IBM and ABB partner to focus on Internet of Things and Industrial artificial intelligence

ABB has sealed a collaboration agreement with International Business Machines Corp, the Swiss engineering company said on Tuesday, the latest step in its efforts to ramp up its presence in digital technology and the Internet of Things.

In a joint statement ABB said it would combine its digital offering, which gathers information from machinery, with IBM’s expertise in artificial intelligence featured in its Watson data analytics software. The two companies will jointly develop and sell new products.

“This powerful combination marks truly the next level of industrial technology, moving beyond current connected systems that simply gather data, to industrial operations and machines that use data to sense, analyse, optimise and take actions that drive greater uptime, speed and yield for industrial customers,” ABB Chief Executive Ulrich Spiesshofer said in a statement.

For example, instead of manual machinery inspections, ABB and IBM intend to use Watson’s artificial intelligence to help find defects via real-time images collected by an ABB system, and then analysed using IBM Watson.

ABB has identified digital technology – where machinery communicates with control centres to increase productivity and reduce downtime – as a driver of growth. It now gets around 55 percent of sales from products that are digitally enabled.

As part of the drive, the company last year signed a strategic partnership with Microsoft to roll out digital products for customers in the robotics, marine and ports, electric vehicles and renewable energy sectors.

To spearhead its strategy, it appointed former Cisco executive Guido Jouret as its first chief digital officer last year.

Reuters

Publish date: April 25, 2017 12:30 pm| Modified date: April 25, 2017 12:30 pm

Google’s new machine learning model can harness the processing power of your phone to improve AI

Image: Google

Google’s new machine learning algorithm harnesses the processing power of your smartphone to improve algorithms and save on data consumption by intelligent virtual assistants and the like.

Using a process called Federated Learning (FL), Google claims that they can “collaboratively share a prediction model while keeping training data on the device.” It might sound complicated, but it’s actually a simple, well thought-out solution to a problem that’s been haunting machine learning for years.

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I am excited about the progress here, really important work on machine learning without centralized training datahttps://research.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-collaborative.html …

6:05 AM - 12 Apr 2017

Federated Learning: Collaborative Machine Learning without Centralized Training Data

Posted by Brendan McMahan and Daniel Ramage, Research Scientists Standard machine learning approaches require centralizing the training da...

research.googleblog.com

 
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Machine Learning (ML) is used to design algorithms. These algorithms help in the functioning of what we know as artificial intelligence (AI). Siri, Google Assistant, Bixby, they’re all just algorithms.

But ML is used for more than just digital assistants. Google’s self-driving car, for example, learns to drive using ML. Essentially, data is harvested and analysed and then an algorithm is developed based on the results. This one-line description grossly oversimplifies how ML works, but you get the general idea.

For example, if you normally drink your coffee at 6 AM every day on weekdays and at 8 AM on weekends, ML will analyse the data and determine your coffee drinking patterns, potentially automating your coffee making process if you have, say, a smart coffee maker. More data might lead the algorithm to determine that you drink coffee late on public holidays as well, or the data might be tied to your heart rate, etc.

The possibilities are endless, but are predicated on a large amount of data, some of it very revealing and potentially a privacy nightmare.

Image: Google

Traditionally, this data would need to be harvested by some device, like your smartphone, and then sent to the cloud for processing. ML is then used to analyse the data further and learn from it, further improving algorithms.

As Google explains in its blog-post, this approach requires low-latency, high-bandwidth data transfer rates. Of course, the privacy issues also raise their head here and taking responsibility for the data can put a company in a tricky spot.

With FL, Google has changed how the learning process works. As they describe it, “your device downloads the current model, improves it by learning from data on your phone, and then summarises the changes as a small focused update.”

The data that’s actually sent to the cloud is the updated algorithm and not the actual data itself. The data remains on your phone at all times.

Google’s cloud-based FL then aggregates these updates and creates an improved model for all devices. This updated model is then sent to devices as an update and the process repeats itself.

Using this technique, Google claims that bandwidth needs can be dropped by up to 100x.

Better yet, for the sake of privacy, the cloud-based processing won’t happen unless “100s or 1000s of users have participated.” This ensures that the updates from a single user cannot be identified.

The updated algorithms that your phone creates are sent to the cloud in a compressed and encrypted manner to begin with.

Google has deployed this technique in their Gboard app to help improve its natural language processing, but as they refine the process, they hope to expand FL’s scope to other applications as well.

FL has the potential to fundamentally change the way models are developed in the future. More information can be found here.

Publish date: April 12, 2017 11:16 am| Modified date: April 12, 2017 11:16 am

Artificial intelligence used to gather insights into cancer with machine-learning platform

Image Credit: Reuters

  29 Jan 2017 , 12:54

A team of scientists has used artificial intelligence (AI) to gain insight into the biophysics of cancer with their machine-learning platform predicting a trio of reagents that generated a cancer-like phenotype in tadpoles.

The research, reported in journal Scientific Reports, showed that during these extensive experiments, the biologists observed that all the melanocytes — a mature melanin-forming cell — in a single frog larva either converted to the cancer-like form or remained completely normal.

In their study, the researchers asked their AI-derived model to answer the question of how to achieve partial melanocyte conversion within the same animal using one or more interventions.

“We wanted to see if we could break the concordance among cells, which would help us understand how cells make group decisions and determine complex body-wide outcomes,” said Tufts University’s Michael Levin, who is the paper’s corresponding author.

The AI model ultimately predicted that a precise combination of three reagents — altanserin, a 5HTR2 inhibitor; reserpine, a VMAT inhibitor, and VP16-XlCreb1, mRNA encoding constitutively active CREB — would achieve that outcome.

The team used the AI-discovered model to run 576 virtual experiments. The last try gave one precise combination of three drugs predicting partial melanocyte conversion.

“Our system predicted a three-component treatment, which we had never have come up with on our own, that achieved the exact outcome we wanted, and which we had not seen before in years of diverse experiments,” Levin added.

“Such approaches are a key step for regenerative medicine, where a major obstacle is the fact that it is usually very hard to know how to manipulate the complex networks discovered by bioinformatics and wet lab experiments in such a way as to reach a desired therapeutic outcome,” Levin noted.

He said that the team now wanted to do something different — cure a disease, control cell behaviour and regenerate tissue.

IANS

Nokia unveils Mika, a digital assistant that’s meant only for telecom operators

Image: Reuters

  28 Jan 2017 , 15:16

Finnish telecommunications giant Nokia has created a customised digital assistant “MIKA” that will improve telecom operators’ efficiency by providing engineers faster access to critical information.

MIKA that stands for ‘Multi-purpose Intuitive Knowledge Assistant’ — is the first digital assistant trained specifically for the telecom industry, designed to provide automated assistance that saves time and frees highly skilled workers to focus on critical tasks.

“MIKA taps into the power of the Nokia AVA platform to provide quick and accurate answers, avoiding time wasted on fruitless searches. It is customised to support the specific needs of telecoms, and can deliver recommendations based on experience from networks around the world,” said Igor Leprince, Head of Global Services at Nokia, in a statement.

MIKA combines augmented intelligence with automated learning to provide access to an extensive range of tools, documents and data sources.

These include the Nokia AVA knowledge library, a repository of best practices gathered from Nokia projects around the world.

Using the knowledge library MIKA can provide recommendations based on similar issues seen in other networks.

MIKA is available via a web interface and mobile agent so that engineers can tap into its knowledge base, wherever they are.

In addition to launching MIKA, Nokia introduces ‘Predictive Repair’, a service that will enable operators to reduce costs and improve network quality by moving away from break-fix approaches to hardware maintenance.

“The care service can predict hardware failures and recommend replacements up to 14 days in advance, with up to 95 per cent accuracy,” the company said.

IANS

Nokia’s ‘Viki’ digital assistant will take on Google Assistant, Siri and Alexa in the near future

Image: Weibo

By tech2 News Staff /  09 Jan 2017 , 12:35

It certainly looks like the future of the smartphone is the digital assistant. The space is currently ruled by Google Now and Siri. Alexa and Cortana aren’t far behind either. Joining the fray, possibly, is Nokia’s own assistant and this one’s called Viki.

Google Assistant is an evolution of Google Now, but isn’t available on many devices yet.

GSMInfo.nl spotted Viki in a trademark filing made by Nokia. The trademark application was for the name Viki, and describes a software for “the creation and monitoring of mobile and web assistants working with digital knowledge and combining all data sources into a single chat and voice-based interface.”

Nokia, which recently revived its brand with the launch of the Android powered Nokia 6 in China, seems to have its heart in the right place. Samsung is also aware of the impending, AI-powered future and has been working on its own digital assistants for a while now (dubbed Bixby and Kestra).

As far as we’re aware, Viki is still only a name on a trademark application and we don’t even know the work that has been done on this AI.

There is also no timeline on if and when Viki will make its way to Nokia’s devices.

Japan working on a 130 petaflops supercomputer, which could be the fastest in the world

Image: Reuters

  26 Nov 2016 , 11:18

Japan plans to build the world’s fastest-known supercomputer in a bid to arm the country’s manufacturers with a platform for research that could help them develop and improve driverless cars, robotics and medical diagnostics.

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry will spend 19.5 billion yen ($173 million) on the previously unreported project, a budget breakdown shows, as part of a government policy to get back Japan’s mojo in the world of technology. The country has lost its edge in many electronic fields amid intensifying competition from South Korea and China, home to the world’s current best-performing machine.

In a move that is expected to vault Japan to the top of the supercomputing heap, its engineers will be tasked with building a machine that can make 130 quadrillion calculations per second – or 130 petaflops in scientific parlance – as early as next year, sources involved in the project told Reuters.

At that speed, Japan’s computer would be ahead of China’s Sunway Taihulight that is capable of 93 petaflops.

“As far as we know, there is nothing out there that is as fast,” said Satoshi Sekiguchi, a director general at Japan’s ‎National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, where the computer will be built.

The push to return to the vanguard comes at a time of growing nostalgia for the heyday of Japan’s technological prowess, which has dwindled since China overtook it as the world’s second-biggest economy.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has called for companies, bureaucrats and the political class to work more closely together so Japan can win in robotics, batteries, renewable energy and other new and growing markets.

DEEP LEARNING

In the area of supercomputing, Japan’s aim is to use ultra-fast calculations to accelerate advances in artificial intelligence (AI), such as “deep learning” technology that works off algorithms which mimic the human brain’s neural pathways, to help computers perform new tasks and analyze scores of data.

Recent achievements in this area have come from Google’s DeepMind AI program, AlphaGo, which in March beat South Korean professional Lee Seedol in the ancient board game of Go.

Applications include helping companies improve driverless vehicles by allowing them to analyse huge troves of visual traffic data, or it could help factories improve automation.

China uses the Sunway Taihulight for weather forecasting, pharmaceutical research, industrial design, among other things.

Japan’s new supercomputer could help tap medical records to develop new services and applications, Sekiguchi said.

The supercomputer will be made available for a fee to Japan’s corporations, who now outsource data crunching to foreign firms such as Google and Microsoft, Sekiguchi and others involved in the project said.

The new computer has been dubbed ABCI, an acronym for AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure. Bidding for the project has begun and will close on Dec. 8.

Fujitsu Ltd, the builder of the fastest Japanese supercomputer to date – the Oakforest-PACS, capable of 13.6 petaflops, declined to say if it would bid for the project.

The company has, however, said it is keen to be involved in supercomputer development.

Reuters

Microsoft and Elon Musk-backed OpenAI sign Azure agreement

  16 Nov 2016 , 17:11

OpenAI, the non-profit artificial intelligence (AI) research firm backed by Tesla Motors Inc’s Elon Musk and other prominent tech executives, has signed an agreement to run most of its large-scale experiments on Microsoft Corp’s flagship cloud service, Azure. OpenAI will use Azure for its experiments in deep learning and AI, and Microsoft will collaborate with the company on advancing research and creating new tools and technologies.

Musk, along with venture capitalist Sam Altman, co-chairs OpenAI, whose backers apart from Musk include Amazon.com Inc’s Amazon Web Services and tech investor Peter Thiel and LinkedIn Corp co-founder Reid Hoffman.  OpenAI is an early adopter of Microsoft’s Azure N-Series Virtual Machines service, which will be generally available from December.

These cloud-computing services, which are powered by Nvidia Corp graphics chips, are designed for the most intensive computing workloads, including deep learning and simulations.

“In the coming months we will use thousands to tens of thousands of these machines to increase both the number of experiments we run and the size of the models we train,” OpenAI said in a blogpost. The non-profit was created last December for the purpose of creating AI that augments human capabilities.

The investors have committed $1 billion to the startup, but OpenAI said it expects to spend only a “tiny fraction” of that in the next few years. OpenAI will continue to release open-source software to make it easier for people to run large-scale AI workloads on the cloud, and will provide Microsoft with feedback to ensure that Azure’s capabilities keep pace with its advances in AI.

Reuters

Investors believe that AI to take over millions of jobs and governments are not prepared

Image Credit: Reuters

  11 Nov 2016 , 09:03

Investors believe it is “inevitable” that artificial intelligence will destroy millions of jobs and that governments are unprepared for such an impact, according to a survey published on Thursday. Artificial intelligence (AI), or the process by which computers or robots take on tasks that need human intelligence, is one of the key themes of this week’s Web Summit in Lisbon.

The poll among 224 venture capitalists attending the conference showed 53 percent believed AI would destroy millions of jobs and 93 percent saw governments as unprepared for this. The survey also found that 83 percent of the investors canvassed expect Britain’s exit from the European Union to damage Europe’s economy and 77 percent believe it will damage British startups.

London is widely seen as the main tech startup hub in Europe, thanks to its large pool of talent and a much bigger pool of funding than in rival centres. Cities like Berlin, Amsterdam and Lisbon are eager to attract more tech startups.

The Web Summit, one of Europe’s biggest tech conferences, is being held for the first time in Lisbon, with 53,000 attendees, after moving from Dublin where it was first launched in 2010. The venture capitalists taking part have more than $100 billion of capital in total to invest. The Web Summit conducted the poll on Nov. 7.

Reuters

Symantec Corporation announces new AI-powered “Symantec Endpoint Protection 14”

Image Credit: Symantec

  10 Nov 2016 , 14:30

Leading cyber security company Symantec Corporation on Wednesday announced “Symantec Endpoint Protection 14” — powered by artificial intelligence (AI) on the endpoint and in the cloud for better security. The “Endpoint Protection 14” is the industry’s first solution to fuse essential endpoint technologies with advanced machine learning and memory exploit mitigation in a single agent, delivering a multi-layered solution to stop advanced threats, the company said in a statement.

The solution delivers protection in a lightweight package, building on industry-leading 99.9 percent efficacy, low false positives and a 70 percent reduced footprint over the previous generation through new advanced cloud lookup capabilities.  “Multi-layered protection, enabled by AI, backed by the world’s most powerful threat intelligence force and powered by the Cloud, this is literally the smartest choice in endpoint technologies,” Tarun Kaura, Director, Solution Product Management, Asia Pacific and Japan of Symantec, said in a statement.

This comes right after the company exceeded its revenue estimates in the earnings report released on November 3, 2016. According to the company, the acquisition of Blue Coat along with continued growth and expansion in enterprise security market has helped the company surpass the earning projections.

With inputs from IANS

Toyota’s Kirobo Mini robot aims to be your companion in the car and at home; to cost around $400

By Nimish Sawant /  04 Oct 2016 , 10:21

Companion robots as well as humanoid robots are a thing in Japan. And the latest addition to that list is the Kirobo Mini robot, which is a palm-sized robot that is being positioned as a synthetic baby which can carry out casual conversations while being driven around in a car or at your home. In Japan, where the birth rates are plummeting and the population is ageing fast, the Kirobo Mini is being positioned as a companion robot for the elderly as well. Toyota plans to start retailing Kirobo Mini in 2017 for 39,800 Japanese Yen which comes to around $400 (approx Rs 27,000).

According to Reuters, the Kirobo Mini is Toyota’s non-automotive product which is aimed at the personal home-robot market. The Kirobo Mini is a smaller version of the Kirobo, which was a robot developed by Toyota and sent into space in 2013 along with Koichi Wakata who was the first Japanese astronaut to be commanding the International Space Station.

Image: Toyota

Kirobo Mini’s chief designer engineer says that the robot is meant to emulate a seated baby and tends to wobble a bit, to mimic a growing baby who is yet to learn the skills to balance itself. Toyota has gone this specific to add an element of vulnerability to the robot which will evoke an emotional reaction from its owners. It can recognise facial expressions, so it can tell if the person is happy or sad and accordingly respond to your emotions. This 10cm tall robot aims to be your companion on your long car rides as well, since according to Toyota, people spend and average of 4.3 years of their lives inside cars.

The Kirobo Mini can respond to your queries, blink its eyes (thanks to the LED lights around the eyes) and has a high pitched voice just like that of a growing baby. Toyota has even gone ahead an added a cradle to go along with the Kirobo Mini, which can fit into a car’s cup holder. Sure, the idea of a robot mimicking a little baby and being marketed as a product to fill in that gap, does raise some ethical questions, but then this isn’t the first companion robot launched in Japan.

Japan is a leader as far as use of industrial robots is concerned, with around 314 machines per 100,000 employees, as per the International Federation of Robots. Toyota, which is heavily investing in artificial intelligence research, will