Author Archives: mstanton

Share: Ex-Google Engineers Working On New ‘VaultOS’ For Banking

Overdue idea, wish we knew who was funding this work:

[Mark Warrick, director of creative and design at Thought Machine], who has worked as a software engineer at Deutsche Bank and RBS, said: “Banks can’t deliver to their customers the innovations that you’re seeing in other sectors simply because their fundamental core systems are not able to react.”

VaultOS is based on “smart contract” technology that allows people to tailor their own products such as mortgages, loans, and overdrafts.

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-engineers-thought-machine-vaultos-core-banking-platform-fintech-2016-7

Share: New EU Law Aim To Hinder AIs Learning About People

According to this Oxford paper, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation law set to take effect in 2018 will outlaw machine learning, hindering AIs’ ability to make decisions about people based on collected information.

From Cade Metz’s coverage on Wired.com:

With a few paragraphs buried in the measure’s reams of bureaucrat-speak, the GDPR also restricts what the EU calls “automated individual decision-making.” And for the world’s biggest tech companies, that’s a potential problem. “Automated individual decision-making” is what neural networks do. “They’re talking about machine learning,” says Bryce Goodman, a philosophy and social science researcher at Oxford University who, together with a fellow Oxford researcher, recently published a paper exploring the potential effects of these new regulations.

Source: http://www.wired.com/2016/07/artificial-intelligence-setting-internet-huge-clash-europe/

Highlights of the law, as quoted in the Oxford paper:

Article 11. Automated individual decision making

1. Member States shall provide for a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces an adverse legal effect concerning the data subject or significantly affects him or her, to be prohibited unless authorised by Union or Member State law to which the controller is subject and which provides appropriate safeguards for the rights and freedoms of the data subject, at least the right to obtain human intervention on the part of the controller.

2. Decisions referred to in paragraph 1 of this Article shall not be based on special categories of personal data referred to in Article 10, unless suitable measures to safeguard the data subject’s rights and freedoms and legitimate interests are in place.

3. Profiling that results in discrimination against natural persons on the basis of special categories of personal data referred to in Article 10 shall be prohibited, in accordance with Union law

EU regulations on algorithmic decision-making and a “right to explanation” (PDF) by Bryce Goodman (BRYCE.GOODMAN@STX.OX.AC.UK)
Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford; and Seth Flaxman (FLAXMAN@STATS.OX.AC.UK), Department of Statistics, Oxford

Backup from Open Archives Initiative copy:
1606.08813v1.pdf

Share: Mobile Fastest Growing Tech, But Word-Of-Mouth Influencers Still Strongest

Human nature confirmed. More on importance of mobile tech in news dissemination.

Despite huge growth in the use of social networks, 85 percent of US adults still prefer to share news by word of mouth rather than digitally, according to Pew. That’s not surprising if the news comes from a traditional medium, such as newspapers or TV, but even consumers who primarily got their news online were nearly three times more likely to share the news verbally than to post on social media, according to the report.

More than seven-in-ten U.S. adults follow national and local news somewhat or very closely – 65% follow international news with the same regularity. Fully 81% of Americans get at least some of this news through websites, apps or social networking sites. And, this digital news intake is increasingly mobile. Among those who get news both on desktop computers and mobile devices, more than half prefer mobile.

Source:
http://www.journalism.org/2016/07/07/the-modern-news-consumer/
http://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/pew_report_online_news_sharing.php

Share: Pew Research Center State of the News Media 2016

Key trends: Cable TV news up 8%, network TV flat, local TV down 2% to 5%, newpapers down 7%.

Eight years after the Great Recession sent the U.S. newspaper industry into a tailspin, the pressures facing America’s newsrooms have intensified to nothing less than a reorganization of the industry itself, one that impacts the experiences of even those news consumers unaware of the tectonic shifts taking place.

In 2015, the newspaper sector had perhaps the worst year since the recession and its immediate aftermath. Average weekday newspaper circulation, print and digital combined, fell another 7% in 2015, the greatest decline since 2010. Also, digital advertising up 20% last year, especially on mobile which is now greater than desktop, but news organizations lag behind this trend.

Already in 2016, at least 400 cuts, buyouts or layoffs have been announced. Ownership trends show further signs of devaluation as three newspaper companies – E.W. Scripps, Journal Communications and Gannett – are now one. And the recently renamed Tribune Publishing Co. spent much of the spring of 2016 fending off an attempt by Gannett to purchase them as well.

Source:
http://www.journalism.org/2016/06/15/state-of-the-news-media-2016/
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/06/15/state-of-the-news-media-2016-key-takeaways/

Share: Local TV News Fact Sheet

Some top line highlights:

Audience: Viewership data collected by Nielsen Media Research shows that in 2015 network affiliate news stations (ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC) lost viewership in every key timeslot – morning, early evening and late night.

Economics: Local TV station revenue typically follows a cyclical pattern of increasing in election years and decreasing in non-election years. True to this pattern, in 2015 total local TV over-the-air advertising revenue declined 7% from election year 2014, according to BIA/Kelsey, amounting to $18.6 billion. However, revenue was roughly on par with the last non-election year in 2013.

Total online revenues for local TV stations increased 12% in 2015 (a total of $900 million) and by 2020 are expected to grow substantially to about $1.6 billion. However, they still account for a tiny portion of the total ad revenues – an estimate of just 5% in 2015, and this share is not expected to grow much over the next five years… (RTDNA survey) responses from news directors across the country indicate that about half of the revenue is generated during news programming.

News Production: The average amount of weekday local TV news programming held steady in 2014. According to the RTDNA survey of news directors, stations aired 5.3 hours of news programming per weekday on average in 2014 – about the same as in 2013. The last year news programming hours increased was 2011.

Full Article: http://www.journalism.org/2016/06/15/local-tv-news-fact-sheet/

Related Links: http://www.rtdna.org/channel/research

Share: Tribune Turns To AI Lead As Online Video Editor?

So the formerly-named Tribune Publishing (now called tronc) aims to publish 2,000 videos a day created through artificial intelligence. (Update 6/20/2016)

“There’s all these really new, fun features we’re going to be able to do with artificial intelligence and content to make videos faster,” (tronc chairman Michael Ferro) told interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin. “Right now, we’re doing a couple hundred videos a day; we think we should be doing 2,000 videos a day.”

BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, for comparison, reportedly makes around 65 to 75 videos per week.

Source:
http://www.recode.net/2016/6/6/11871908/tribune-publishing-artificial-intelligence-videos

Announcement videos:

Quote in clip #2, from Anne Vasquez, chief digital officer: “Right now we’re averaging about 16 percent of our article have the type of videoplayer that we can monetize. By 2017, we need to get to 50 percent of our article pages have a Brightcover videoplayer attached to it.”

Mixed reviews:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/20/business/media/tribune-publishings-new-name-tronc-puzzles-marketing-experts.html

http://www.recode.net/2016/6/20/11976522/tronc-videos-adult-swim-parody

Share: Publishers Give Mixed Reviews So Far To Google AMP

It’s been three months since Google launched Accelerated Mobile Pages, its fast-loading article pages initiative, and publishers are giving mixed it reviews. Pages are loading faster, but some are seeing little traffic benefit. “I would love to see more widespread adoption,” said Slate vice chairman Dan Check. That may be because AMP has been rolling out gradually. But in any case, it may lead some publishers to rethink how much energy they devote to AMP versus Facebook’s fast-loading page initiative, Instant Articles, which has more potential to help their content reach new audiences.

Source: http://digiday.com/publishers/publishers-give-mixed-reviews-far-google-amp/

Share: Imaginary Worlds Podcast: The Robot Uprising

I met Eric Molinsky of the great Imaginary Worlds podcast at a Brooklyn gaming store this week. In his most recent episode about “The Robot Uprising,” his interview guests touch on the “slaves who turn against their masters” idea as carrying particular triggers for Americans due to centuries of legal human chattel slavery and its legacy toward civil rights, race relations and slavery today.

How would a robot deal with current real-life decision making needs – like, say, Google’s self-driving cars — when programmed to follow some moral/ethical code (say, Isaac Asimov’s original Three Laws of Robotics, noted below):

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

When confronted with the decision to avoide a collision to protect the driver versus hitting a pedestrian or just hitting a lightpole, the car will likely choose the lightpole. However, soon human drivers — who easily can ignore such “moral programming” — will learn to intuit “passive driver” robot cars and cut them off in traffic, drive aggressively around them, and otherwise exploit the “privledged authority” associated with human operators.

Full version:
http://www.imaginaryworldspodcast.org/
https://soundcloud.com/emolinsky/the-robot-uprising

Related:
http://metromemetics.net/share-science-friction-robots-will-kill-us-all-video/
http://metromemetics.net/share-fw-thinking-robots-will-save-us-all-video/

Share: Moral Responsibility Of AI?

Interesting read on the moral responsibility and liability of our future autonomous machines and AIs…

How can you punish a bot though? It probably feels no pain or disappointment, it doesn’t mind being locked up or even switched off and destroyed. There does seem to be a strange gap if we have an entity which is capable of making complex autonomous decisions, but doesn’t really care about anything. Some might argue that in order to make truly autonomous decisions the bot must be engaged to a degree that makes the crushing of its hopes and projects a genuine punishment, but I doubt it. Even as a caring human being it seems quite easy to imagine working for an organisation on whose behalf you make complex decisions, but without ultimately caring whether things go well or not (perhaps even enjoying a certain schadenfreude in the event of disaster). How much less is a bot going to be bothered?

Full version: http://www.consciousentities.com/2016/05/bad-bots-retribution/

Share: Four AI Experts Debate The Singularity

Am I the only one who found the comment at 2:01 about “well, historically humans have killed more people than machines” a bit troubling giving that we’re designing our future machine overlords in our image?

Yoshua Bengio, Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind), Neil Lawrence, Yann LeCun (Facebook), Kevin Murphy, and Jürgen Schmidhuber discuss whether or not super intelligent AI is a threat to humanity.

Source: http://futurism.com/experts-weigh-in-is-artificial-intelligence-really-a-threat-to-humanity/