Udacity is offering scholarships for the black community to serve technology enthusiasts from the underrepresented community. In collaboration with Nokia and The Black in Technology Foundation, Udacity will offer 302 free scholarships to aspirants. The idea behind the scholarship is to empower learners from the black community to increase opportunity in the technology landscape.
With this scholarship, aspirants will get an opportunity to learn skills like Python, data structures and algorithms, Java, Cloud DevOps, and more. The last day to apply for the scholarship is on 27 September 2021.
The scholarship is divided into two phases — the challenge course and the Nanodegree program. While the first phase will start on 11 October, the announcement of the scholarship recipients for the full Nanodegree program will be announced on 21 December. And phase 2 will start on 10 January 2022.
On selection, you will have to participate in the 2-month challenge course; a total of 3020 applications will be approved for the challenge course.
Based on the performance of learners in the challenge course, Udacity will select 302 learners for the scholarship, which would be a 5-month Nanodegree program. On completion of the scholarship, you will receive a certificate.
Although the scholarship is open worldwide, Udacity would prefer students from the US. However, this does not mean that your application will not be accepted if your current location is not in the US.
DeepMind’s reinforcement learning lecture series is a collection of 13 videos spanning from 45 minutes to a little less than 2 hours each. The lecture series by DeepMind was created in collaboration with University College London (UCL) for providing information about modern reinforcement learning.
Taught by DeepMind researchers and engineers, the reinforcement learning lecture gradually progresses from fundamentals to advanced concepts.
With concepts like Markov Decision Processes, deep reinforcement learning, and sample-based learning algorithms, off-policy learning, multi-step updates, and more, the lectures are highly focused on Master’s students and above, according to DeepMind.
The lectures include MDPs and dynamic programming, theoretical fundamentals of dynamic programming algorithms, model-free prediction, model-free control, function approximation, and more.
DeepMind’s reinforcement learning lectures are hosted on their Youtube channel and contain slides in the description of each video for assisting learners to easily follow along with the lectures. Alternatively, you can access the learning rescues from their website.
Heavily focused on advancing the reinforcement learning technology, DeepMind has released a series of learning resources and has even created courses (available on Coursera).
The United States-based financial service providing company Well Fargo reveals its newly developed artificial intelligence tool named Integrated Receivable. The information was shared through a press release published by the company.
The unique platform helps users to manage their accounts receivable process effectively. Integrated Receivable uses machine learning, robot processing, and artificial intelligence to offer simplified payment and remittance data capture and invoice matching.
This platform will help businesses operating in the revenue cycle management domain will be able to reduce operational costs and time consumed in the AR process. Well Fargo has collaborated with the Florida-based fintech startup Dade Systems to provide its new artificial intelligence tool, Integrated Receivable. Dade Systems is one of the world’s leading accounts receivable solutions providing firms.
CEO of Dade Systems, Bill Zayas, said, “Wells Fargo and DadeSystems recognize the potential for accounts receivable automation to improve efficiencies for a wide range of businesses from smaller companies to the largest and most complex.”
The artificial intelligence platform is capable of automatically fixing errors and improving matching logic that would considerably help businesses to manage their workflow. Integrated Receivable comes with an intuitive and user-friendly interface that helps users understand the platform’s functionalities quickly.
Peggy Reingold and Perry Abbonizio founded San Diego-based Well Fargo in the year 1852. The company holds assets worth $1.3 trillion till date. The financial company provides multiple services, including banking, investments, insurance, mortgage, consumer finance, and many more.
The head of Treasury Management and Payment Solutions at Well Fargo, Danny Peltz, said, “By automating the capture of payments and the matching of funds to invoices, Integrated Receivables can help produce significant operational cost savings, reduce the risk of incomplete or inaccurate data entry, and accelerate cash flow.” He further mentioned that the platform allows its users to focus more on their key business objectives by reducing the time consumed in accumulating payments data.”
A new artificial intelligence-powered robot named Crew Interactive Mobile Companion-2 (CIMON) is now all set to accompany astronauts for missions to be executed from the International Space Station.
The unique robot has been developed by Airbus for the German Aerospace Center Space Administration. Earlier this year, the previous generation of this robot performed an operation with two European astronauts.
With this new upgrade, scientists have upgraded the capabilities of CIMON exponentially to behave in a human-like manner. Scientists have also worked towards improving the robot’s connection to Earth that would help astronauts to have better communication with the control center.
CIMON project manager Till Eisenberg said, “Through improving the software architecture we managed to get down to two seconds, just in time for the first mission. With further software upgrades, we have now tried to eliminate delays that might occur when the connection breaks.”
The earlier version of this robot was well appreciated by astronauts deployed at the international space station. The robot is planned to be used in the upcoming mission led by a German astronaut named Matthias Maurer that would commence in October 20201 using the SpaceX Crew-3 Dragon.
CIMON-2 will feature various impeccable artificial intelligence-powered voice recognition systems that will be controlled from Earth at an IBM data center located in Frankfurt. Developers are now focusing on enhancing the network reception of the robot as the signals have to travel from satellites to the IBM data center and back.
“There is already enough computational power aboard the space station that would be able to support CIMON. It’s only a question of sharing these computational resources,” said Eisenberg.
He also mentioned that his team is now planning to work on the third generation of CIMON, which would pack features that would not require it to have any connections with data centers located on Earth.
On Tuesday, following the approval of President Nayib Bukele’s proposal, El Salvador made history by becoming the first country in the world to adopt bitcoin as legal tender. The move was taken in an effort to encourage “financial inclusion,” investment, and economic growth.
The nation purchased 400 bitcoins, worth more than $20 million at that moment, ahead of the launch. Following the purchase of the first batch of 200, President Nayib Bukele announced through Twitter that the nation aims to purchase “a lot more.”
It is expected that in the next 90 days, the usage of cryptocurrencies as legal money – alongside the US dollar – will become the law, and the bitcoin/dollar exchange rate will be determined by the market. Salvadorans will be allowed to pay their taxes in bitcoin, and “every economic agent” will be forced to accept bitcoin as payment unless they do not have access to the needed technology.
Meanwhile, the regional development bank CABEI is assisting El Salvador in adopting the cryptocurrency, which is a significant demonstration of solidarity, given the World Bank has rejected aid to El Salvador due to concerns about the environment and transparency.
It would be interesting to observe whether El Salvador’s embrace of Bitcoin as alternative legal money reduces the cost of remittances, which are an essential source of income for millions in the area. According to the President, bitcoin could make it easier for Salvadorans living abroad to send home remittances, which amounted to $6 billion in 2019, contributing a fifth of the country’s GDP.
However, the fact is that most Salvadorans are unhappy with the proposal, and turned to the streets to protest against it. The angry mob also stooped to burning a tire and setting off fireworks in front of the Supreme Court. Their primary concerns are about lack of knowledge about cryptocurrencies or the volatility of the cryptocurrencies which can lead to more regulations and risks for the financial institutions.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has said that its plans could jeopardize a planned deal with the country, where El Salvador is seeking a $1 billion loan. Some economists have warned that the country could become a haven for financial crime. There are also widespread concerns about bitcoin’s potential environmental impact, as it consumes a lot of electricity.
Amid the concerns about whether the move might complicate discussions with the IMF, lawmakers passed the two-page proposal late Tuesday night with 62 of the assembly’s 84 votes. This was possible since the President’s party and supporters have complete control of Congress. El Salvador’s government also developed a digital wallet, Chivo for its 6.4 million people, which was preloaded with $30 in Bitcoin for users who register with a Salvadoran national ID number. Chivo is a local slang term for ‘cool.’ There will be no commissions on transactions. In addition, the government is also working on the installation of 200 Chivo automatic tellers and 50 Bitcoin attention centers around the country where customers may withdraw or deposit funds. Moreover, the Finance Ministry created a $150 million fund at state-run bank Banco de Desarrollo de la República de El Salvador, Bandesal, for backing the transactions.
Unfortunately, the rollout soon turned into a series of mishaps and glitches. For instance, President Bukele complained the government-backed bitcoin app was not available on various internet platforms including Apple and Huawei.
After it was resolved, Chivo digital wallet was swarming with traffic and it had to be pulled offline for a short time and connect to more servers and increase capacity. By the afternoon, the President was retweeting videos on social media of citizens using bitcoin to pay for things like McDonald’s and Starbucks in El Salvador.
He also tweeted “The process of #Bitcoin in El Salvador has a learning curve. Every step toward the future is like this, and we will not achieve everything in a day, nor in a month. But we must break the paradigms of the past.”
Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s value plunged early Tuesday, falling from more than $52,000 per coin to $42,000 before briefly recovering nearly half of that loss — an illustration of the volatility that has many people concerned. Though some believe this dip is the direct impact of El Salvador’s Bitcoin proposal, other experts blame whales for the downward spiraling of the prices. Whales are entities that own a large enough amount of bitcoin to be able to affect the value of the currency. Ether and other big cryptocurrencies were also affected by the downturn.
El Salvador took advantage of the price drop by purchasing 150 bitcoins. “I am buying the dip. There are 150 new coins in the mix,” President of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, sent out a tweet.
“The sale looks to be coming to a close. @IMFNews, I appreciate the dip. A million sheets of paper were saved. El Salvador currently has 550 bitcoins in its possession,” another tweet read.
For now, according to the government, the dollar will continue to be the national currency for public accounting reasons, and retailers that are technologically unable to accept the e-currency will be excluded from the law.
Despite the fact that President Bukele has a bad image, notably when he marched soldiers in war fatigues into Congress last year and threatened MPs to be summoned in seven days unless they approved a loan for new security equipment — if El Salvador’s experiment is a success, other countries may follow suit.
NeuroPixel.AI, a Bangalore-based Deeptech SaaS company, has secured US$825,000 in a seed round funding led by Inflection Point Ventures (IPV). Entrepreneur First, Huddle, Dexter Angels, and Rishaad Currimjee were among the other investors in the round.
The capital raised will be used to scale the R&D team in order to speed up the transition of their products from beta to production and expand their ‘training set,’ which is a critical component of any machine learning algorithm.
Founded by Arvind Nair (CEO) and Amritendu Mukherjee (CTO) in 2020, the Deeptech startup specializes in garment cataloging, which is one of the most time-consuming tasks that any fashion shop or e-commerce platform must complete on a regular basis. According to the company, its proprietary DeepNet framework would allow customers to photograph any outfit on simply a mannequin, and its technology will recreate the fashion on models of various sizes and positions. NeuroPixel.AI claims that its software would save 30 percent on cataloging costs and 90 percent on processing times.
According to Ankur Mittal, co-founder of Inflection Point Ventures, with the increase in the number of online shoppers, the requirement for realistic and high-quality product images would also increase. In the fashion industry, it plays a significant role in a buyer’s choice to buy. The procedure is cumbersome, time-consuming, and expensive, especially for SMEs and social sellers, two categories that are rapidly expanding. Ankur points out that using catalog image-based customization and virtual try-ons, NeuroPixel.AI is aiming to tackle this challenge by developing a solution that can change online fashion shops, allowing the typical customer to make a far more informed purchasing choice.
Prior to the recent funding investment, it had received a pre-seed investment of US$440,000 by Global talent investor Entrepreneur First (EF) during its fourth cohort in India, along with seven tech startups.
“What Arvind and Amritendu are building today is a world-class, innovative, technology-led startup that can change the way consumers shop online. I’m excited to see how NeuroPixel.AI evolves and disrupts the online fashion ecosystem to pave the way for more intuitive solutions and much-needed disruption of the online customer experience,” said Esha Tiwary, general manager at EF India.
The ISB D-Labs incubator, in partnership with the Department of Science and Technology, had also selected NeuroPixel.AI as one of six businesses for funding as part of their seed support program. In addition, the startup has been accepted into the Huddle accelerator, which will begin when this round of investment is completed.
A customer walks out of Majid Al Futtaim’s (MAF) first contactless, checkout-free store.
Majid Al Futtaim (MAF), the UAE’s shopping mall, retail, and leisure operator, has inaugurated the region’s first contactless and checkout-free store, thanks to its artificial intelligence-enabled “Simply Walk Out” approach. Carrefour, the French grocery giant, has just opened its automated checkout-free Carrefour City+ shop in the Mall of the Emirates, allowing customers to buy items from the convenience store and walk out without having to queue and pay at the cash register.
Access to the store, which is lined with 97 small surveillance cameras and countless sensors, is possible only if the customer’s phone is equipped with the store’s smartphone app, MAF Carrefour App. When consumers enter Carrefour City+, every item they pick up is instantly placed in a digital shopping basket, and the purchase is finished by simply walking out. This implies, not only is the purchasing experience quicker, but it is also totally contactless, requiring no interaction with store employees. This is the first time MAF has opened a physical outlet that offers zero store-staff interaction.
This new AI powered Carrefour store in @MallofEmirates has 97 cameras and will allow shoppers to pick their products and just walk out (payment via the app) pic.twitter.com/ALSdfpTRo9
To track a shopper’s movement inside the store, the cameras use a combination of computer vision and machine learning. According to the company, they employ tracking technology to identify consumers based on their body shape and do not collect any face recognition or biometric data. The cameras utilize key-point technology to distinguish each consumer and to detect when a customer picks up or drops a product, allowing their virtual baskets to be updated automatically.
MAF Carrefour’s smartphone app sends a digital receipt to the customer as soon as they leave the store, automatically charging the total cost of their basket to their registered card.
City+ is a first for Carrefour in the globe since it uses artificial intelligence and technology to properly identify thousands of goods, improving inventory management and making shopping easier for customers. Carrefour City+ has approximately 1,300 goods, including snacks, beverages, packaged foods, ready-to-eat meals, and basic necessities. It can be located near the Mall of the Emirates Metro Station link’s entrance.
For the AI technology, Majid Al Futtaim has collaborated with San Francisco-based Aifi. According to Hani Weiss, CEO of Majid Al Futtaim Retail, the store will continue to rely on AI technology to remove friction and enhance the retail experience. He further added that Carrefour City+ marks a major step forward for retail in the UAE and the region.
Inaugurated by His Excellency Omar bin Sultan Al Olama, Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, Digital Economy and Remote Work Applications, Carrefour City+ is an excellent example of the private sector’s participation in assisting the UAE’s Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) Strategy to become a major global center and open lab for 4IR application. It also aligns with the UAE Artificial Intelligence Strategy, which intends to position the UAE as a leader in AI investments and applications across a variety of industries.
Last Tuesday, Verizon announced that it would be partnering with Microsoft to offer an on-premises private edge compute solution for businesses. It will include integrating Verizon’s 5G Edge to Microsoft Azure Stack Edge as well as additional features, like Verizon’s ThingSpace IoT platform, data and video ingestion services, and network security, depending on enterprise requirements.
Verizon 5G Edge is a multi-access edge computing (MEC) platform that connects the carrier’s network with Wavelength and Stack Edge. Together with Microsoft Azure Stack Edge, it offers compute and storage capabilities to customers’ premises at the network’s edge. As a result, businesses benefit from enhanced efficiency, increased security, and the low lag and high bandwidth required for computer vision, augmented and virtual reality, and machine learning applications.
Verizon’s 5G Edge network works in tandem with Verizon’s On-Site 5G solution, which was released in June for business and public sector customers, and provides 5G network equipment such as small cells, packet core, and radios on-premises. The On-Site 5G offering is the first private wireless solution to provide a high-band millimeter wave spectrum, which has been instrumental in expanding Verizon’s Ultra Wideband network.
According to Sampath Sowmyanarayan, chief revenue officer of Verizon Business, the partnership with Microsoft brings 5G Edge to enterprises, dropping latency at the Edge, helping critical, performance-impacting applications respond more quickly and efficiently.
As per Verizon’s official statement, Retailers can analyze data in near real-time using On-Site 5G and edge computing to get actionable data-driven insights, improve inventory accuracy, and power quick and flexible supply chains. Manufacturers can improve asset performance, streamline operations, reduce downtime, and get end-to-end insight across all processes to make quicker, more informed choices. All of this is feasible thanks to data analytics provided by apps running on the local edge computing infrastructure.
Ice Mobility, a supply chain and logistics services company that serves Verizon and all of the carrier’s retail partners, was an early adopter of Verizon’s Microsoft Azure private 5G edge. As a way to improve on-site quality assurance, Ice Mobility is utilizing the solution to facilitate computer vision-backed product packing.
Ice Mobility intends to expand its use of Verizon and Microsoft’s integrated technologies by exploring 5G applications that rely on early computer vision and 5G Edge investments to deliver concrete, practical automation benefits like near real-time activity-based costing.
This solution would enable them to allocate overhead and indirect costs to specific customer accounts, pick and pack lines, and warehouse activities in order to increase efficiency and competitiveness.
The Artificial Inventor Project, run by Ryan Abbott, Law Professor at the University of Surrey, has launched a global effort to get the AI systems listed as an inventor on patents. Abbott’s team enlisted Stephen Thaler, Imagination Engines Inc. founder, to build the machine whose primary purpose was to invent. Australia and South Africa have favored their argument to get the AI machine to patent its invention. However, America’s top patent court has rejected the idea of AI being an inventor. He challenged the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s refusal as “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of direction and not in accordance with the law.”
In July 2021, the patent office of South Africa issued a patent listing DABUS as the inventor. Two days later, a federal judge from Australia also judged that a nonhuman could be named the inventor of a patent.
Thaler created a “creativity machine” called DABUS that “invented” a beverage container and a device for attracting enhanced attention. Abbott’s team filed applications in 17 jurisdictions around the world along with the U.S., South Africa, and Australia to list DABUS as the inventor on patents on these products.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejected their application for failure to list a person as an inventor. As a response, Thaler appealed to the district court. Further, the agency is now gathering comments and inputs from individuals and companies on addressing the problem of listing AI systems as both an invention and a potential inventor. It is seeking comment on how patent eligibility of AI systems affects investment.
“The unequivocal statements from the Federal Circuit that ‘inventors must be natural persons’ and ‘only natural persons can be inventors’ supports the plain meaning of ‘individual’ in the Patent Act,” the judge ruled.
A rendering of the electric ID.Buzz microvan from Volkswagen equipped with Argo AI’s self-driving technology.
Image: VW
Volkswagen has hit another milestone with Argo AI, a Pittsburgh-based autonomous vehicle start-up backed by the German automaker and Ford Motor. On Sunday, they unveiled the first version of the jointly developed, fully-electric self-driving van ID.BUZZ AD (Autonomous Driving). The self-driving ID.BUZZ AD will begin carrying passengers to their destinations in Hamburg in 2025 as part of a ridesharing service offered by MOIA.
Before the start of this week’s IAA auto and mobility expo in Munich, Argo and Volkswagen’s commercial vehicle division presented the first of five ID.BUZZ vans that will be part of a test fleet. At Argo’s R&D center and test track outside Munich, Volkswagen will conduct tests of the battery-powered vehicles equipped with Argo’s laser LIDAR sensors, radar, cameras, and AI-enabled software. The ID.BUZZ models are intended to have Level 4 autonomy, which implies that drivers will not be required to take charge, however the cars would only be able to function in certain situations, such as geofenced regions or predetermined routes. The ID.BUZZ joins the Ford Fusion and Ford Hybrid Escape as the third car platform to be connected with the Argo SDS.
Argo and VW created a prototype minivan earlier this year utilizing VW’s MEB electric vehicle platform inside a VW T6 Transporter and Argo’s AV technologies, including LIDAR sensors, radar, and cameras. Furthermore, Argo’s software allows the car to “see” its environment, plan its future moves, and anticipate the actions of other vehicles and people on the road. When combined with Argo’s sensor suite, autonomous driving at low and high speeds is possible.
Arndt von Bieren, a senior hardware engineering manager at Argo, says, one of the key distinctions of the ID.BUZZ compared to a regular automobile is the roof, which is large and gives a lot of freedom for adding Argo LIDAR and other sensors. “We were able to arrange the cameras and radar in a beautifully formed tiara around the LIDAR in close coordination with Volkswagen.”
Boasting a 400-meter sensing range and dark-object identification for safe highway driving, Argo’s state-of-the-art LIDAR sensor is touted to be the industry’s longest-distance sensing range capability. Argo Lidar also has ultra-high resolution perception, which allows for photorealistic imaging of small objects, which is necessary for safe operation on congested city streets.
All this was possible thanks to Argo’s acquisition of Princeton Lightwave, a LIDAR company, four years ago, which allowed the company to develop this new, highly accurate sensor with patented Geiger-mode technology that can detect a single photon, the tiniest of light particles, allowing it to capture, detect, and precisely represent low-reflectivity objects like black vehicles.
The ID.BUZZ will be commercially launched in Hamburg in 2025 as part of a self-driving ride-pool system by MOIA, a VW Group subsidiary that works with cities and local public transportation companies on mobility solutions. The ride-sharing service is intended to use the potential of autonomous systems to alleviate traffic congestion in urban areas. Moia has been running an electric vehicle fleet as part of its “ride-pooling” service in Hamburg since 2017, serving over 3 million clients.
