Silicon Valley isn’t happy: Here’s what top tech CEOs have to say about US President Trump’s immigration order

Image: Reuters

By tech2 News Staff /  29 Jan 2017 , 11:38

US President Donald Trump has passed an executive order which halts immigration from seven Islamic nations including Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, and Syria, for at least 90 days. For Syrian refugees, the ban is indefinite. Trump said that the order was to keep away radical Islamic terrorists.

This has caused a lot of furore not just among the general population, but also among technology companies.

Most of the top technology firms in the US are filled with staff who aren’t native US citizens. And logically enough, most leaders from across the technology industry spectrum have criticised this new temporary ban that Trump has issued.

Microsoft Corp, Alphabet Inc, Apple Inc, Facebook Inc and Uber Technologies and many other companies have expressed concern about the immigration order’s effects on their employees, according to the Wall Street Journal. 

Here is what the heads of top US tech companies have to say about this order.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, himself an immigrant told the Wall Street Journal that he had experienced and seen the positive impact that immigration has had on Microsoft as well as for the US and the world. He said that Microsoft Corp would continue being an advocate on the issue.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has sent an email to his employees assuring them that Apple has contacted the White House to explain the negative effects of such restrictions. Cook had also spoken about the importance of immigration, both to Apple and the US’s future, when he had visited Washington last week.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that the order affected close to 187 current Googlers. “We’re upset about the impact of this order and any proposals that could impose restrictions on Googlers and their families, or that could create barriers to bringing great talent to the US. It is painful to see the personal cost of this executive order on our colleagues,” he said.

Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg put out a status on his Facebook pagestating that both his and his wife’s parents were immigrants to the US. “We need to keep this country safe, but we should do that by focusing on people who actually pose a threat. Expanding the focus of law enforcement beyond people who are real threats would make all Americans less safe by diverting resources, while millions of undocumented folks who don’t pose a threat will live in fear of deportation,” said Zuckerberg.

Digital storage firm Box’s CEO Aaron Levie said that the move was quite infuriating and morally wrong. He said that he was looking at ways to get personally involved and fight the order.

Amazon’s vice president for HR, Beth Galetti, said that a diverse workforce helps Amazon make better products for its customers. It has sent out an email to its staffers, recommending US based employees from countries in the ban-list, from travelling outside the US. It has also asked such employees to get in touch with the company if they are already outside the borders for travel or work.

Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, in a personal post on his Facebook page said, “Trump’s actions are hurting Netflix employees around the world, and are so un-American it pains us all. Worse, these actions will make America less safe (through hatred and loss of allies) rather than more safe. A very sad week, and more to come with the lives of over 600,000 Dreamers here in a America under imminent threat. It is time to link arms together to protect American values of freedom and opportunity.”

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has sent out an email to his employees titled, ‘Standing up for what’s right.’ Kalanick goes on to talk about the executive order issued by Trump and how it affects Uber drivers. He said that Uber will be reaching out to all its drivers who work in the US but go home for long breaks to be with family. These drivers affected by the order will be compensated for three months, pro bono, said Kalanick.

“While every government has their own immigration controls, allowing people from all around the world to come here and make America their home has largely been the U.S.’s policy since its founding. That means this ban will impact many innocent people—an issue that I will raise this coming Friday when I go to Washington for President Trump’s first business advisory group meeting,” he said.

Microsoft follows AWS into France with plan for new Azure data center

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spoke at a company event in Dublin on Oct. 3, 2016. Credit: Microsoft via IDG News Service


Peter Sayer
IDG News Service
Oct 3, 2016 9:22 AM
French businesses will be able to access Office 365, Dynamics 365 and Azure services from local servers, Nadella says

Microsoft is adding to its European cloud infrastructure, with plans to open new data centers in France next year, CEO Satya Nadella said Monday.

The company has already spent US$3 billion growing its European cloud capabilities. These include data centers in the U.K. hosting Azure and Office 365 services, and in Germany hosting Azure.

The French data centers will host Dynamics 365, Microsoft's new ERP and CRM offering, in addition to Azure and Office 365.

The company has already won over the the U.K.'s Ministry of Defence and German auto parts manufacturer ZF to its cloud services. Ireland's Health Service Executive and the Franco-Japanese car-making partnership Renault-Nissan Alliance are also customers, it said.

Key to winning European customers is the issue of "data sovereignty," according to Microsoft.

Data sovereignty is typically about ensuring data remains under the control of local laws, and in Europe those come at two levels.

Government rules on secrecy typically require that government data remain within national borders -- so data centers in the U.K. are vital if the U.K. government is to remain a customer, for example.

The storage and processing of personal information about European Union citizens faces other restrictions: It must only be done in jurisdictions offering the same level of privacy protection as EU law. While it's possible to export such data to the U.S. using legal mechanisms such as Privacy Shield, many companies are opting to keep things simple and keep the data within the EU.

The UK's recent "Brexit" referendum vote to leave the EU threatens to halve Microsoft's EU data center capacity, though, by putting UK servers outside the boundary if and when the exit happens. Adding more locations inside the EU will give Microsoft diversity.

"Trust and scale are some of the most important elements of our design plan for Microsoft cloud," CEO Satya Nadella said at a Microsoft event in Dublin on Monday.

Microsoft is not the only cloud company thinking of such things: Amazon.com last week announced that it will add a French location to its Amazon Web Services offering next year to increase geographic diversity. The company already has two data centers in the EU, in Ireland and Germany, and, in anticipation of Brexit, is building one in the U.K.

Mindful of recent attempts by U.S. authorities to subpoena email messages stored on its servers in Ireland, Microsoft has taken a hands-off approach to customer data in Germany, placing it under the control of a data trustee, T-Systems International, owned by German telco Deutsche Telekom.

Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft announce partnership on AI and machine learning

#ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Image Credit: Reuters

  29 Sep 2016 , 16:11

In a major boost to artificial intelligence (AI) research, five top-notch tech companies — Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft — have joined hands to announce a historic partnership on AI and machine learning.

It means that these companies will discuss advancements and conduct research in AI and how to develop best products and services powered by machine learning, Tech Crunch reported on Thursday.

Initial financial help will come from these companies and as other stakeholders join the group, the finances are expected to increase.

“We want to involve people impacted by AI as well,” Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder and head of applied AI at DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet (parent company of Google), was quoted as saying.

According to the report, the organisational structure has been designed to allow non-corporate groups to have equal leadership side-by-side with large tech companies.

“The power of AI is in the enterprise sector. For society at-large to get the benefits of AI, we first have to trust it,” Francesca Rossi, AI ethics researcher at IBM Research, told Tech Crunch.

AI-powered bots will become the next interface, shaping our interactions with the applications and devices we rely on and Microsoft’s latest solutions are set to change the way HP interacts with its customers and partners, Microsoft’s Indian-born Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said recently.

At Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in August, Nadella had said that AI-powered chatbots will “fundamentally revolutionise how computing is experienced by everybody.”

IANS

We want to democratise artificial intelligence, says Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella

Artificial Intelligence is the current buzzword and every major tech giant including Google, Facebook, IBM and others are investing heavily in it. At its annual IT conference Ignite, in Atlanta, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also spoke at length about AI and how Microsoft is focussing on this field and how it plans to leverage it in the future.

Nadella said that Microsoft is working towards democratising AI. Taking a slight dig at Google and IBM, Nadella said, “We are not pursuing AI to beat humans at games.” This was clearly in reference to the news reports of how Google’s AI has been effective in defeating humans in Chinese board game Go as well as IBM’s Watson defeating humans at Jeopardy.

“We are pursuing AI, so that we can empower every person and every institution that people build with tools of AI. So that they can go on to solve the most pressing problems of our society and our economy. That’s the pursuit,” said Nadella.

According to Nadella, Microsoft is working towards analysing mountains of data which is produced by consumers or businesses and then making sense of it by presenting it in a legible way to people. Microsoft is approaching AI via what it calls as ‘four core pillars. Namely agents, applications, services and infrastructure. And needless to say each of these pillars is associated with a related Microsoft service.

Cortana, the digital assistant of Microsoft will be an agent, which will be a new organising layer which will sit across all applications you will use in your life. Microsoft Office and Dynamics software can function as applications. According to Nadella, Microsoft Dynamics is capable of sifting through third party apps such as LinkedIn to point out where changes are made on this app.

Cortana being open to third party developers to help them use it to build their own apps is an example of services said Nadella.

Nadella also mentioned that Microsoft is using custom computer chips to help crunch information quicker and better manage traffic in data centres.

Deep learning is a major component of all the products and services making use of AI. This lets organisations feed large amounts of data in to neural networks, which mimic the human brain in a way to understand links between information and data sets. Google and Facebook have been using deep learning for things such as improving search results, image recognition, speech translation and so on.