The Big Three of Google, Facebook and Amazon Join Forces On the Future of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The world's biggest technology companies are joining forces to consider the future of artificial intelligence.

Amazon, Google's DeepMind, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft will work together on issues such as privacy, safety and the collaboration between people and AI.

Dubbed the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, it will include external experts.

One said he hoped the group would address "legitimate concerns".

"We've seen a very fast development in AI over a very short period of time," said Prof Yoshua Bengio, from the University of Montreal.

"The field brings exciting opportunities for companies and public organisations. And yet, it raises legitimate questions about the way these developments will be conducted."

Bringing the key players together would be the "best way to ensure we all share the same values and overall objectives to serve the common good", he added.

One notable absentee from the consortium is Apple. It has been in discussions with the group and may join the partnership "soon", according to one member.

The group will have an equal share of corporate and non-corporate members and is in discussions with organisations such as the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

It stressed that it had no plans to "lobby government or other policy-making bodies".

"AI has tremendous potential to improve many aspects of life, ranging from healthcare, education and manufacturing to home automation and transport and the founding members... hope to maximise this potential and ensure it benefits as many people as possible," it said.

It will conduct research under an open licence in the following areas:

• ethics, fairness and inclusivity
• transparency
• privacy and interoperability (how AI works with people)
• trustworthiness, reliability and robustness

Microsoft's managing director of research hailed the partnership as a "historic collaboration on AI and its influences on people and society", while IBM's ethics researcher Francesca Rossi said it would provide "a vital voice in the advancement of the defining technology of this century".

Image copyright Thinkstock

Image caption DeepMind uses data analysis of a million eye scans to find out more about problems such as macular degeneration

Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Google's artificial intelligence division, DeepMind, said he hoped the group would be able to "break down barriers for AI teams to share best practice and research ways to maximise societal benefits and tackle ethical concerns".

And Amazon's director of machine learning, Ralf Herbrich, said the time was ripe for such a collaboration.

"We're in a golden age of machine learning and AI," he said.

"As a scientific community, we are still a long way from being able to do things the way humans do things, but we're solving unbelievably complex problems every day and making incredibly rapid progress."

Artificial intelligence is beginning to find roles in the real world - from the basic AI used in smartphone voice assistants and web chatbots to AI agents that can take on data analysis to significant breakthroughs such as DeepMind's victory over champion Go player Lee Sedol.

              

The win - in one of the world's most complex board games - was hailed as a defining moment for AI, with experts saying it had come a decade earlier than anyone had predicted.

DeepMind now has 250 scientists at its King's Cross headquarters, working on a variety of projects, including several tie-ins with the NHS to analyse medical records.

In a lecture at the Royal Academy of Engineering, founder Dr Demis Hassabis revealed the team was now working on creating an artificial hippocampus, an area of the brain regarded by neuroscientists as responsible for emotion, creativity, memory and other human attributes.

But as AI has developed, so have concerns about where the technology is heading.

One of the most vocal and high-profile naysayers is Tesla's chief executive, Elon Musk, who has tweeted the technology is "potentially more dangerous than nukes [nuclear weapons]" and expressed concerns humans were "just the biological boot loader for digital super-intelligence".

Last year, Mr Musk set up his own non-profit AI group, OpenAI.

It is not, at this stage, part of the Partnership on AI.

Source: BBC

Google Glass: new app promises to spice up your sex life

 

Designer says Sex With Glass will enable users to 'see what their partner sees' when making love

GOOGLE GLASS is already the ultimate fashion accessory for geeks, and now the internet-enabled eyewear could become a hit in the bedroom as well.
A new app called Sex With Glass is promising to steam up the spectacles of Glass wearers worldwide, as it allows wearers to see what their partner sees when they're making love.
Sherif Maktabi, the founder of the project, says when he began work on the erotic app he wanted to discover "how can we make sex more awesome with Google Glass". According to a report in the Business Insider his answer is through "shared live streaming, ephemeral video recording and voice controls for your connected home".
Maktabi, a design student at London's Central Saint Martins, has only spent one day with Google Glass at a hackathon held in November 2013, but he was so inspired he's spent his time since then developing Sex With Glass.
"Some people find what we do repulsive," admits Maktabi. "But a lot of other people - and I am basing this from the emails we are getting online - really desire to try this. People have fantasies, desires and needs. It's personal."
Maktabi says live streaming will make sex more steamy enabling wearers to "see what your partner can see... just say 'OK glass, it's time' and Glass will stream what you see to each other. And if you feel like stopping everything, just ask: 'OK glass, pull out'."
But will it catch on?
"What they do with that is up to them," says Maktabi. "Guilt, dogma and shame is something we still widely experience when it comes to sex and how we talk about it."
As well as enabling wearers to share each other's pleasure, the app can control bedroom lights and music if the user's home is wired up correctly. And if any further encouragement were needed the whole experience can be videoed - although the videos are deleted automatically after five hours. · 

Source: The Week

Firefox 4 on Android will make iPhone users jealous

Mozilla’s latest mobile browser, Firefox 4, officially launches today after months of testing.

The browser brings features like Firefox Sync — which synchronizes tabs, personal data, and settings from Firefox 4 on any other platform — and a new interface that does away with distracting menus and icons. And of course, it’s also blazing fast.

Firefox 4 for Android shows just how innovative apps can be with an open mobile OS like Android. Apple’s iPhone OS doesn’t allow for any third-party browsers to use rendering engines of their own, which means that it would be impossible for Mozilla to release the browser on the iPhone as it is. Undoubtedly, Firefox 4 is one of the few Android apps that will inspire envy among iPhone users.

Mozilla does offer an iPhone app, Firefox Home, which includes the Firefox sync feature. But it relies on Apple’s WebKit browser rendering engine, which means that in practice it isn’t that much different from the iPhone’s native Safari browser.

One aspect of the mobile Firefox 4 that I really appreciate is its ingenious user interface that lets webpages fill the entire screen. To access open tabs, you simply swipe right on your device’s screen. To access settings, swipe left. The address bar is at the top of the screen, natch, but it also disappears as you scroll down a page. On mobile devices, where screen real estate is precious, I appreciated Mozilla’s concerted effort to make as much of the screen available as possible.

Mozilla claims that Firefox 4 is up to three times faster than Android’s built-in browser. After testing the browser on a Samsung Galaxy Tab, the speed difference was noticeable. Mozilla even managed to include extensions support in the browser, which the desktop version of Firefox popularized.

Firefox 4 also brings support for advanced HTML5, which will allow Web publishers to implement features like location-aware browsing (using your device’s GPS), device orientation (which would allow sites to show you different content based on how you’re holding your device), and even build games completely out of HTML.

The browser doesn’t include support for Adobe Flash at the moment — which is the biggest knock against it, since Flash support is one of Android’s big selling points. Mozilla says it’s looking to add Flash in the future, it just wasn’t fast enough to include in time for Firefox 4’s launch.

For some reason, Mozilla is also releasing Firefox 4 on Nokia’s Maemo platform today, an operating system that’s only available on Nokia’s N900 smartphone.