Microsoft’s Project Alexandria Makes Parsing With Unsupervised Learning Realistic

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July 7, 2021

Microsoft’s research project Alexandira can parse documents with unsupervised machine learning. It can scale over a billion records to create templates from both structured and unstructured data.

This project was launched in 2014 along with the Cambridge research division, with an intent to construct an entire knowledge base from a set of documents automatically. Alexandria’s technology powers the recently announced Microsoft Viva Topics, which automatically organizes large amounts of data in enterprises. The Alexandria team identifies topics, metadata and employs AI to parse the content of documents in datasets.

Alexander initially runs a query engine for the required document with its keyphrases or title. The query engine searches millions of records, emails, and ad contexts that relate to the document’s title to extract snippets. All these collected snippets are parsed using the probabilistic phraser, which identifies the parts of text snippets that correspond to specific property values. The model identifies a set of patterns, template such as project {name} will be released on {date}, then matches the template to text, determining which parts of the text correspond with specific property value for further linkage.

In linking, all the duplicate or overlapping entities are identified and united using a clustering process to parse an unsupervised document. According to Alexandria’s lead John Winn, Alexandria merges hundreds or thousands of items to create entries along with a detailed description of the extracted entity.

Alexandria’s program can also help with human-made errors, like incorrect entries or misplacement of information. During the linking process, the model can even analyze knowledge from other sources where it wasn’t originally mined. Irrespective of the source, all the knowledge is linked together to provide a single unified knowledge base. During this cross-checking process, the human entity errors can be fished out and corrected.

In the coming years, Alexandria is focussing on creating a tailored schema to meet the needs of each organization that would allow employees to find all events of a specific type along with the place and date of their occurrence. The project team would also be working towards developing a knowledge base that understands what a user is trying to achieve and automatically provides relevant information to help them achieve it.

Israel used Artificial Intelligence Drones For Hunting Down And Blitz Hamas Terrorists With No Human Input

By

Dipayan Mitra

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July 6, 2021

Israel Used A Drone System For Hunting Down And Blitz Hamas Terrorists.

Israel recently used a new drone system for hunting down and blitz Hamas terrorists. This unique system does not require any human intervention as the drones are connected to each other using artificial intelligence technology. The drones can cover vast distances and keep operating even if it loses some units.

Hamas began firing rockets into Israel after protests by Palestinians in May, prompting an eleven-day conflict between the two groups, which resulted in the death of more than two hundred civilians in Gaza and eleven reported deaths in Israel.

United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research’s Arthur Holland said, “if confirmed, they are certainly a notch up in the significant growth of autonomy and machine-to-machine collaboration in warfare.”

In recent years, the Israeli military has been working on developing an artificial intelligence system that enables drones to work together without the need for a human operator.

The concept of the drone swarm is that the flying machines can make decisions by themselves using artificial intelligence, which drastically reduces strategic decision making time.

This machine learning technology used data from various sources like satellites, aerial vehicles, intel collected from the ground, as well as from other reconnaissance drones.

Unit 8200 of the Israel Defence Forces Intelligence Corps has developed algorithms using human intelligence, signal, and geographical data to identify these strategic strike points.

The Israeli army has been utilizing artificial intelligence and supercomputers to identify locations of Hamas’ terror activities and plan airstrikes to eliminate any strategic advantage.

The IDF is yet to confirm any specifics of the autonomous swarm attack on Hamas targets. Many other countries, including the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, and China, have been trying to develop similar systems.

TITA’s Starts Artificial Intelligence Internship Programme From July 12

By

Manisha Kalagara

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July 6, 2021

Telangana Information Technology Association (TITA)’s Digiton is launching an internship programme starting from July 12. The ones that clear the course will get a certificate from the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD), US.

Telangana government declared last year as the year of artificial intelligence and numerous job opportunities in the IT sector. The area of artificial intelligence has been growing ever since in the state. Digiton has launched artificial intelligence training to create employment for the State’s youth in AI and machine learning. The programmes have received over 50,000 applications for the courses from which more than 2,000 individuals have imparted training in AI as part of the Telangana government’s ‘Year of the AI’ initiative.

Digiton and UTD conducted AI exams for the program intake last year, in which 96.7 percent of them cleared the exam, and 80 percent of individuals landed jobs in the area of artificial intelligence. The state government recognised and appreciated the role of Digithon, the digital entity of TITA, in transmitting AI skills. To pass on the programmes in 2021, TITA has launched the internship program.

TITA will be starting the ‘Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning In-plant Training cum Internship Programme’ from July 12. The last date for enrolling in the course is July 10. Candidates will be taking up projects on machine learning (ML) and deep learning along with training in facial recognition, chatbox, etc.

The registration for the internship is open on the digithon website till July 10. As a part of the industrial tour, candidates will be visiting industries too. Those who clear the exam post the eight-week artificial intelligence program will receive a certificate in AI & ML from the UTD. The program is being offered at a nominal charge of Rs 10,000 for youth in the state.

Physicists Teach Artificial Intelligence to Simulate Atomic Clusters

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Dipayan Mitra

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July 6, 2021

Physicists Teach Artificial Intelligence to Simulate Atomic Clusters

A new method shows that physicists can use their expertise in machine-learning algorithms, helping them train on a few small simulations consisting of a few atoms, then predict the system’s behavior with hundreds of atoms.

In the near future, similar techniques might even characterize microchips with billions of atoms, predicting failures before they occur.

The researchers began with simulated units of 16 silicon and germanium atoms, two elements often used to make microchips. They used high-performance computers to better understand the quantum-mechanical interactions between the atoms’ electrons.

Given a specific arrangement of atoms, the simulation generated unit-level characteristics like its energy bands, the energy levels available to its electrons.

But a physicist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the paper’s senior author, Sanghamitra Neogi, said, “you realize that there is a huge gap between the toy models that we can study using a first-principles approach and realistic structures.”

Physicists plan to develop machine-learning models to predict energy bands from 16-atom arrangements, then feed the models more extensive arrangements to see their accuracy.

Neogi and Artem Pimachev trained two contrasting models, which include a neural network and a random forest, or set of decision trees. They tested them on three different types of structures, comparing their data with that from detailed simulations.

Across all conditions, the predictions of the random forests differed from the simulation outputs by 3.7 % to 19%, and the neural networks varied by 2.3% to 9.6%.

In Sanghamitra Neogi’s upcoming work, expected to be published in the coming months, her lab conducted an inverse operation. Given a material’s energy bands, their system predicted its atomic arrangement. Such a system gets them closer to recognizing faults in computer chips. If a semiconductor’s conductivity is off, they might point to the flaw.

Their research has applications to other kinds of materials too. Neogi says, “a little can tell us a lot if we know where to look,” regarding their approach to generating and representing training examples.

Mumbai Youngsters Win Award For Developing Artificial Intelligence-Powered Platform To Detect Skin Cancer

By

Dipayan Mitra

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July 5, 2021

Mumbai Youngsters Win Award For Developing Artificial Intelligence-Powered Platform To Detect Skin Cancer

Two youngsters from Mumbai recently won an award for developing an artificial intelligence and machine learning-powered mobile application which can help detect early signs of skin cancer.

The class 11 students of Jamnabai Narsee International School, Sidharth Jain and Aasimm Khan, won the Grand Awards at the United States-based International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF).

Their platform, Remote Identification, and Detection of Genital Skin Cancer (RIDGE) was given the fourth place in the annual global innovations fair’s ‘World ISEF Regeneron 2021 Bio-Medical Category.

Earlier, the duo secured a place among the top 10 at the Microsoft Innovation Challenge, one of the most significant innovation competitions for students worldwide. Siddharth and Aasimm won the Junior Imagine Cup with their project for using artificial intelligence for humanitarian action in detecting genital skin cancer.

Siddharth said, “Since we were working on a technology based on remote diagnosis, we needed to make it easier for an analysis of the image.” He further added that their first option was to use machine learning and image processing, but the massive size of the database of images made them realize that they need some guidance.

With the help of mentors at a Mumbai-based learning center that teaches science, technology, research, engineering, art, and maths (STEAM) courses, On My Own Technology (OMOTEC), the duo was able to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect abnormalities and understand different types of cancers.

Aasimm said, “When we were starting up this project, we weren’t finding any good source images. We searched fifteen websites and got only five thousand images.” He also mentioned that currently, they have an accuracy of 83%, which is higher than many conventional diagnosis methods used across the globe. The duo is planning to add new databases to improve their accuracy up to 95% shortly.

Attackers Use Artificial Intelligence Generated Deepfake For Phishing Campaigns

By

Manisha Kalagara

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July 5, 2021

Cyber attackers use offensive artificial intelligence for impersonation like deepfakes to perpetrate phishing campaigns. They also reverse engineer to steal proprietary algorithms and amplify attacks to expand their campaigns.

A research conducted by Microsoft, Purdue, and Ben-Gurion University explored the threat of offensive artificial intelligence on organizations. The research identified various capabilities that adversaries can use to strengthen cyber attacks and provide insight into the adversaries while ranking each by severity. Artificial intelligence is used to poison the machine learning models by disrupting their training data and stealing credentials through side-channel analysis.

The top artificial intelligence threat is the use of deepfakes for phishing campaigns, as AI is capable of automating processes, the adversaries may pace from having slow covert campaigns to fast-paced campaigns that will overwhelm defenders and increase the attacker’s chances of success. According to research conducted by Attesive, as bots gain the ability to make more realistic deepfakes, phishing campaigns will become more widespread. In the next few years, there will be an increase in offensive artificial intelligence in the areas of data collection, training, model development, and evaluation.

The researchers wrote that “With AI’s rapid pace of development and open accessibility, we expect to see a noticeable shift in attack strategies on organizations.” They also mentioned that artificial intelligence would enable adversaries to target more organizations frequently and parallelly. They result in overwhelming the defender’s response teams with thousands of attempts for the chance of one success. As adversaries begin to use artificial intelligence-enabled bots, defenders will also be forced to automate bots for their defense.

The researchers suggested a few ways to avoid the threats, like recommending the organizations to develop post-processing tools that can secure software from analysis after development, integration of security testing, protecting and monitoring models with MLOps for the organizations to maintain secure systems easily.

Egypt’s CIT Minister launches Artificial Intelligence Platform

By

Dipayan Mitra

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July 5, 2021

Egypt’s CIT Minister launches Artificial Intelligence Platform

Egypt’s Minister of Communications and Information Technology (CIT) and Chairperson of the National Council for Artificial Intelligence, Dr. Amr Talaat, recently announced the launch of a special artificial intelligence platform in the country.

The platform will be developed and controlled by the National Council for Artificial Intelligence and will serve as Egypt’s official portal in the field of artificial intelligence.

The launch of the ai.gov.eg platform is a part of Egypt’s willingness to keep pace with the digital age and interact with the most prominent technologies of this era. It also plans to consolidate Egypt’s position to become one of the world leaders in the field of artificial intelligence.

The artificial intelligence-powered platform’s launch guarantees a major qualitative leap in this field and will save workers time and effort to reach their goals.

According to Golestan Radwan, Advisor to the Minister of Communications and Information Technology for Artificial Intelligence, the document on Egypt’s national artificial intelligence strategy has been published in both English and Arabic on the platform.

The platform aims to accelerate the process of communication, innovation, and cooperation with startups, along with programs for creating public awareness on artificial intelligence and preparing special courses for university students and professionals in the private and public sectors.

The Government Readiness for Artificial Intelligence index of Oxford Insight Foundation and the International Development Research Center, issued in 2020, indicated that Egypt’s ranking in the general index advanced 55 places to 56 globally of 172 countries, compared to 111 among 194 countries in 2019.

The country has recently played a vital role in the ongoing discussions within UNESCO to adopt a recommendation on the ethical use of artificial intelligence. In addition, Egypt also participated in an Arab Working Group on Artificial Intelligence meeting, held last February.

Amazon Launched A New Development Center In To Support Amazon Scout In Finland

By

Dipayan Mitra

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July 5, 2021

Amazon Launched A New Development Center In To Support Amazon Scout In Finland

Amazon recently in a blog, announced the launch of a new development center to develop electric autonomous delivery vehicles in Helsinki, Finland.

The company plans to deploy 24 engineers in its new Amazon Scout development center to focus on research and development. One of Amazon’s main aims is to develop 3D software that can simulate the complexity of real-life and ensure the autonomous vehicles can navigate safely while making deliveries.

The research center is now hiring bright minds in the field of robotics to kick start their research process, and they hope to grow many folds in the coming years.

The announcement of the new development center in Helsinki comes half a year after tech-giant reportedly acquired a native 3D modeling startup Umbra, which also has offices in the United States and the Asia-Pacific region. Founded in 2006 by Valter Baldaccini, Umbra raised $3.4 million from investors before being acquired by Amazon.

The company said the development center in Helsinki will work alongside Amazon staff at the Amazon Scout research and development lab in Seattle and teams in Tubingen, Germany, and Cambridge, where Amazon has been developing delivery drones for many years.

The Amazon Scout vehicle has six wheels, is powered by an electric battery, and moves at a walking pace. Autonomous delivery robots are widely seen as a potentially serviceable asset in last-mile delivery, but they also possess a threat of eliminating thousands of jobs.

Amazon has been conducting trials of the Scout vehicle between Monday and Friday in a neighborhood in Snohomish County, Washington, to deliver shipments in daylight hours. Human overseers accompany the robots to ensure that the devices can safely and efficiently navigate around pets, pedestrians, and anything else in their path.

Heineken Unveiled Its Beer Outdoor Transporter or B.O.T

By

Dipayan Mitra

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July 5, 2021

Heineken Unveiled Its Beer Outdoor Transporter or B.O.T

Heineken recently unveiled its Beer Outdoor Transporter, or B.O.T. This unique robot stores beer and uses motion sensors to follow its owner autonomously.

The Dutch beer brewing company launched an online raffle for people who want to buy one. The brand director of Heineken U.S.A., Joshua Egan, said, “Nobody loves lugging around like a giant cooler and sweating in the 100-degree heat.”

The autonomous driving machine was built with the help of artificial intelligence. This summer, it was revealed to mark the country’s return to semi-normalcy after gatherings were discouraged due to the coronavirus last year.

The product is not designed exclusively for Heineken’s products. The B.O.T. also comes with a refrigerating unit, allowing the user to store and chill any can-based beverage outdoors.

The robot features a touch screen, cameras, and sensors in the front to help it avoid obstacles. At the rear end, there is a cooler backpack branded with Heineken’s logo. The company did not reveal the number of robots they are producing, but they said that they have been working with many other companies since the past year to build this product.

The winners of the raffle will be announced within the next week, and the product will ship from Los Angeles after that. Heineken did not mention its plan for the second shipment of B.O.T.

The company noted that the robot weights around 32 Kgs when not filled with ice. They also said that the droid can travel up to 24 Kms in one go when fully charged. Beer Outdoor Transporter is currently priced at $3,250, which is quite expensive, but the company said that considering its capabilities and being the first consumer robot in the United States with such functionality, the cost is justified.

The robot features two modes. One allows the machine to follow you, and the other enables the operator to control where it goes through a smartphone application.

TikTok Sells Its Algorithm And Artificial Intelligence Technology

By

Manisha Kalagara

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July 5, 2021

TikTok’s parent company ByteDance sells its artificial intelligence technology and algorithms to companies worldwide. The company launched a new division called BytePlus in June to avail the AI technology at a price, including it’s groundbreaking recommendation algorithm.

BytePlus has put up many of its features for sale including, short video application computer vision technology, automated text to speech translation, real-time video effects, and data analysis tools. Companies can avail these tools at a certain price and tailor them according to their needs.

TikTok’s recommendation feature ForYou has been revolutionary, users claim that it was able to detect their sexuality, medical diagnoses even before they did. The algorithm recommends videos on the users feed using the metadata and how they interact on the platform, such as which videos they liked, shared, or commented on, what hashtags or captions on their posts, the device they are using, people they follow, content created by them, location settings, etc. This is one of the major reasons for the growth of the app, due to which ByteDance capitalized on it.

According to TikTok’s blog post “Ultimately, your ForYou feed is powered by your feedback: the system is designed to continuously improve, correct, and learn from your own engagement with the platform to produce personalized recommendations that we hope inspire creativity and bring joy with every refresh of your ForYou feed”.

Personalized recommendations are new in the AI community, still ByteDance stays positive and believes that in the long run, its tools will be up against the artificial intelligence services of Amazon Web Services, Facebook, Google, IBM, and Microsoft, Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent. BytePlus is also looking to register trademarks in the U.S., although it’s unclear if the company has established a stateside presence yet.

Few of the companies such as Goat (american shopping app), WeGo (Singapore-based travel booking) and Indonesian online shopping start-up Chilibeli have already brought the features according to the ByteDance website.