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TikTok Sells Its Algorithm And Artificial Intelligence Technology

Tiktok sells algorithm and AI tolls

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”. 

Read more: Artificial Intelligence Powered Precision Agriculture Can Revolutionize The Food Production Industry

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.

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Google Sold $2.5 Million In AI To Pentagon For Covid-19 Recovery

google sells $1.2 million in AI

Google sells $2.5 million dollars in artificial intelligence to the U.S.Defence Department by supplying AI tools and cloud software. This was done to support the sector’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The $2.5 million deal is part of an undisclosed contract among both the agencies from May 2020. Google’s Reston, Virginia, partner Carahsoft provided cloud and AI tools to the United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), a centralized command and control unit for the Department of Defense (DOD) homeland security efforts.

The contract was also based on an Artificial intelligence-integrated resource optimization solution for Covid-related disruptions. This was brought into action to aid the defense agency in allocating resources more effectively for both military and medical equipment. In collaboration with the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, the AI models were trained with data that was accessed from the existing data sets, to create and test improved algorithms. The tech could have been expanded to help the DOD predict future supply chain shortfalls.

Read more: Google AI Introduces A Dataset To Study Gender Bias Translation

The contract also leveraged Google’s tools while integrating with other DOD, federal, state, private, and international agencies and organizations. But, Google restricted itself from commenting on the nature of its work because it isn’t authorized to discuss contracts.

Google continues to work with the U.S government and is proud of the work it has done and will be doing, particularly on its Covid-19 response business. According to reports, the AI pioneer uses various contractors around the Washington, D.C., area for its government sales, such as a $2 million Customs & Border contract for a human and cargo surveillance system known as the Automated Targeting System.

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Developing Artificial Intelligence Technology To Detect Early Signs Of Alzheimer’s Disease

Developing Artificial Intelligence Technology To Detect Early Signs Of Alzheimer's Disease

Researchers at Michigan State University are developing an artificial intelligence-powered technology that analyzes speech and vocabulary patterns to recognize early signs of Alzheimer’s disease, which is the most common cause of dementia.

The research is being led by an associate professor at Michigan State University’s College of engineering, Jiayu Zhou. The research recently received a funding of $3.9 million from the National Institutes of Health. The study aims to develop a user-friendly smartphone application that can be used to diagnose patients for early symptoms of Alzheimer’s.

Jiayu Zhou said, “Alzheimer’s is hard to deal with, and it is quite easy to confuse its early stage, mild impairment, with normal cognitive decline as we are getting older.” He also mentioned that it’s only when the situation worsens, people realize the need for medication. 

Read More: Google Joins O-RAN Alliance To Develop Artificial Intelligence-Powered 5G

Although doctors do not have a specific cure for Alzheimer’s, early diagnosis could help researchers and doctors to prescribe medication to slow down its spread before any major loss. 

The research team believes that artificial intelligence can recognize minor voice changes and expressions better than a human. Hence they plan to develop an artificial intelligence-powered app that will make Alzheimer’s’sAlzheimer’s’s diagnosis considerably affordable, widely accessible, and less time consuming. 

Researchers have already proved in initial tests that the application is capable of recognizing early symptoms as accurately as MRI. 

Zhou said, “If we want to develop an application that anyone can use, we don’t want to have people talking to it for hours.” He further added that they need to develop an efficient strategy to navigate the conversation and extract the required data in a short amount of time. The artificial intelligence-powered application would scrutinize all of this data, then give users risk scores of how likely it is that they are displaying signs of Alzheimer’s.  

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Artificial Intelligence Powered Precision Agriculture Can Revolutionize The Food Production Industry

Artificial Intelligence Powered Precision Agriculture Can Revolutionize The Food Production Industry

Precision agriculture, site-specific crop management, or satellite farming is a farming management concept based on analyzing, measuring, and responding to inter and intra-field variability in crops. Precision agriculture research aims to define a decision support system for entire farm management and optimize returns on inputs while preserving resources.

It includes wind patterns, rain predictions, and other seasonal effects, mapping the field in terms of disparities within the area or other fields around it, the sunlight variation across the year using feeds from weather stations, Remote sensing equipment, GPS, and GIS. 

Another critical feature of precision agriculture is having a trained artificial intelligence-powered software module on the specific crop being planned in that field. 

Read More: Lollipop AI Launched Online Grocery Marketplace Where Users Can Build Their Own Recipes

This artificial intelligence software has an understanding of the growth patterns of that particular crop, potential diseases that are related to that crop, selection of specific fertilizer or pesticides depending upon the possible infections, and prediction of disease depending upon the growth of leaves, size, and color of the plant.

The technique uses feed sensors, soil sensors, weight sensors, temperature sensors, intensity sensors, and numerous cameras. These sensors may be deployed on a machine. This machine can be a small-sized robot moving across the field. 

This robo will have multiple compartments filled with different ingredients required for the plants like pesticides, water, and fertilizers. Based on the real-time feedback of various sensors, the software will scrutinize that information according to the trained artificial intelligence model installed on that robot.

Farmers currently rent out heavy machines for sowing and cutting the crops, they will be able to hire various types of robots for their specific needs. Initially, the cost will be high, but gradually, when this becomes standard practice, the price will reduce considerably with volume and scale.

However, despite all these advantages, artificial intelligence technology also has a few drawbacks representing challenges. Firstly, the most important social challenge is unemployment that could be a threat due to the reduced human interference in the process.. 

Moreover, some risks and apprehensions could be posed regarding sustainability, especially the massive energy consumption, e-waste problem, market concentration, and job displacement.

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Nvidia’s MLPerf Benchmark Show Impressive Results In AI Training

Nvidia's high performance benchmark

Nvidia announced that their graphics processor units (GPU) based systems perform 3 to 5 times better while training artificial intelligence models, according to their latest MLPerf benchmarks.

The MLPerf benchmark is backed by Alibaba, Google, Facebook AI, Nvidia, and Intel and is managed by MLCommons Association, making the tests transparent. MLPerf gives users a clean source of information before buying the product. These benchmarks are based on AI workloads and scenarios like natural-language processing, covering computer vision, recommendation systems, and reinforcement learning. The training benchmarks are focused on time to train AI models. 

NVIDIA has set new performance records by training models in the least amount of time across all eight benchmarks in the commercially available submissions category with its A100 GPU.

Nvidia ran the tests on Selene, the fastest AI supercomputer worldwide, based on Nvidia DGX SuperPOD architecture. Scaling is the most critical part of AI, but Nvidia obtained magnificent results in chip-to-chip comparisons. Overall, the results depict that the performance rose by 6.5x in 2.5 years, and 3 to 5 times than last year. 

Read more: NVIDIA Finalizes GPU Direct Storage 1.0 To Accelerate Artificial Intelligence

The MLPerf results depict the performance of various NVIDIA-based AI platforms with numerous new and innovative systems. They span from entry-level edge servers to AI supercomputers with thousands of GPUs. ”Our ecosystem offers customers choices in a wide range of deployment models — from instances that are rentable by the minute to on-prem servers and managed services — providing the most value per dollar in the industry” said Nvidia. 

All the software used is available from the MLPerf repository, making it accessible for everyone to reproduce the benchmark results. Nvidia will continually add this code into the deep learning frameworks and containers available on NGC, the software hub for GPU applications. 

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Seoul Introduces AI-Integrated CCTV To Prevent Suicides On Bridges

AI prevents suicide

The Seoul metropolitan government rolled out artificial intelligence integrated CCTV cameras to prevent suicides on bridges. This was done under the new pilot project to address suicides on bridges. They are installed on 10 major bridges in and around Seoul, South Korea. 

Seoul metropolitan government has been operating CCTV surveillance and response system to monitor the bridges and proactively respond to suicide attempts around the clock since 2012. The recent pilot project has been to monitor suicides on bridges spanning the Han River, which is the largest waterway bisecting the city. 

The Seoul metropolitan government partnered with The  Seoul Institute of Technology and the Seoul Fire and Disaster Headquarters (SFDH) for the pilot project with the main objective of improving the current suicide detection system. The artificial intelligence system is trained with tones of data from dispatch reports, CCTV footage, data from bridge sensors, information from people who had previously attempted suicide, report history, phone calls and text messages. The officials mentioned that under this project they have been analyzing data from SFDH since April 2020.  

Read more: Medidata Acorn AI Synthetic Control Arm Named “Best AI-Based Solution For Healthcare” By 2021 AI Breakthrough Awards

The AI system learns suicidal behavioural patterns from the previous data and analyzes the information received from the cameras and sensors. If it detects any suspicious behaviour or dangerous situation, it immediately alerts rescue teams. And the rescue teams will be there at the point under three minutes. “We believe that the new video surveillance system will allow our teams to detect cases a bit faster and help us to answer a call more quickly,” said Kim Hyeong-gil, head of a relief squad.

This project has been taking new forms because South Korea has recorded the highest number of suicides in 2019. According to studies, approximately 486 people attempt suicide on bridges spanning the Han River every year and authorities rescue about 96.63 per cent. The government also informed that the number of rescue dispatches surged about 30 per cent in 2020 compared to the year before which predominantly gave rise to this project.

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Cloud-Based Employee Training Software Articulate Rises $1.5 Billion

articulate rises $1.5B

Articulate, the cloud-based employee training software, has raised $1.5 Billion in series A funding round today. The enterprise is associated with many A-listed companies like Amazon, Oracle, and Morgan Stanley. 

This New York-based enterprise was founded in 2002 to serve 106,000 companies. Its most in-demand app is Articulate 360, which is used for authoring training courses that give companies the leverage of exporting to the web or hosting on their learning management system (LMS). This provides many assets such as photos, videos, templates,on-demand training that is live supported. Rise.com is another program designed for small and mid-size businesses that don’t use LMS.  

“Every enterprise has to train employees, every function has its own unique training needs, and the organization as a whole has training needs around employee onboarding, compliance, and employee engagement,” Articulate president Lucy Suros said. She also added that many companies have historically done training in a very unscalable and are instructor-led. But Articulate enables employees to take all that training online regardless of their skill and position and focuses only on areas that require training.

Read more: DataRobot Raised $250 Million On $6 Billion Valuation

Articulate helps reduce training time by providing only essential areas. The platform can also save resources for massive companies that need to train thousands of employees every year. The ready-made course components can be used for mid and small-sized businesses, which can save some resources that would usually be invested in creating custom training materials.

Articulate stands at $3.75 billion post-funding, General Atlantic joined with Blackstone Growth and ICONIQ Growth in the investment, making a big chunk of the funding. Articulate will be using the new capital to gain more customers and expand by three times over the coming years.

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Olive Raised $400M In A Funding Round For Artificial Intelligence-Based Health Tech

Olive Raised $400M In A Funding Round For Artificial Intelligence-Based Health Tech

Olive on Thursday announced that it had raised $400 million in a funding round. This fresh funding has increased the company’s valuation to $4 billion. 

The automation company’s funding round was led by Vista Equity Partners, which is a global leader of investment in software enterprises along with Base10 Partners Advancement Initiative.

The company will also contribute to scholarship and financial aid awards for America’s historically black colleges and universities, which will be known as The Olive Scholarship.

Read More: Medidata Acorn AI Synthetic Control Arm Named “Best AI-Based Solution For Healthcare” By 2021 AI Breakthrough Awards

Chief Medical Officer of Olive, Dr.YiDing Yu, said that artificial intelligence could be a boon for healthcare companies as it has the ability to reduce the time consumed to deliver an efficient flow of information. 

“Olive is the leading force for rapid product development to better empower the humans in healthcare, which is being hired at health systems and insurance companies across the country at lightning speed,” said the CEO of Olive, Sean Lane. 

He further added that the widespread adoption of their technology makes it evident that the healthcare industry is now looking forward to adopting artificial intelligence-powered services.

Last year, the company raised $1.5 billion, after which it acquired Empiric Health with the aim of accelerating the provider payments process using the firm’s self-developed platform, ‘Olive Assure.’ 

Olive is an automation company that is addressing healthcare’s most prominent issues through automation. The company helps in delivering hospitals, payers, and health systems increased revenue, lower costs and greater capacity. 

Healthcare workers are essentially working with outdated technology that creates a lack of shared knowledge and accurate data. Olive is driving connections to shine new light on healthcare processes, improving operations today so everyone can benefit from a healthier industry tomorrow.

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WHO Issues Guidelines for Ethical Use Of Artificial Intelligence

WHO Issues Guidelines for Ethical Use Of Artificial Intelligence

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently published a document mentioning six guidelines for ethical use of artificial intelligence in the healthcare industry. 

This guideline comes after an intensive two-year research conducted by more than twenty scientists. The report highlights how doctors can use artificial intelligence to treat patients in underdeveloped regions of the world. 

But it also points out that technology is not a quick solution for health challenges, especially in low and middle-income countries. Governments and regulators should carefully analyze where and how artificial intelligence is used in healthcare. 

Read More: GitHub’s New Copilot Programming Uses GPT-3 To Generate Code

The World Health Organization said that it hopes the six principles can be the foundation for how governments, developers, and regulators approach the technology. 

In the document, six guidelines mentioned by WHO are : 

  • Protect autonomy: Humans should have the final say on all health decisions. The decisions should not be made entirely by machines, and doctors should be able to override them at any time. Artificial intelligence should not be used to guide someone’s medical care without their consent, 
  • Promote human safety: Developers should continuously monitor any artificial intelligence tools to ensure they’re working as they’re supposed to and not causing harm.
  • Ensure transparency: Developers should publish information about the design of AI tools. One common criticism of the systems is that they’re “black boxes,” and it’s too hard for researchers and doctors to know how they make decisions. The WHO wants to see enough transparency to be fully audited and understood by users and regulators.
  • Foster accountability: When something goes wrong with an AI technology — like if a decision made by a tool leads to patient harm — there should be mechanisms determining who is responsible (like manufacturers and clinical users).
  • Ensure equity: That means making sure tools are available in multiple languages, that they’re trained on diverse sets of data. In the past few years, scrutiny of standard health algorithms has found that some have racial bias built-in.
  • Promote sustainable artificial intelligence: Developers should regularly update their tools, and institutions should have ways to adjust if a tool seems ineffective. Institutions or companies should also only introduce mechanisms that can be repaired, even in under-resourced health systems.

There are numerous potential ways artificial intelligence can be used in the healthcare industry. There are applications in development that use artificial intelligence to screen medical images such as mammograms, devices that help people monitor their health, tools that scan patient health records to predict if they might get sicker, and systems that help track disease outbreaks. 

“The appeal of technological solutions and the promise of technology can lead to overestimation of the benefits and dismissal of the challenges and problems that new technologies such as artificial intelligence may introduce,” The report mentioned.

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Google AI To Fuse Artificial Intelligence And Art

Google fuses AI and art

Google AI joins Douglas Coupland to fuse artificial intelligence and slogan writing. The project is called Slogans For Class 2030, focuses on the first generation of young people whose lives are fully interconnected with artificial intelligence. 

This idea was brought into life by initially training the AI model with Coupland’s 30 years of written work (which is over a million words) for the model to familiarize with the author’s style of writing. Later, the ongoing topics were picked from social media posts and were added to the training sets to build short-form, topical statements. After the model was trained, Couplands text along with the curated topics was the inspiration to create twenty-five Slogans for the Class of 2030

“I would comb through ‘data dumps’ where characters from one novel were speaking with those in other novels in ways that they might actually do. It felt like I was encountering a parallel universe Doug,” Coupland says. He also added that the statements from the project appeared like gems. Though they weren’t written by him they were still him since they wouldn’t have existed without him.

Read more: AI Will Now Judge Artist’s Popularity In Italian Museums

A usual pattern seen in Coupland’s work is investigating the human condition through the eye of pop culture. This was the focus on the class of 2030. Coupland’s work is aimed towards inspiring students in their early teens who will be graduating in 2030. The motive is to help teens considering their future career paths, Coupland hopes that this project will trigger conversation on the vast possibilities in the various fields and familiarize them with the fact that AI does not have to be strictly scientific, it can be artful.

All the 25 thought-provoking and visually rich digital slogans are available on Google Arts & Culture along with other behind-the-scenes material. Artificial intelligence is evolving in areas that humans could have never imagined like art, emotions and socializing. This is only a small step in the evolution, there are many more routes to go in the forthcoming years. 

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