In recent years, Reddit has continually put efforts into strengthening its ad targeting and optimization capabilities, this time with the acquisition of audience contextualization company Spiketrap. Though the specifics of the deal are not disclosed, Reddit has said that Spiketrap’s AI-powered contextual analysis and tools would assist Reddit in areas such as ad quality scoring and will enhance prediction models for enabling auto-bidding. In other words, this acquisition will assist Reddit in better understanding its graph and matching relevant ads, resulting in improved ad results.
Reddit wants to make it simpler for advertisers to target relevant audiences based on interests; therefore, the agreement represents the company’s expanding commitment to its advertising business. The acquisition continues Reddit’s record of purchasing AI-powered businesses like MeaningCloud in July and Spell in June. The MeaningCloud platform is a natural language processing platform that enables developers to create apps that can extract meaning from written information, such as text on Reddit’s forums. Spell is a SaaS AI platform that enables technology teams to construct and execute machine learning algorithm experiments at scale.
In today’s millennials and Gen-Z-dominated internet culture, people often use emoticons, incomplete sentences, memes, inside jokes, and other unstructured languages when conversing with one another. Hence, measuring how people engage with online content using simple statistics based on what they click, see, or vote for is crucial and challenging.
The contextual analysis offers more profound insights than can be obtained from simply quantitative statistics of the number of engagements or link clicks. For instance, by utilizing metrics like audience sentiment, impact ratio, and conversation trends, the data collected from a campaign by Spiketrap’s proprietary AI, Clair AI, may provide an advertiser with a bit more insight about not only how but why people are talking about a campaign.
Clair AI is renowned for its potential to glean operational insights from unstructured data instantly. Reddit will be able to track popular articles in real-time using the Clair AI system, which will then map those stories against online community engagement to more accurately map information flows.
Another Spiketrap product called Emotion AI can identify the tone of a message, such as enthusiasm, sarcasm, or toxicity. Reddit has struggled with toxicity over the years, frequently having to ban harassing and nasty subreddits as well as those that advertisers would want to avoid.
Spiketrap is a California-based company that was established in 2016 and provides specialized audience analytics and media solutions to businesses in the gaming and media sectors.
Reddit reports that the Spiketrap team has joined the organization and will lead several initiatives in the future for its advertisements business. Reddit is presently concentrating on fusing Spiketrap’s tools, technology, and resources with Reddit; as part of this transition, the company emphasizes, a plan for its commercial operation will be included.
The Chinese company Baidu unveiled the first superconducting quantum computer, Qianshi, which touts it as the first all-platform quantum hardware-software integration solution in the world.
This is the company’s first superconducting quantum computer that combines its hardware platform and software stack called Liang Xi on an industrial scale. The ability of a material to conduct electricity without producing heat or wasting energy is known as superconductivity. Several businesses have introduced quantum systems using superconductive components in recent years. The software stack, which Baidu has developed, includes:
A quantum machine learning called Paddle Quantum
A quantum error processing toolkit dubbed QEP
Several other components
The 10-qubit quantum computer, which integrates various practical quantum applications, was shown at the Quantum Create 2022 conference in Beijing. These applications include quantum algorithms for simulating protein folding and designing new materials for novel lithium batteries. The company further emphasizes that the performance of other commercially accessible quantum computers is currently limited to 7 qubits. This innovation results from four years of extensive research and development by Baidu’s Institute for Quantum Computing. The division has already begun developing Qianshi’s successor, which Baidu claims will have a 36-qubit superconducting quantum processor with couplers.
According to Runyao Duan, director of the Institute for Quantum Computing at Baidu Research, “with Qianshi and Liang Xi, users can create quantum algorithms and use quantum computing power without developing their quantum hardware, control systems, or programming languages.” Runyao claims with the help of Baidu’s inventions, anybody with a smartphone may now access quantum computing from anywhere at any time. Baidu’s platform is also readily compatible with a wide range of quantum processors, allowing for “plug-and-play” access.
The ongoing heated competition between USA and China to dominate the tech industry took a surprising turn on Wednesday. Chip manufacturer NVIDIA said that US officials asked it to stop shipping two of its top computing processors for use in Artificial Intelligence research to China as a sign of rising tensions over the global semiconductor conflict.
In order to address the possibility that the covered products could be utilized in, or diverted to, a military end use, the US government has imposed a new licensing prerequisite for any future export to China (including Hong Kong) and Russia, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. With tensions in Beijing after visits to Taiwan by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other US leaders this month, the new regulation represents a substantial uptick in the Biden administration’s attempts to avert future supply chain problems and promote competition with the Chinese government.
Chinese enterprises won’t be able to do advanced computer functions, such as voice and image recognition, satellite imagery for weapons, etc., cost-effectively without the supply of American chips from firms like NVIDIA and its rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). The new license requirement, according to NVIDIA, will affect the export of systems like DGX that use its A100 and H100 processors, which are developed to accelerate machine learning activities. Furthermore, it may jeopardize the completion of the H100, NVIDIA’s flagship processor, announced this year.
According to the filing, the licensing obligation also applies to any future NVIDIA integrated circuit that achieves peak performance and chip-to-chip I/O performance levels that are equal to or greater than those of the A100, as well as any system that employs those circuits.
If clients choose not to buy the company’s alternative product offerings or if the US government delays granting licenses or refuses licenses to important customers, it will cost NVIDIA a US$400 million loss in sales to China.
According to an AMD representative, new licensing requirements would prevent its MI250 artificial intelligence chips from being sold to China. On the plus side, the MI100 chips are not likely to be affected, and the company does not anticipate the new regulation will have a material impact on business.
The US Department of Commerce refused to disclose the new requirements it has established for AI chips that cannot be exported to China but did state that it is evaluating its China-related rules and procedures to prevent sophisticated technologies out of the wrong hands.
The US is pursuing a comprehensive approach to implementing extra measures needed to be associated with technology, end-uses, and end-users to preserve US national security and foreign policy objectives, a spokeswoman told Reuters.
After the news broke down, NVIDIA’s shares dropped 6.6% after hours, while AMD saw a 3.7% drop after hours. According to Stacy Rasgon, a financial analyst at Bernstein, the announcement indicated that around 10% of NVIDIA’s data center sales—which investors have closely followed in recent years—came from China and that the sales decline was probably manageable for NVIDIA.
The chip restriction comes after NVIDIA predicted last week that the current quarter would see a significant decline in sales due to an underperforming gaming market. According to NVIDIA, third-quarter revenue would total US$5.90 billion, a 17% decrease from last year. NVIDIA revealed US$6.7 billion in sales for the second quarter, which was much lower than estimates. However, it reported revenue from its data center business rose by 61% over the same period last year.
This is not the first time the United States has sought to restrict selling chips to Chinese vendors. The government of former President Donald Trump prohibited suppliers from providing the telecom giant Huawei with processors built with American technology without a special license in 2020. This caused Huawei to flood chip makers based outside the US to help with their company needs.
China’s government has been investing heavily in its domestic chip industry over the past few years in an effort to support businesses that can compete with US, South Korean, and Japanese industry behemoths. However, the US government’s restriction will put a dent in its need for chip supplies. The nation has already been struggling to meet new demands amid the semiconductor crisis worsened by the covid pandemic. Early indications of shifting demand caused some computer companies to stockpile chips and place advance orders as the pandemic worsened, leaving other companies scrambling to get the components. Meanwhile, due to the rapid changes in demand brought on by the pandemic, the cost of transporting cargo containers and air freight rates worldwide has skyrocketed.
The ban met a negative response from China. Wang Wenbin, a representative of the Chinese foreign ministry, stated on Thursday that the US was trying to impose a technology blockade on China. He said the restriction demonstrated America’s efforts to uphold its technological hegemony.
Shu Jueting, a spokesperson of the Chinese commerce ministry, said that the move endangered the stability of the world’s supply and industrial chains and the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese businesses. According to Jueting, this action would interfere with supply networks and the global economic recovery. The US side should immediately halt its misguided measures, treat businesses from all nations fairly, including those from China, and do more to support global economic stability.
For now, China will be compelled to rely on multiple lower-end processor alternatives from NVIDIA that were not prohibited if it fails to find direct local replacements. Even though it would be more expensive, this effort to replicate the processing capabilities would not operate at the same speeds.
The one-of-its-kind model has helped the Jio Mobility team provide support across multiple categories by enhancing local language queries by 2.5 times and reducing human interventions by 80%.
With Jio Mobility, Haptik provides chatbots across three platforms: WhatsApp Business account, MyJio App, and Jio website. This solution has assisted Jio Mobility in engaging in 2M+ conversations from customers in Hindi and Hinglish with an 80% decrease in human interventions and a 2.5 times increase in localized queries.
Microsoft, in collaboration with Jio Haptik, facilitates vernacular support for users by leveraging transfer learning from multilingual and monolingual data to create this unique language model. Their unified efforts have helped Jio Mobility’s customer care feature a one-of-a-kind conversational service in Hindi and Hinglish.
Basic translation models have existed in the market for a long time. Still, they are not equipped to handle grammatical errors, and unstructured sentences are essential for conversational agents to perform well. However, this one-stop solution by Azure Cognitive Services and Jio Haptik manages Hindi in Roman script (Hinglish) and Devanagari, allowing users to switch between languages while functioning at high accuracy for short sentences and domain-specific conversations.
Chip designer Nvidia has said that US officials have ordered it to stop exporting two top computing chips required for artificial intelligence (AI) work to China.
The move could cripple the ability of Chinese firms to carry out advanced work like image recognition and hamper Nvidia’s expectations to generate $400 million in sales this quarter. Nvidia shares fell about 4% after hours.
The company said that the ban, which affects its H100 and A100 chips designed to speed up machine learning tasks, could interfere with the completion of development of the H100, the flagship chip Nvidia announced this year. AMD shares were down 2% in after-hours trading.
AMD had received new license requirements to stop its MI250 artificial intelligence chips from being exported to China, but it believes its MI100 chips will not be affected. AMD said it does not believe the new rules will negatively impact its business.
Nvidia said US officials told it the new rule would address the risk that the covered products may be used in, or diverted to, military end use or military end user in China.
The announcement signals a significant escalation of the US crackdown on China’s technological capabilities as tensions bubble over the fate of Taiwan, where chips for Nvidia and almost every other major chip firm are manufactured.
Without American chips from companies like Nvidia and its rival Advanced Micro Devices, Chinese organizations will be unable to cost-effectively carry out the kind of advanced computing used for image and speech recognition, among many other tasks.
A woman received $10.5 million in an accidental transaction from popular cryptocurrency platform Crypto.com and then allegedly spent it on a luxury home.
Two sisters in Melbourne, Australia, are now being chased by the courts after going on a spending spree with the cash. A Crypto.com representative confirmed to Decrypt that the matter is currently “before the courts” but would not comment further.
Crypto.com, a Singapore-based exchange that also offers a Visa debit card, mistakenly sent the huge sum when Thevamanogari Manivel, the woman who received the money, asked for a $100 refund in May 2021.
But instead of notifying Crypto.com of the mistake, Manivel and her sister Thilagavathy Gangadory allegedly went shopping with Manivel buying a $1.35 million five-bedroom home as a gift. Manivel also allegedly transferred $10.1 million into a joint account following the error.
Crypto.com noticed the mistake during an audit in December 2021. A Crypto.com employee had mistakenly entered an account number in the payment section and sent the money. The company has since taken legal action, and Victoria’s Supreme Court has ordered the home to be sold, and the money returned.
For the first time, China’s BYD became the top-performing EV brand in the world, beating Tesla by selling 3,54,000 EV units, marking a 266 percent Y-o-Y increase. In comparison, the global sales for Tesla stood at 2,54,000 units with only a 27 percent Y-o-Y increase.
The BEVs accounted for 72 percent of the report, while the PHEVs constituted the remaining EV sales. China topped the leaderboard, clocking a 92 percent Y-o-Y increase, accounting for 1.24 million units compared to the 0.64 million units sold in the previous year, followed by Europe and US.
While the top two performers in the list expect better sales amid the comparatively better situations, the other top players are also regaining the lost ground. As per the report, the top 10 EV models accounted for more than 30 percent of global EV sales in Q2 2022.
The Wuling Hongguang Mini EV was the best-selling model for the China market and grew to a whopping 16 percent on a Y-o-Y basis, becoming the third-ranked in global EV sales.
On the other hand, BMW aims to bring about 2 million BEVs on the road by 2025 as the German luxury manufacturer grabbed the fourth spot with an 18 percent Y-o-Y growth. Volkswagen saw a decline in the growth graph and only a percent Y-o-Y increase in Q2 2022. Hence, the world’s number one automobile manufacturer took the fifth spot.
Tesla is facing a class-action lawsuit in the US over phantom braking problems that the lawsuit alleged turned a safety feature into a ‘frightening and dangerous nightmare.’
The lawsuit, filed by Tesla owner Jose Alvarez Toledo in federal court in the Northern District of California seeking punitive damages, claimed hundreds of thousands of customers could seek to join his class action suit against the company.
The lawsuit accused the electric car-maker of fraudulently hiding the safety risks associated with the company’s Autopilot driver assist system, breaching its warranties, unfairly profiting from Autopilot, and violating California’s unfair competition law.
Phantom braking is when an advanced driver assistance system (ADAS), or a self-driving system, applies the brakes for no good reason.
The system can falsely detect an object on the road or anticipate a collision that will not actually happen and apply the brake to try to avoid it.
The lawsuit comes as Tesla faces a federal investigation from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) into its phantom braking problem, which first surfaced last fall. The US transport agency investigated over 400,000 Teslas for problems with their automated emergency braking systems.
The US government has received more than 750 complaints of unexpected braking from Tesla owners. According to the lawsuit, many Tesla owners have reported significant, unexpected slow-downs and stops due to the false engagement of their Class Vehicle’s braking systems, even though no objects were nearby,” the lawsuit read.
According to a court filing from last Friday, Facebook parent company Meta Platforms Inc. has agreed to settle a lawsuit that the social networking site granted access to confidential user data to other organizations, including Cambridge Analytica.
The lawsuit was filed due to the alleged role of Cambridge Analytica, a now-defunct British consulting firm that assisted US President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and during the UK’s Brexit referendum campaign, had inappropriately accessed and exploited Facebook user data. Though Facebook agreed to pay penalties in the US and UK and modify its privacy policies, both the social networking giant and Cambridge Analytica initially denied any wrongdoing.
The preliminary agreement, which was made public in a court filing late on Friday, comes after it was made public last month that Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg will be forced to undergo questioning by plaintiffs’ attorneys. Former COO Sheryl Sandberg, who resigned from Meta in June, and current COO Javier Olivan are also expected to be presented in the lawsuit sometime this month, in the final phase of pre-trial evidence gathering. According to a document filed in San Francisco federal court, Zuckerberg has consented to undergo a deposition that may last up to six hours, while Sandberg might face questions for up to five hours. Olivan, who has long overseen the company’s expansion activities, will be questioned in detail throughout the deposition for up to three hours.
Although the settlement’s contents were not made public, it is believed that additional information may become available in late October. This is because this Class-Action civil suit which is being handled by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, has been postponed for 60 days while the plaintiffs’ and Facebook’s legal teams work out a formal settlement. Reuters said that Facebook and its attorneys from Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher did not immediately comment on requests for further information on the settlement. Neither Keller Rohrback nor Bleichmar Fonti & Auld, the two legal firms representing the plaintiffs, made any comments.
After four years in court, 87 million present and former Facebook users will receive compensation for using their personal information without their consent. As some of the users may have independently filed a lawsuit, the amount depends on how many people are in the class. Depending on the settlement amount, the attorneys will retain 25% to 33% of the total sum.
Facebook used to offer full access to app developers so that they would be equipped with data to develop games, dating apps, and other socially-friendly software using user data. Soon, marketers and academics started carrying out independent studies based on user data. Researcher Jonathan Bright explained in a blog post from 2018 how Facebook’s Graph API was able to acquire user data for years. The information that Facebook applications could take was extensive, including about me, actions, activities, birthday, check-ins, education, events, games, groups, hometown, interests, likes, location, notes, online status, tags, photographs, questions, relationships, religion/politics, status, subscriptions, website, employment record.
Things turned ugly when Facebook stated that in 2014 Aleksandr Kogan, a psychology professor at the University of Cambridge, violated its privacy standards by sharing Facebook user data collected from his personality-prediction app thisisyourdigitallife (also known as GSRApp), with third parties, including Cambridge Analytica. The app queried its users about their personalities and other aspects of their lives, and it also gathered data from them and their friends in their social networks. The data had a rather wide scope and comprised roughly 30 distinct data points about the people who downloaded the app in addition to information on those users’ Facebook friends.
In order to build a system that could profile specific US voters in order to target them with tailored political advertisements, Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy owned by hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and led at the time by Trump’s chief advisor Steve Bannon, used personal information taken without authorization in early 2014.
To provide personality assessments for GSRApp users and their Facebook friends, Kogan and Cambridge Analytica created, utilized, and analyzed data from the app in 2014. The company used these personality scores for voter profiling and targeted advertising by comparing them to data on American voters. Kogan was able to repurpose an app he already had on the Facebook network for this endeavor, giving it the ability to gather Facebook data from app users and their Facebook friends.
The world was hit by a massive curveball when a whistleblower revealed widespread data exploitation to the Observer in 2018. The Observer is the oldest Sunday newspaper in the world, published by the Guardian group. The Guardian Media Group purchased it in 1993 to serve as a sister publication for the Guardian.
A dossier of information regarding the data misuse was presented to the Observer by whistleblower Christopher Wylie, a Canadian data analytics expert who collaborated with Cambridge Analytica and Kogan to develop and manage the program. According to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and the National Crime Agency’s cybercrime unit, this comprised emails, contracts, bills, and financial transactions confirming one of the worst Facebook data breaches in history. This data breach resulted in the theft of more than 50 million profiles, most of which belonged to US citizens registered to vote. Additionally, it was charged with using strategies to suppress Black voters, according to Wylie.
Concerns regarding Facebook’s participation in selecting voters for the US presidential election have become even more pressing in light of the revelation of the enormous amount of data collected and the purposes for which it was used. This revelation compelled Zuckerberg to testify before Congress and resulted in the social media company being fined a multibillion-pound penalty. This is because, as per Facebook’s platform policy, data from users could only be collected to improve the user experience in the app and could not be sold or used for advertising – implying that the social networking company was lying about using user data for unethical purposes. Days after the article was released, Facebook’s stock price plummeted by an amount greater than $100 billion.
Facebook first refuted that Cambridge Analytica had violated data security and that Kogan’s company GSR had harvested information. In a statement, the company said that Kogan acquired access to this information in a lawful manner and through the appropriate procedures, but did not afterward adhere to company policies because he disclosed the data to outside parties. Later Facebook claimed to have withdrawn the app in 2015 and requested proof from anybody who had copies that the data had been destroyed.
In August 2016, a letter from Facebook’s attorneys ordering him to delete any data he had that had been obtained by GSR was included in the proof Wylie provided to the UK and US authorities.
Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal surfaced, Facebook has reduced the amount of information available to developers, blocked access to its data from hundreds of applications suspected of misusing it, and made it easier for users to set limits on the sharing of personal information. Just two months after the revelation that the political consulting firm had gathered the personal information of 87 million users, the company filed for bankruptcy. What’s scary is we only know about how Facebook gave Cambridge Analytica access to user personal data. There is a possibility that the company is still keeping other instances of data leaks under wraps.
The British Information Commissioner’s Office swiftly turned its attention to Cambridge Analytica and Facebook in its investigation into data and politics. In a separate investigation, the Electoral Commission also looked into Cambridge Analytica’s involvement in the EU referendum. Due to the data sharing incident, Facebook was fined £500,000 (maximum possible fine) in the UK by the Information Commissioner’s Office. In October 2019, the company decided not to appeal the ICO penalty.
In the meanwhile, the US Federal Trade Commission slapped Facebook with a record-breaking $5 billion in July 2019 for its participation in the incident. In order to improve its monitoring of privacy policies, the agreement called for the company’s board of directors to be restructured. The FTC also looked into whether this breach was in violation of a consent agreement signed in 2012 between Facebook and the agency, which required Facebook to improve user privacy protection. A separate lawsuit from last year said Facebook paid the FTC $4.9 billion more than required as part of a settlement to shield Zuckerberg.
While Facebook tried to allegedly shift attention from its role in the Cambridge Analytica breach by renaming itself Meta, both Meta and the social networking site Facebook are still drowning themselves in lawsuits.
After almost a million Britons signed up for a lawsuit organized by an organization called “You owe Us,” which has the claimed purpose of illustrating that the world’s biggest firms are not above the law, the social networking giant was slammed with a mass action lawsuit in the UK in October 2020.
In March 2020, Australian Information Commissioner and Privacy Commissioner Angelene Falk filed a lawsuit in the Federal Court against Facebook Inc. and Facebook Ireland. She claimed at the time that Facebook had violated Australian privacy legislation by engaging in significant and/or persistent invasions of privacy. Earlier in February, the Federal Court granted the Commissioner permission to sue Facebook. Attorney General Karl Racine of Washington, DC, filed the most recent complaint against Meta in May this year.
While Meta and Facebook are desperately grasping straws since the Cambridge Analytica scandal took the world by storm, one wonders if the current settlement can reverse the damage inflicted. At the same time, a detailed and transparent probe is required to investigate the possible hidden data breaches in the past by Facebook. The company has been under heat for racist mislabeling facial recognition AI before.
Vijay Balakrishnan has joined United Phosphorus Limited (UPL), a global provider of sustainable agriculture solutions, as their Senior Vice President (VP) and Chief Data & Analytics (D&A) Officer. Balakrishnan previously worked as the Group Chief Data Officer at Michelin, India.
In a LinkedIn post, Balakrishnan announced that he will be leading the group D&A focus at UPL from today. He said he would be responsible for setting up a new D&A center in Bengaluru to augment the current D&A activities globally.
He said, “I’m looking forward to learning the dynamics of the agriculture industry and the varied roles of tech and D&A to maximize value across the spectrum.” Balakrishnan has an MBA in Finance from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi.
United Phosphorus Limited offers an integrated portfolio of both patented and post-patent
agricultural solutions for various arable and specialty crops, including biological, crop protection, seed treatment, and post-harvest solutions covering the entire crop value chain.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Balakrishnan is passionate about enabling business decisions through smart insights derived from the right data at the right time and exploring unique ways of data delivery, including reports, interactive dashboards, mobile Apps, alerts, chatbots, smart bulbs, and AR/VR.
