Taiwan’s government launches its new artificial intelligence hub with the purpose of upgrading its existing industries and becoming a global leader. Taiwan identified the capabilities of artificial intelligence to increase the productivity and efficiency of various industries. Hence, the government decided to adopt multiple measures to support industrial artificial intelligence research and development.
Enterprises are also being asked to promote the deployment of AI solutions through public-private partnerships programs in the country. The private sector of Taiwan is already witnessing a boost in the AI adoption rate due to efforts made in the past.
Taiwan Industrial Development Bureau’s AI HUB initiative interviewed over 20 industry associations regarding their pain points that have facilitated more than 50 artificial intelligence applications in the country.
Consulting Analyst at Frost & Sullivan, Georgia Edell, said, “The use cases for AI are growing rapidly, but enterprises may still be reluctant to risk adoption. Government programs that support AI companies and startups, as well as the adopting enterprises, are an important way to increase the development of the industry.”
She further added that the effort made by Taiwan Industrial Development Bureau is considerably helping companies operating in various sectors to quickly adopt AI technologies in a way that meets the real and immediate needs of industries.
The new AI Hub initiative plans to accelerate the growth of artificial intelligence by improving the following areas –
Providing better support to companies for helping them in the R & D process.
Providing incentives to enterprises for adopting AI technologies.
Tailoring the program to develop AI adoption for the real and immediate needs of industry segments.
Highlighting various use cases to point out the advantages of AI technologies.
The AI hub has meticulously designed its plan of action by monitoring international trends in the artificial intelligence market. This calculated move will ensure the effectiveness and success of the newly launched initiative.
Earlier this year, the Taiwan-India Artificial Intelligence Technology Innovation Research Center also signed a collaboration agreement with NASSCOM to improve relations between Indian and Taiwanese businesses while also facilitating trade.
The Center for Data Ethics and Innovation (CDEI) publishes the world’s first roadmap to accelerate the growth of the artificial intelligence ecosystem in the United Kingdom. It is a one-of-a-kind roadmap that aims to make the United Kingdom a world leader in artificial intelligence.
The newly published roadmap is a part of the country’s national AI strategy to help regulate the threats posed by various artificial intelligence technologies and promote the adoption of risk-free solutions in multiple industries. According to the guideline, artificial intelligence technologies will be first verified to check their reliability and security before they get deployed in the country.
The Minister of Technology and the Digital Economy at the Department of Digital, Culture, Media, and Sports, Chirs Philip, said, “In the National AI Strategy, we committed to establishing the most trusted and pro-innovation system for AI governance in the world and building an effective AI assurance ecosystem in the UK will be critical to realizing this mission.”
He further added that he is looking forward to working with the stakeholders from standards bodies and service firms to make the vision of the roadmap a reality.
The roadmap published by CDEI points out the following six areas for action –
To generate demand for reliable and effective assurance for artificial intelligence supply chains and improve understanding of risks involved with their deployment.
To build a dynamic and competitive artificial intelligence market in the country.
To develop standards to provide a common language for AI assurance.
To build an accountable artificial intelligence assurance profession.
In setting up specific requirements to support organizations to meet regulatory obligations.
In improving links between industries and researchers.
According to CDEI, a stable and matured AI ecosystem has the potential to become a multi-billion pound industry in the coming years. Moreover, a matured artificial intelligence industry will open doors to thousands of new job opportunities in the United Kingdom.
“Today’s publication marks a key first step in operationalizing the UK’s National AI Strategy and the UK leading the way in how a world-leading AI assurance ecosystem and market can become a reality,” said deputy CEO of TechUK Antony Walker.
Sophia, the world’s most renowned humanoid robot who has spoken before the United Nations, interviewed Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Markel, in addition to presenting in New York Fashion Week and singing on “Tonight’s Show,” has made headlines once again. This time, though, for a very different reason. On December 16, the tokenized form of Hanson Robotics’ humanoid robot will be up for auction on Binance as a part of an initial game offering (IGO) set. A total of 100 iNFTs (intelligent non-fungible tokens) versions of Sophia will be auctioned off under the collection name ‘The Transmedia Universe of Sophia beingAI.’
These NFTs will engage with humans in a gamified atmosphere on their own. The creators hope that by using a virtual format, they will be able to grow to millions of simultaneous interactions across several media platforms and devices. “I believe the virtual format can allow us to scale to millions of concurrent interactions across devices and media platforms, which would create large-scale impact,” said Jeanne Lim, the former CEO of Hanson Robotics.
It was Lim who debuted a virtual animation version of the robot called “Sophia beingAI” earlier this month at her new firm, beingAI, under a perpetual license and co-branding agreement. Lim thinks that the new AI entity will bring humanity and technology together to enable us to realize our true nature of unconditional love and limitless potential.
BeingAI has teamed up with iNFT production company Alethea AI to bring 100 tokens to life for the metaverse, including Sophia on Binance’s NFT marketplace. The word “iNFT” refers to revolutionary NFTs that are integrated with intelligence in the form of an AI personality, allowing them to write their own smart contracts. These self-aware NFTs can interact with humans in a gamified environment in real-time. Alethea AI employs OpenAI’s GPT-3 engine to generate NFTs that are smarter than current NFTs.
The iNFT will be part of Alethea AI’s decentralized Metaverse Project Noah’s Ark, which is an “intelligent metaverse” that aims to preserve and evolve the culture and collective intelligence of the human species. Last October, Alethea AI unveiled Noah’s Ark as a metaverse that will be “inhabited by sentient, interactive NFTs.” The auction will run for five days, with twenty iNFTs issued each day until the sale ends on December 21.
The price of each iNFT has not been revealed, but it is expected to start with tens of thousands of dollars. Meanwhile, the original Sophia didn’t appear thrilled to have a virtual replica of herself out there in a video exchange between the two.
Pat Lee, a well-known comic book artist who has previously worked with DC Comics and Marvel on big-name characters like Batman, Superman, Ironman, and Spider-Man, will also contribute to the show’s illustrations.
Sophia was first introduced on February 14, 2016. She became a Saudi Arabian citizen a year later. Sophia has also been recognized as a United Nations Development Program Champion of Innovation, making her the first non-human to achieve so.
This is not the first time Sophia has ventured into the NFT space. Sophia organized an NFT auction on the Nifty Gateway platform in March of this year.
Virtual calling assistant solutions developing company Smith.ai launches the world’s first AI-powered client-controlled solution for complex outbound calling campaigns.
The newly launched solutions will allow customers of Smith.ai to create, schedule, and monitor outreach campaigns according to their own specific requirements at ease. The solution is now capable of making calls to others sent to them by the customers through spreadsheets or Smith.ai’s outbound API.
The artificial intelligence-powered calling system would help companies automate various processes, including routine calls to existing clients, lead follow-ups, payment requests, review requests, and many more. All these activities can be performed for a single time or can be set as recurring tasks depending upon the needs of customers.
Aaron Winston from Express Legal Funding, a customer of Smith.ai, said, “Smith.ai has been a game-changer for us. They expertly handle the outbound calls to individuals who complete an online application on our website. They took the time to really learn about our company and its services, so we have total confidence when they do outreach on our behalf.” He further added that Smith.ai has become an integral part of their business and has turned out to be a way more than a worthwhile investment for them.
San Francisco-based artificial intelligence solutions providing firm Smith.ai was founded by Aaron Lee and Justin Maxwell in 2015. The company specializes in developing virtual receptionists that can perform multiple tasks like accepting payments, intake clients, scheduling appointments, and many others. To date, Smith.ai has raised $7 million from investors like NFX and Fabio Rosati. Smith.ai’s platform comes with out-of-the-box support for integration with various popular applications like Salesforce, Slack, Hubspot, Zapier, and numerous others.
Co-founder and CEO of Smith.ai, Aaron Lee, said, “We’re democratizing access to cutting-edge products and services that equip small and mid-sized business owners to more effectively compete.”
Harvard University announces the launch of its new institute named Kempner for the study of natural and artificial intelligence. The Kempner Institute will carry out studies to better understand the fundamentals of human and machine intelligence.
Bernardo Sabatini from the neurology department of the Harvard Medical School and Sham Kakade will lead the Kempner Institute. The newly launched initiative has been funded by a $500 million gift from Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg. The institute has been named after Zuckerberg’s mother, Karen Kempner Zuckerberg.
According to officials, the funds will be used to appoint ten new faculty members and build new computing facilities for students. Both Zuckerberg and Chan have made precious contributions to Harvard in the past in the form of supporting students, researchers, faculty, and many more.
President of Harvard University, Larry Bacow, said, “The Kempner Institute at Harvard represents a remarkable opportunity to bring together approaches and expertise in biological and cognitive science with machine learning, statistics, and computer science to make real progress in understanding how the human brain works to improve how we address disease, create new therapies.”
He also mentioned that the Kempner institute would help researchers better understand the human body and the world at a broader scale. According to the plans, Kempner Institute will be established at the new Science and Engineering Complex in Allston by 2022. The institute’s prime focus is to train undergraduates, graduates, and post-doctoral fellows in the human and artificial intelligence fields.
Individuals from underrepresented fields, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), will be recruited to join the institute to carry out research. Faculties from various fields, including computer science, neuroscience, applied mathematics, cognitive science, and many others, will be working together in the Kempner Institute.
According to Sabatini, the institute will bring in experts from multiple fields to create a new population of researchers through education and funding programs.
Microsoft announced that it has collaborated with Rigetti Computing, a pioneer in full-stack quantum computing. As a part of this partnership, Microsoft will offer Rigetti quantum computers over the cloud to users of its Azure Quantum service.
When the Rigetti system is fully operational, it will be the largest quantum computer available on Azure Quantum. According to the two companies, the integration is expected to be finished and available to consumers in the first quarter of 2022.
Quantum computers are information processing devices that employ quantum physics phenomena. Information in a classical computer is represented as a binary bit where a bit can be a one or a zero. In comparison, information is represented in a quantum computer by a quantum bit, or qubit, which may be placed in a quantum state that allows it to represent both zero and one at the same time.
Furthermore, in a classical computer, each bit in a computer chip works individually. The qubits of a quantum computer are “entangled” with others in the quantum processor, allowing them to collaborate to find a solution. As a result, quantum computers, in principle, have exponentially more power than classical computers backed by these two features.
Rigetti quantum computers employ superconducting qubits, which have demonstrated faster execution speeds and more scalability than other commercially available quantum computing systems. Rigetti quantum computers have the potential to help tackle a wide range of practical challenges, including machine learning, drug discovery, renewable energy, logistics optimization, and financial simulations, thanks to their performance characteristics.
It also excels in quantum processing languages and applications like combinatorial optimization, which entails decreasing functions with a high number of variables. As a result, Rigetti’s self-reliance grows, and it becomes a considerably more appealing investment choice since it has a variety of cards to play.
Krysta Svore, General Manager of Microsoft Quantum, had this to say about the collaboration: “Rigetti’s scalable approach to superconducting quantum computers will create new opportunities for the Azure Quantum development community.” Krysta also adds, “We’re working closely with Rigetti to deliver hybrid quantum-classical computing with the performance to tackle problems that were previously out of reach.”
Rigetti is currently attending Q2B 2021, a quantum computing conference, where it will demonstrate a quantum chemistry algorithm operating on a Rigetti quantum computer in the cloud employing Microsoft’s quantum intermediate representation (QIR). Rigetti and Microsoft are working together through the QIR Alliance to make quantum computing more compatible, which will cut development efforts for everyone in the area.
QIR will also be available on Azure Quantum to enable low latency and parallel execution.
Azure Quantum, according to Microsoft, is the finest development environment for simultaneously developing quantum algorithms for multiple platforms while maintaining the flexibility to adjust the same algorithms for different systems. Users may use a variety of programming languages to run their algorithms on numerous quantum systems, including Qiskit, Cirq, and Q#.
In mid-2022, Intel plans to take Mobileye public in the United States. This deal could value Intel’s self-driving unit at more than $50 billion. Chip giant Intel expects to hold on to majority ownership in the unit after the initial public offering (IPO).
The largest employer of Israel’s high-tech industry with nearly 14,000 workers also expects to retain Mobileye’s executive team and has no intention to spin off its majority ownership in Mobileye.
The company also stated that it would continue to provide technical resources to the automaker. Mobileye Chief Executive Officer Amnon Shashua said that the partnership yields substantial revenue and free cash flow to Mobileye, allowing funding for autonomous vehicle development.
“Amnon and I determined that an IPO provides the best opportunity to build on Mobileye’s track record for innovation and unlock value for shareholders,” Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said in the statement.
Mobileye was founded in 1999, and in 2017, Intel bought Mobileye for $15.3 billion, putting it into direct competition with rivals Qualcomm Inc and Nvidia Corp for developing driverless systems for global automakers. Mobileye has taken a different approach from its competitors, using a camera-based system that helps cars with lane change assistance and adaptive cruise control.
Mobileye is currently using lidar units from Luminar Technologies but plans to build its own “lidar” sensor to help its cars map out a 3D view of the road. However, Mobileye has never used Intel’s factories to make its chips. Instead, it relies on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co for all of its “EyeQ” chips to date.
A team of MIT researchers has developed a deep learning model that predicts the 3D shapes of a molecule using the 2D graph of its molecular structure. GeoMol is a model that processes molecules in seconds and performs better than previous models. It also specifies the 3D structure of each bond independently. The molecules are usually depicted as little graphs in this case, where individual atoms in a molecule are represented as nodes, and chemical bonds that connect them are represented as edges.
In cheminformatics or computational drug development, it is critical to deal with molecules in their native 3D structure. These 3D conformations determine the biological, chemical, and physical characteristics.
Understanding how a molecule will interact with certain protein surfaces requires determining its 3D form. However, it is not a simple process as pharmaceutical companies frequently conduct multiple laboratory tests on various compounds. Furthermore, it is a time-consuming and costly procedure.
According to Octavian-Eugen Ganea, a postdoc in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and co-lead author of the paper, GeoMol might aid these firms in speeding up the drug discovery process by reducing the number of molecules that need to be tested.
GeoMol predicts local atomic 3D structures and torsion angles, avoiding excessive over-parameterization of the geometric degrees of freedom, by using the competency of message passing neural networks (MPNNs) to gather local and global graph information. Message passing neural network is a new deep learning technology that is particularly built to operate on graphs.
At first, the model predicts the lengths of chemical bonds between atoms as well as the angles of those bonds. The arrangement and connectivity of atoms decide which bonds can rotate. The structure of each atom’s surroundings is then predicted separately. It then assembles surrounding rotatable bonds by computing torsion angles and aligning them.
The rotatable bonds can take on a wide variety of values in this case. As a result, the MIT team can capture a lot of the local and global environments that impact the prediction by employing message passing neural networks. Since the rotatable bond can take multiple values, the researcher team wants their prediction to be capable of reflecting that underlying distribution.
To test GeoMol, the MIT researchers used a dataset of molecules containing information on likely 3D shapes they could take. This dataset was developed by Rafael Gomez-Bombarelli, the Jeffrey Cheah Career Development Chair in Engineering, and graduate student Simon Axelrod.
The team compared the GeoMol against machine learning models and other ways to see how many of these plausible 3D structures it could capture.
GeoMol beat the other models on almost all of the measures that were assessed.
GeoMol also precisely specifies chirality throughout the prediction process since it identifies the 3D structure of each bond separately, removing the need for post-process optimization. Because a chiral molecule’s mirror copy would not interact with the environment in the same manner, chirality has been a key challenge in predicting the 3D structure of molecules. This might lead drugs to interact improperly with proteins, potentially resulting in serious adverse effects.
While the age of Metaverse is fast dawning upon us, this will usher a new chapter for the NFT marketplace, cryptocurrencies, and video gaming. Amid the fears that cryptocurrencies are still a risky gamble, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and many others are slowly gaining approval from Wall Street. Meanwhile, the dynamics between gaming and NFT are changing with the advent of NFT games.
This year, the NFT marketplace surged, beginning with NFT artwork that leveraged blockchain’s transparent and secure digital record to verify its products uniquely. This assured gamers that they could have digital ownership and resell their game characters for a profit, allowing a new business model for games known as play-to-earn, in which players earn incentives. With the widespread acceptance of NFT, the gaming industry is on the crux of new disruption.
New trends like “play-to-earn” and more widely part of the Web 3.0 movement will act as harbingers of a new era of gaming with a real-world economy and new player incentives. Web 3.0 refers to the third generation of the internet, which many predict will be driven by decentralized infrastructure and machine-based data interpretation. As a result, existing business models in the gaming industry may be fundamentally disrupted.
The arcade games gave the initial push to the gaming industry. It was followed by free-to-play games where gamers could pay to avail themselves of extra power-ups and RPG characters skins, which created a digital items-powered economy strictly controlled by gaming companies. Now, we are blessed with play-to-earn, which is centered on generating real-world value from in-game items and other types of digital products using non-fungible tokens, cryptocurrencies, and other blockchain technologies.
In play-to-earn, gamers no longer have to spend hundreds of dollars on products that are just related to their accounts. Instead, these goods are stored in a non-custodial wallet that gamers may use to play games.
This basically means that gamers can purchase commodities on the open market and use them for the course of the game. Once they finish the game, they can either sell their stuff on the open market for real money once they finish the game or use the commodities in another game that interests them. In other words, your assets are no longer bound to the game in which you purchased them. You can leave at any time and at least get some of the value you put in. One example of a successful play-to-earn game is Axie Infinity, which already has millions of players worldwide and has generated more than US$2.5 billion in trading volume.
Once this becomes mainstream, it will provide the groundwork for the much-desired Metaverse that many social media and gaming companies are attempting to build.
Polygon is one of the most well-known cryptocurrencies and NFT companies. As a network that provides scalability solutions for projects built on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain, Polygon has attracted an increasing number of users and developers interested in NFT, allowing them to generate and trade these assets at lower costs. This is achieved by adding an additional layer (Layer 2), which works on top of primary blockchains to speed up transactions. This allows it to reduce gas expenses, which are connected to the computational costs of blockchain transactions from user-made NFT purchases.
According to a study from blockchain development platform Alchemy, Polygon already has over 3,000 applications. Polygon has moved to the top of the list of companies that had made big investments in blockchain-based gaming so far, when it launched Polygon Studios, a $100 million incubator for NFT game ventures, earlier this year.
Its gaming initiative continues with the recent announcement of a new collaboration with GameOn Entertainment. Polygon Studios will contribute half of the non-dilutive money for continuing product development costs as part of the partnership. The investment will specifically benefit GameOn in spearheading the development, minting, and selling of NFTs on the games it currently manages. GameOn’s prime focus would be to sell white-label prediction games, fantasy games, and NFT-based games to other entertainment firms, which they could then push out to their user base, creating a win-win situation for everyone. Because this is developed on the Polygon network, it can minimize the costs of developing NFT games.
In a statement, its CEO, Matt Bailey, said, “By leveraging Polygon’s technology, GameOn continues to focus on blockchain and NFTs, bringing innovative gamification to Web 3.0 economies. Through resource-generating partnerships and acquisition mergers, we will continue to redouble our efforts to be the one-stop-shop for gamification , including NFT-based games”.
Building on the success of Polygon, the native MATIC cryptocurrency saw massive growth in 2021. Over the course of the year, the cryptocurrency value has increased by more than 13,000%. In addition, the network’s total number of unique addresses has topped 100 million. The token increased by 70% in October alone. Despite ending November with a loss, assets increased by more than 15% this week.
EngineeredArts recently unveiled its newly developed humanoid robot that is capable of making complex facial expressions. The robot, named Ameca, can make human-like expressions that are of the highest accuracy.
The robot comes with a face that has eyes, nose, lips, forehead, and cheeks. Developers have made the robot highly capable of making hyper-realistic human expressions from aww to surprise.
Ameca was revealed in a YouTube video uploaded by the company where it was making expressions by changing the shape of its facial features. EngineeredArts is a United Kingdom-based robotics company that is currently headed by Will Jackson. The firm specializes in developing various sorts of humanoid robots with multiple features and capabilities.
According to the company, Ameca is the world’s most advanced human-shaped robot. Ameca will turn out to be of great importance for students and developers to improve human-robot interaction. EngineeredArts plans to unveil more capabilities of the robot at the CES 2022 event that is supposed to be held in January.
The robot does not yet know how to walk but the company plans to upgrade it in the coming years. In the revealed video, the robot can be seen making various hand gestures that are synchronized with its facial expressions. Apart from Ameca, the company has also developed another humanoid robot named Mesmer that can perform similar facial actions.
Original 3D scans of real human expressions were used to train the robot in the development process that has resulted in a highly accurate bone structure and facial features of the humanoid robot.
