Lifeboat Foundation

Rain Design isn’t the first company to fall victim to the aggressive techniques Amazon uses to achieve market dominance. Although its retail site is the most visible of its business strands, the $740bn company has quietly stretched its tentacles into an astonishing range of unrelated industries. Google and Facebook might have cornered the online advertising market, but Amazon’s business successes now include groceries, TV, robotics, cloud services and consumer electronics.

With its profound knowledge of its customers, Amazon can move into almost any sector – striking fear into the hearts of rivals. And the $740bn company is ‘just getting started’

By Olivia Solon and Julia Carrie Wong in San Francisco

Continue reading “Jeff Bezos v the world: why all companies fear ‘death” »

The EU wants to invest 20 billion euros in research by 2020.

By Marty Swant

The World Economic Forum is an independent international organization committed to improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas. Incorporated as a not-for-profit foundation in 1971, and headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, the Forum is tied to no political, partisan or national interests.

China is drawing up plans for an aerospace engine plant that would pave the way for the mass production of “hypersonic” planes or spacecraft capable of travelling at more than five times the speed of sound, boosting the country’s competitiveness in defence, space, business and other sectors, according to scientists familiar with the project.

The plant that would be built in Hefei, in China’s eastern Anhui province, could give the country an edge over the United States and Russia in the race to achieve large-scale applications of hypersonic technology, the scientists said.

Hefei deputy mayor Wang Wensong led a delegation to the Institute of Mechanics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing last month to discuss the project’s roll-out, according to a statement on the institute’s website.

Continue reading “China plans hypersonic engine factoryChina’s hypersonic engine means new frontiers for travel, space exploration” »

@media screen and (min-width: 976px) {
.main-article.big_article_header{font-size:45px!important;}
.main-article.big_article_summary{font-size:25px;}

AI can have Positive Impact on Banks’ Business.

https://theglowingskinseries.com/day-15/

Google today announced a pair of new artificial intelligence experiments from its research division that let web users dabble in semantics and natural language processing. For Google, a company that’s primary product is a search engine that traffics mostly in text, these advances in AI are integral to its business and to its goals of making software that can understand and parse elements of human language.

The website will now house any interactive AI language tools, and Google is calling the collection Semantic Experiences. The primary sub-field of AI it’s showcasing is known as word vectors, a type of natural language understanding that maps “semantically similar phrases to nearby points based on equivalence, similarity or relatedness of ideas and language.” It’s a way to “enable algorithms to learn about the relationships between words, based on examples of actual language usage,” says Ray Kurzweil, notable futurist and director of engineering at Google Research, and product manager Rachel Bernstein in a blog post. Google has published its work on the topic in a paper here, and it’s also made a pre-trained module available on its TensorFlow platform for other researchers to experiment with.

The first of the two publicly available experiments released today is called Talk to Books, and it quite literally lets you converse with a machine learning-trained algorithm that surfaces answers to questions with relevant passages from human-written text. As described by Kurzweil and Bernstein, Talk to Books lets you “make a statement or ask a question, and the tool finds sentences in books that respond, with no dependence on keyword matching.” The duo add that, “In a sense you are talking to the books, getting responses which can help you determine if you’re interested in reading them or not.”

Continue reading “Google’s latest AI experiments let you talk to books and test word association skills” »