenses to small and regional providers, Innovation Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne said in a statement on Thursday. The results would boost competition, he added, a reference to Ottawa's push to open up a market dominated by BCE Inc, Telus Corp and Rogers Communications Inc, known as the big three. Canadian consumers have complained of steep wireless bills, which are among the highest in the world, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Liberal government has asked operators ... Read More on Datafloq

(Reuters) -Apple Inc's chip supplier Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co said on Friday that some of its production lines in southern Taiwan were hit by a contamination of gases used in the chipmaking process. TSMC does not expect the incident to have significant impact on operations, it said in an emailed statement to Reuters. Nikkei, which first reported the news, said the company's most advanced chipmaking facility, Fab 18, was hit. It added that all of the latest processors for the upcoming iPhones and Mac computers were produced there. (https://s.nikkei.com/3iebmQw) "To ensure that there will be no issues with production quality, TSMC is currently carrying out stringent follow-up operations," the company added. Apple did not immediately respond to Reuters' request for comment. ... Read More on Datafloq

By Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss NEW YORK (Reuters) - Ethereum, the second-largest blockchain network, is about to undergo a technical adjustment that will significantly alter the way transactions are processed, as well as reduce the supply of the ether token and sharply boost its price. The scheduled coding revamp will go live on Aug. 4. The upgrade known as Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559 is similar, analysts said, to a bitcoin "halving" event in which periodic adjustments reduced the supply of bitcoin. Each halving helped propel bitcoin's price to higher records. While bitcoin is the preferred store of value in the digital ecosystem, Ethereum has emerged as the leading financial infrastructure, settling over $12 billion of daily transactions, according to a Grayscale report released in February this year. ... Read More on Datafloq

By John P. Desmond, AI Trends Editor   To help autonomous cars navigate safely in the rain and other inclement weather, researchers are looking into a new type of radar.     Self-driving vehicles can have trouble “seeing” in the rain or fog, with the car’s sensors potentially blocked by snow, ice or torrential downpours, and their ability to “read” road signs and road markings impaired.   Many autonomous vehicles rely on lidar radar technology, which works by bouncing laser beams off surrounding objects to give a high-resolution 3D picture on a clear day, but does not do so well in fog, dust, rain or snow, according to a recent report from  abc10  of Sacramento, Calif.   “A lot of automatic vehicles these days are using lidar, and these are basically lasers that shoot out and keep rotating to create points for a particular object,” stated Kshitiz Bansal, a computer science and engineering Ph.D. student at University of Californ...

By John P. Desmond, AI Trends Editor     The “Automated Guided Vehicles” at St. Olav’s Hospital in Trondheim, Norway, have personalities. The boxes talk.   These motorized units, essentially boxes on wheels, are assigned to transport garbage, medical equipment or food from one part of the hospital to another. But because they have to interact with humans, such as by warning them to get out of the way, they have to talk.     But instead of using a generic Norwegian voice, the hospital robot developers decided to give them a voice that uses the strong, distinctive local dialect, according to an account in  the  International Journal of Human-Computer Studies   And in so doing, the developers gave the stainless-steel boxes rolling around the hospital to transport goods, a personality. And they made the robots kind of pushy, a little rude.   Children with illnesses who were being treated in the wards began to play games with them, trying to...

By AI Trends Staff     In a highly unusual undertaking in the technology industry, the Alphabet Workers Union was formed by over 400 Google engineers and other workers in early January. The union now has about 800 members.     The  Alphabet Workers Union  is a minority union, representing a fraction of the company’s more than 260,000 full-time employees and contractors. The workers stated at the outset that it was primarily an effort to give structure to activism at Google, rather than to negotiate for a contract.      The union is  affiliated with the Communications Workers of America (CWA), a union representing workers in telecommunications and media in the US and Canada.   Sara Steffens, secretary-treasurer, Communication Workers of America “There are those who would want you to believe that organizing in the tech industry is completely impossible,” stated Sara Steffens, CWA’s secretary-treasurer, in an acc...

By AI Trends Staff     An agricultural technology (ag-tech) startup in San Francisco, Plenty, plants its crops vertically indoors, in a year-round operation employing AI and robots that uses 95% less water and 99% less land than conventional farming.   Plenty’s vertical farm approach can produce the same quantity of fruits and vegetables as a 720-acre flat farm, on only two acres.      Nate Storey, cofounder and chief science officer of the startup Plenty “Vertical farming exists because we want to grow the world’s capacity for fresh fruits and vegetables, and we know it’s necessary,” stated Nate Storey, cofounder and chief science officer of the startup Plenty, in an account in  Intelligent Living .    The yield of 400x that of flat farms makes vertical farming “not just an incremental improvement,” and the fraction of water use “is also critical in a time of increasing environmental stress and climate uncertainty,” Storey state...

By Douglas Busvine BERLIN (Reuters) - A top German court has ruled that Facebook acted illegally in taking down racist posts and blocking the account of their author because the social network failed to inform the user or give a reason for shutting them down. Thursday's judgment by the Federal Court of Justice further complicates a fraught debate over toxic discourse on social networks as Germany girds for a general election in September that polls show may not deliver a stable government. It is all the more striking because the comments made by the unnamed plaintiff evidently violated Facebook's community standards governing so-called hate speech, which is banned under German law if it threatens the peace or incites violence against minority groups. In its three-page summary, the Karlsruhe-based court stated ... Read More on Datafloq

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The International Monetary Fund must ramp up its resources as it seeks to "monitor, advise on, and help manage this far-reaching and complex transition" to digital money, according to an IMF paper published on Thursday. Digital money can make payments more accessible, faster and cheaper, the paper said. But to make that happen, policymakers must step up to key challenges: digital cash must be trustworthy, must protect domestic economic and financial stability, and the stability of the international monetary system should remain. "The Fund has a critical role to play to help its members harness the benefits and manage the risks of digital money," the paper said. Importantly, digital money "must be regulated, designed, and provided so countries maintain control over monetary policy, financial conditions, capital account openness, and foreign exchange regimes". ... Read More on Datafloq

By Danielle Kaye NEW YORK (Reuters) -LinkedIn will allow employees to opt for full-time remote work or a hybrid option as offices gradually reopen, Chief People Officer Teuila Hanson told Reuters. This new policy is a shift from the initial indication last October that Microsoft Corp's professional social networking site would expect employees to work from an office 50% of the time when COVID-19 pandemic restrictions lift. The updated policy, offering the flexibility to work remotely full-time or work at an office part-time, will apply to LinkedIn's global workforce of more than 16,000 employees. "We anticipate that we'll definitely see more remote employees than what we saw prior to the pandemic," Hanson said in a Wednesday interview ahead of the announcement, adding that some jobs would require in-office work. ... Read More on Datafloq

By John McCrank NEW YORK (Reuters) - App-based retail brokerage Robinhood Markets Inc was set to make its highly anticipated market debut on the Nasdaq on Thursday. The brokerage, known for helping pioneer commission-free trading, relied on a controversial practice called payment for order flow (PFOF) for more than three-quarters of its revenue https://ift.tt/2SILkuE in the first quarter. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is now scrutinizing PFOF over conflicts of interest it says are inherent in the practice. WHAT IS PFOF? Retail brokerages send the majority of their customers' orders to wholesale brokers, rather than to exchanges, because wholesalers generally execute the orders at a slightly better price than available on exchanges. Most retail brokers ... Read More on Datafloq

By Noor Zainab Hussain and Ankur Banerjee (Reuters) - Shares of Robinhood Markets Inc fell more than 10% after opening flat in their Nasdaq debut on Thursday, valuing the online brokerage at about $28 billion, a dismal reception to one of the most hotly anticipated listings of the year. Shares fell to $34 in early trading, far lower than the offer price of $38, which was at the lower of end of its initial price offering (IPO) range. The company, arguably the breakout financial technology startup of its generation, priced its IPO on Wednesday and raised $2.1 billion. Its long-awaited debut comes months after it was caught in a confrontation between a new generation of retail investors and Wall Street hedge funds. ... Read More on Datafloq

By Lance Eliot, the AI Trends Insider       Are you a middle parker or a sideline-hugging parker?       Here’s the deal. A recent TikTok video went viral about how we all should be parking our cars when doing so in those parking lots that have clearly marked lined spaces. A brouhaha has now arisen. You know how it goes. As you drive down a row of parked cars, you are spying for any next open space. Upon spotting one, you quickly drive up to the prized piece of turf and maneuver your car into the allotted space. There are painted lines on the asphalt that denote what amount of floor space you are considered entitled to consume.       The question posed to you is whether you tend to park directly midway between those lines, or whether you aim to be closer to one side or the other of your teensy bit of earth. Take a moment to think this over. Your answer is very, very, very important.       Most of the ti...