European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Law Could Cost Over $36 Billion

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July 27, 2021

European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Law Could Cost Over $36 Billion

The Center for Data Innovation recently released a report that mentioned European Union’s (EU) new artificial intelligence law could cost it’s economy over $36 billion in the coming years.

The Washington-based think tank claimed the EU’s artificial intelligence act to be the world’s most restrictive artificial intelligence regulation.

The artificial intelligence policy would slow down the development of new technologies in the region, and the compliance burden would cost the union more than $12.8 billion every year due to strict regulation norms imposed on businesses for artificial intelligence applications.

Earlier this year, the European Union had introduced a new Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) to regulate the ethical use of artificial intelligence by banning technologies that could affect the citizen’s fundamental rights.

On the contrary, according to the EU’s recently released Digital Decade target initiative, more than a quarter of businesses in Europe will be using artificial intelligence-driven technologies by the year 2030.

According to the report, the target predicted by the Digital Decade initiative is likely unachievable due to the regulations imposed by the AIA. The research organization’s report mentioned, “The AIA is likely to spark a chilling effect on investments into AI in Europe, due to the Act’s legal complexity and the compliance costs it engenders.”

The law is expected to damage the region’s digital transformation before it starts gaining pace. Senior policy analyst at the Center for Data Innovation, and the author of this report, Ben Mueller, said, “The Commission has repeatedly asserted that the draft AI legislation will support growth and innovation in Europe’s digital economy, but a realistic economic analysis suggests that argument is disingenuous at best.”

The Center for Data Innovation is a Washington-based think tank that has been funded by many industry-leading enterprises like Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft.

Google’s Waymo Argues That UK Government Shouldn’t Cap Autonomous Vehicles On The Road

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Dipayan Mitra

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July 27, 2021

Google’s Waymo Argues That UK Shouldn’t Cap Autonomous Vehicles On The Road

Google’s self-driving car developing startup Waymo recently reached out to the government of the United Kingdom, asking it not to cap autonomous vehicle testing on the road.

The government recently announced that it plans to put regulations on autonomous vehicle testing. Currently, the country’s Law Commission is leading a three-year consultation program for finalizing the role of self-driving vehicles in public transportation, ride-hailing, and other related tasks.

Discussions have been going on within the government officials regarding the introduction of a law to specify the liabilities of an autonomous vehicle manufacturing company for those involved in accidents that occur during testing.

“The Law Commission’s conclusion that the final decision to assess acceptable risk is a political one implies that there is a large amount of subjectivity involved in that process,” said the government officials in a recent statement.

They further added that they believe in making an impartial decision regarding autonomous vehicle norms. Waymo’s international policy manager, Ben Lowenstine, in an online statement, said that the company urges the government lawmakers not to restrict the testing of autonomous vehicles in the country.

“Waymo is concerned that the limits on deployment, as suggested in the consultation paper, will be just that by either numbers or geography,” said Lowenstine.

The autonomous vehicle firm also called out for establishing an independent body to oversee the self-driving vehicle operations in the country.

According to reports, the United Kingdom government believes that by 2035, more than 40% of vehicles operating on the road will have some sort of self-driving capabilities and will create 38,000 new employment opportunities in the country.

The government is also planning to legalize a new technology called automated lane-keeping system (ALKS) that allows a car to autonomously accelerate and retard on a specific lane.

GM Sued Ford Over Branding Of Autonomous Driving Cars

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Dipayan Mitra

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July 26, 2021

GM Sued Ford Over Branding Of Autonomous Driving Cars

General Motors (GM) recently announced that it had sued car manufacturer Ford over the branding of autonomous driving cars.

According to reports, GM sued Ford as it thinks Ford has violated trademark policies for its super cruise feature as Ford renamed its autonomous driving platform Co-pilot360 to Blue Cruise.

Both the companies have failed to come to any conclusion after several rounds of dialogue. GM officials said that the company had no other choice other than to file a lawsuit against Ford as both the car manufacturers were unable to come to a unanimous decision before the deadline of 24th July 2021.

A unit of Detroit-based General Motors filed the lawsuit against Ford in the U.S. District Court Northern District of California. GM officials said that Ford could have easily avoided using the word ‘Cruise’ for its autonomous driving platform.

“While GM had hoped to resolve the trademark infringement matter with Ford amicably, we were left with no choice but to vigorously defend our brands,” said GM in a statement.

While mentioning their views, Ford officials said that General Motor’s allegations are completely baseless as it can be easily understood that the word ‘cruise’ in their BlueCruise platform stands for cruise pilot, which is the company’s next-generation adaptive cruise control technology.

They further added that several other companies have named their self-driving platforms in a similar way, like BMW’s Active Cruise Control and Smart Cruise Control of Hyundai.

Ford had announced that it planned to launch BlueCruise for its F-150 pickup and Mustang Mach E vehicles back in 2019.

Experts believe that this legal tussle between the two industry leaders won’t end anytime soon and an out of the court settlement can be highly expected.

Google Launched Artificial Intelligence-Powered Story Writing Platform Wordcraft Text Editor

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Dipayan Mitra

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July 26, 2021

Google Launched Artificial Intelligence-Powered Story Writing Platform Wordcraft Text Editor

Google recently announced that it had launched its new artificial intelligence-powered story-writing platform named Wordcraft Text Editor. The software has a built-in artificial intelligence assistant that helps writers to create an immersive storytelling experience.

The platform uses few-shot learning and a neural affordance of conversion that aids writers with editing, writing, and story planning. Wordcraft has a very user-friendly interface that has features like ‘get continuation’ and ‘elaborate’ that automatically generates relevant texts to support writers.

The feature can also be used to rewrite a paragraph or to elaborate on the selected text. Google officials, in a research paper, said, “In our framework, the conversation is between the storyteller and an agent who responds to the storyteller’s requests.”

The tech giant used an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot Meena to develop Wordcraft. The platform is also capable of producing clarification requests in a very human-like manner if it is unable to comprehend a given command.

The researchers are also working on a new feature called ‘fill in the blanks’ that would enable Wordcraft to place desired words at correct positions in a sentence or paragraph.

“We see ‘Wordcraft’ as a launching point for ‘deeper investigations’ into the strengths and weaknesses of using language modes for multi-purpose creative writing assistants,” said the researchers.

Google plans to conduct intensive research on human collaboration with artificial intelligence-powered writing assistants in the future to launch better products, and Wordcraft is the first step towards that goal.

The data collected from the users of Wordcraft will be used by the company to fine-tune its artificial intelligence algorithm to provide writers with what they want.

Google has launched the prototype of Wordcraft and will soon make it available for the public once all the research and development work gets completed.

New Artificial Intelligence Technology Can Spot Shipwrecks From Ocean Surface And Air

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Dipayan Mitra

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July 26, 2021

New Artificial Intelligence Technology Can Spot Shipwrecks From Ocean Surface And Air

Scientists have developed a new artificial intelligence technology that can spot shipwrecks from the ocean surface and also from the air.

The University of Texas collaborated with the United State Navy’s underwater archeology branch to develop this new artificial intelligence software capable of detecting shipwrecks with an accuracy rate of 92%.

The newly developed computer model is now ready to be deployed in order to identify unmapped shipwrecks on the coasts of the United States and Puerto Rico. The artificial intelligence algorithm was fed with images of shipwrecks and underwater topology to enable it to recognize unknown wrecks.

The platform uses images from publicly available databases of pictures collected from various parts of the globe and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s database of shipwrecks. It also uses lidar and sonar-based imageries of the seafloor to carry out its operations more accurately.

The lead researcher of the project, Leila Character of the University of Texas at Austin College of Liberal Arts, said that she had used images that extend to twenty-three kilometers from the coast to a depth of eighty-five meters.

This technology will help archeologists to track human history in a much quicker and cost-effective manner as traditional methods are extremely time consuming, dangerous, and expensive.

Researchers currently use underwater drones to identify shipwrecks, but this new technology that can scan a large area in a short span of time will aid the researchers in conducting tracing operations efficiently.

The platform can also be used to identify submerged buildings, airplanes, and other archaeological objects. Similar research had been done earlier in China to recognize shipwrecks using deep learning on an underwater drone.

Leila said that she is also working on various other artificial intelligence platforms to create a customizable archeological machine learning model.

Scientists Are Enabling Artificial Intelligence To Imagine And Visualize Things

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Dipayan Mitra

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July 26, 2021

Scientists Are Enabling Artificial Intelligence To Imagine And Visualize Things

Scientists have recently developed a new artificial intelligence algorithm that has the capability to imagine and visualize things in a human-like way to make artificial intelligence more realistic.

The new technology called disentangled representation learning enables the artificial intelligence algorithm to identify objects based on their looks. The algorithm is also capable of recognizing things it had never seen before.

Researchers from the United State’s University of South Carolina have developed this new technology to explore greater capabilities of artificial intelligence.

A computer scientist from the research team, Yunhao Ge, said, “Humans can separate their learned knowledge by attributes – for instance, shape, pose, position, color – and then recombine them to imagine a new object. Our paper attempts to simulate this process using neural networks.”

He further added that they are trying to simulate human imagination in machines by using artificial intelligence that is inspired by human visual generalization skills. Researchers claim that they were able to generate a picture of a red car using two separate images of a red boat and a blue car.

They say that a massive pool of usable data, also known as extrapolation, is a must to achieve this kind of result. The technology uses similar techniques of generating deepfakes to achieve human-like visualization with artificial intelligence.

The algorithm processes each material individually and builds semantic links between different data in order to identify similarities between the subjects to generate entirely new data.

Computer scientists at the University of South Carolina, Laurent Itti, said, “This new disentanglement approach, for the first time, truly unleashes a new sense of imagination in artificial intelligence systems, bringing them closer to humans.”
According to scientists, this new technology can also be used in the healthcare and autonomous driving vehicles industry. The research had been presented at the virtual event of the International Conference on Learning Representation 2021.

India Considered A Vital Artificial Intelligence Partner For The United States

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Dipayan Mitra

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July 26, 2021

India Considered A Vital Artificial Intelligence Partner For The United States

The government of India is in a constant effort to rapidly adopt artificial intelligence solutions in the system that has made India one of the vital artificial intelligence innovation partners of the United States of America.

A recently released research conducted by the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) based in Washington DC pondered upon the untapped potential of India for artificial intelligence development across various fields like patents, cloud computing, research, and talent.

The study named ‘Mapping India’s AI Potential’ was conducted under the supervision of a research analyst at CSET, Husanjot Chahal. “We also saw that there are strong arguments for a partnership between India and the United States with comprehensive evidence of existing ties between the two countries across most of these five levels,” she said.

Chalal also mentioned that the five departments of artificial intelligence that India can excel upon are also the CSET’s own active lines for research. The study also established the fact that India has one of the largest talent pools in the world that has the capability to drive groundbreaking innovations in the artificial intelligence sector.

“It is certainly important for us to know what the level of preparedness is in a country that will deliver artificial intelligence to a sixth of … humanity, and what is the state of the technology sector in this region that will provide over a billion data producers and owners to this world potentially,” said Chahal.

The United States is currently working on initiatives like the four-way security dialogue that aims to develop new artificial intelligence technologies in collaboration with India, Japan, and Australia.
The US national security commission, in a report, recommended the government to partner with India for artificial intelligence research as India is the world’s second-most populous country that has a huge workforce to create data and develop AI-powered solutions for the world.

ARTPARK Launched New AI Innovation Program In Association With IISc To Help Startups Grow

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Dipayan Mitra

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July 25, 2021

ARTPARK has recently announced the launch of its new artificial intelligence programs in association with the Indian Institute of Science Bengaluru (IISc) to train workers, students, and tech startups in artificial intelligence applications.

The program aims to help startups dealing with artificial intelligence and robotics, by providing them with the necessary skills and tools required for research and development.

Under its new initiative of ‘Innovate with ARTPARK,’ it has launched four new programs. Every course is meticulously designed differently to serve the purpose of learners’ different needs.

Interested learners can register themselves on the official website of ARTPARK. The applicants must upload a business plan that has to include financial modeling and output expectation and existing ideas in the pipeline.

Presenting the ARTPARK Innovation Program promoted by @iiscbangalore & supported by @IndiaDST @umakant_soni

See your start-up scale up with the latest AI & robotics imperatives

Apply here- https://t.co/KurXcjEjeN #ArtificialIntelligence #Robotics #AtmanirbharBharat #startups pic.twitter.com/OdPqjFoCSQ
— ARTPARK – AI & Robotics Technology Park (@artparkindia) July 17, 2021

Each program is of different tenure, varying from 6 to 18 months. Following is the list of the programs offered by ARTPARK –

ARTPARK Spark – It is a six months course built to train individuals to be able to become a part of early founding teams at ARTPARK
ARTPARK Ignite – It is an Incubator program that can be completed over a period of 6 to 18 months. This program aims to train senior entrepreneurs in data, domain, and research.
ARTPARK Turbo – This is a funding program where ARTPARK selects companies and gives them funding of $100,000 to help them innovate.
ARTPARK Boost – This program supports existing startups by giving them mission projects and joint GTM without the need for any equity model.

Alphabet Announces Intrinsic, A Robotics Software Company

By

Ratan Kumar

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July 24, 2021

Alphabet launches Intrinsic, a robotics software company that will focus on developing state-of-the-art solutions for industrial robots. After five and half years of research on cognitive robots, Intrinsic comes out from Alphabet’s moonshot project company called X.

The newly spun out Alphabet’s Intrinsic will be led by Wendy Tan-White, who announced her appointment through a post. “Intrinsic is working to unlock the creative and economic potential of industrial robotics for millions more businesses, entrepreneurs, and developers,” wrote Wendy Tan-White, CEO of Intrinsic.

Intrinsic’s primary focus will be to create machine learning-based software that can be used in a wide range of tasks. Over the years, robots developed to automate industrial work highly rely on hard coding. Such manual work takes several months to create software and is limited to carrying out specific tasks. However, Intrinsic is focused on generalizing with machine learning methods to increase the productivity of robots by enabling them to carry out a wide range of tasks.

“Over the last few years, our team has been exploring how to give industrial robots the ability to sense, learn, and automatically make adjustments as they’re completing tasks, so they work in a wider range of settings and applications,” said Wendy Tan-White.

According to the company, it trained a robot in two hours that could complete a USB connection task that would have been taken hundreds of hours to program. And in another test, robotic arms were able to assemble architectural installations and a simple piece of furniture.

Although robots are a part of manufacturing companies, they were focused only on eliminating tedious tasks to reduce manual labor. But, for complex tasks, which mostly cannot be structured, companies relied on human efforts.

With Intrinsic, Alphabet is now trying to revamp the entire industrial robotics landscape, especially with the advancements in machine learning research that can power machines to carry out strenuous tasks.

Intel Beats Its Revenue Estimate For Q3 In 2021

By

Dipayan Mitra

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July 23, 2021

Intel Beats Its 2021 Revenue Estimate For Q3

Intel recently announced that it crossed its Q3 revenue estimate for 2021 by 2%. Intel confirmed that it had generated a revenue of $18.5 billion in the second quarter of this year. The company also sold 33% more computer components in 2021 compared to the last year.

Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of Intel, said, “There’s never been a more exciting time to be in the semiconductor industry. The digitization of everything continues to accelerate, creating a vast growth opportunity for us and our customers across core and emerging business areas.”

He further mentioned that with their scale and focus on both innovation and execution. They are perfectly positioned to capture this opportunity. He also believes that this is just the beginning of the company’s step towards sustainable growth.

“Our second-quarter results show that our momentum is building, our execution is improving, and customers continue to choose us for leadership products,” said Gelsinger. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a boom in the computer market due to the digitization of the education and business sector.

Intel is a California-based microchip manufacturing company founded by Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce in 1968. It is currently the market leader in manufacturing semiconductor chips. The enterprise has a current market valuation of $2309.09 billion.

However, Intel’s second largest division that produces chips for data centers generated 9% less revenue of $6.5 billion than the previous year. Recently, Intel’s Mobileye also received permission from the government to test its autonomous driving vehicles in the streets of New York. The chip-manufacturing enterprise has recently launched its 11th generation computer processors with integrated IrisXE graphics.