Seven Shades of Fake and AI to the Aid
Listing out the three biggest threats to the online world, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, put fake news on the top. His recent comments on the W3F blog to mark the 28th anniversary of what is now known as the Internet, could not have come at a more appropriate time for the traditional press, which apart from battling an onslaught from digital media, is also facing flak for fake news, perhaps a tad unfairly.
Fake news is not necessarily a new phenomenon. Its precursor is definitely what many of us know as yellow journalism. But fake news as we know it today, to say the least, is mostly a digital phenomenon and immensely secular. For instance even a bunch of teenagers from the small Macedonian town of Veles, are credited with changing the very course of American history by abetting the election of Donald Trump as its President for nothing more than just making a few more Google Ad Sense dollars.
This throws up several interesting dimensions and perhaps even a case for harking back to the good old journalistic values and tenets, as against the easy and lazy information gathering avenues that the digital world throws up. Anders Hofseth, a journalist and strategic analyst at The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK), provides a good refresher for journalists to guard against fake news in this post reproduced by the Reuters Institute of Journalism. These rules are eminently implementable in both the traditional newsroom as well as the online space.
However, in a digital world that is driven by clickbait and social media such as Facebook and Twitter, and where every user of the Internet is a “citizen journalist”, traditional journalistic practices are barely enough. That is because one also needs to understand the gray areas of the phenomenon itself.
In this post Clare Wardle, head of strategy and research at digital trust and truth advocacy group, First Draft, gives a fairly elaborate breakup of different shares of fake news in the “misinformation ecosystem.” All seven types of fake news can apply to both media, albeit to different degrees based on ease of deception and misinformation, intended or otherwise.
While digital and social media cannot be wished away, and even as it has clearly realized this and is taking steps so as not to be left behind, traditional media should perhaps look at fake news as an opportunity to reclaim turf and address core issues confronting the industry today in context.
The newsroom is certainly the first place to start using elements of Hofseth’s checklist, or anything similar that is suited to each, however, the more critical question is how to safeguard against fake news in the deluge of digital information that comes pouring in almost real time? Clearly this is a humanly overwhelming task and very resource intensive to address.
Enter artificial intelligence and machine learning. News and information feeds curated by AI are no longer a novelty.
Veooz Labs Pvt. Ltd. is one such digital platform company and perhaps the only one in India to have developed and deployed very advanced AI and machine learning news algorithms to protect readers from fake news and sift real news from social media cacophony. With its ability to mine big data and analyze disparate sources (over 40,000) at any given time, Veooz, (Pronounced Views), serves only stories generated by authoritative sources on its news App. It also puts a story in perspective and offers the reader the opportunity for a 360 view of the topic.
Traditional news desks can very well start utilizing such technology, particularly in India, not only to consolidate and curate content but also to validate their own journalistic output which, given the realities explained above, can be prone to being misled. Many aggregators just like Veooz, including Apple News and Snap, have started implementing the hybrid model even though it may still be some time away before it can be authoritatively said the problem has been addressed.
DISCLAIMER:The writer is Editor at Veooz Labs which manages the Veooz news platform.
Tax the Robot, says Bill Gates
Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking join issue on AI
and job losses
The noise around AI and job
losses is gathering higher decibels with the rich and influential adding their
voice to the rising chorus.
The latest salvo has come from
none other than Microsoft founder and the World’s richest man Bill Gates who
has suggested that robots that take jobs should be taxed. In an interview to tech portal Quartz he
argues that government must oversee such programs rather than rely on
businesses to redirect jobs to help people with lower incomes.
This
observation follows close on the heels of a similar observation by Tesla chief
Elon Musk who said there would be fewer and fewer jobs that robots could not do
better. Therefore, the powers that be will have to consider a universal basic
income for such populations that lose their jobs, he suggested speaking at the World Government Summit 2017 in
Dubai earlier this week.
Such concerns are not
an isolated phenomenon coming close on the heels of the endorsement of 23
Asilomar AI Principles by Musk and theoretical
physicist, cosmologist Stephen Hawking among other well-known personalities
that suggest safeguards, ethical, economic and social, while adopting AI across
fields. These principles were prepared and unveiled in conjunction with the Beneficial
AI Conference held in Boston in early January. AI researchers from academia and
industry, and thought leaders in economics, law, ethics, and philosophy
gathered to discuss issues in AI for five days.
Both the timing of this
conference and the new voices of concern being added are not an isolated case
with governments and think tanks highlighting contentious issues concerning the
unabated adoption of AI across industries. While the EU has been
talking about for some time now, one of the last acts by the lame duck Obama
Administration was to issue a policy document to deal with the adverse effects
of AI on jobs in late December 2016.
Quite understandably, while the
West seems to be more worried by the fast adoption of AI, it is actually the
developing nations that are likely to be more impact by it in the coming years
a topic touched upon in an earlier post on this blog. In fact latest
analysis based on World Bank data, suggests that 77% and 69% of jobs China and
India at risk compared to 47% in the US
The
Indian IT industry will be the hardest hit with automation already showing its
impact on Indian IT jobs. Infosys has “released” 8000-9000 employees in the
past one year as lower end jobs have been automated, the Economic Times said in an article quoting
the company’s HR head Krishnamurthy Shankar. Infosys has been releasing 2000
people every quarter. These employees are now being trained for other higher
end jobs, he said.
More
than the scare of robots and intelligent assembly lines taking away factory
jobs, it is white collar tech jobs that employ the young, and contact center
jobs that employ the young and the not so highly educated, that are under
threat.
DeMo and China spell death-knell for Indian smart phone makers
In Q4 of 2016 Indian mobile smart phone vendors faced the double whammy
of demonitisation and an aggressive push by Chinese vendors.
As a result Indian brands were pushed out of the top five sellers
list in the quarter as Chinese vendors continued to grab market share with
extremely price-competitive devices, a report released by independent
technology analyst firm Canalys on Wednesday said.
Local vendors were also hit hard by the Indian government’s
decision to demonetize the INR500 and INR1,000 (US$7.30 and US$14.65)
banknotes.
“Local brands’ target customers typically buy in cash and
from independent retailers. With the short-term liquidity crunch caused by
demonetization, these retailers are suffering a slowdown in consumer spending.
Local vendors are losing out as retailers look to shift their stock to
fast-moving, current devices,” said Canalys Analyst Rushabh Doshi. “In Q4 2015,
Micromax, Intex and Lava took second, third and fifth place, accounting for
almost 30% of the market. One year on and all three vendors have dropped out of
the top five, with their collective share falling to around 11%.”
Samsung continues to lead the market with shipments of
around 6.2 million units and a 22% share, in line with the previous quarter.
Second-placed Xiaomi’s focus on Indian expansion continued to pay off as it
reached the 3.0-million-unit mark, growing by more than 230% year on year.
Oppo
was the best-performing vendor in the top five, shipping 2.6 million units, up
from 150,000 a year ago, and a 150% increase from the previous quarter. Lenovo
finished fourth with just under 2.6 million units shipped, followed by Vivo,
which shipped just over 2 million smart phones.
“Oppo’s intensive brand-building has paid off. In the past
year, it has sponsored popular TV shows, T20 cricket and signed up local
celebrities Hrithik Roshan and Sonam Kapoor to build popularity,” said Research
Analyst Lucio Chen. “Beyond sponsorships, Oppo has also driven strong channel
expansion activities, investing in channel marketing initiatives and securing
vital shelf space with local mobile retailers. While this is a
capital-intensive approach, the significance of building a brand in India
cannot be underestimated.”
India's Ranking Among Top500 Supercomputer Powers Slips
CHINA MAINTAINS LEAD WITH TOP TWO SYSTEMS
NECK AND NECK WITH US ON NUMBER OF SYSTEMS IN LIST
The list is compiled once every six months by Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville; and Martin Meuer of ISC Group, Germany, and considered the only authoritative ranking of computing power across the world.
From nine systems in the list of the world’s Top 500 supercomputers, only five from India were able to make it to the latest list put out by the combine while the ranking dropped from 110 to 139. Poland replaced India at the 110th spot.
However, the CRAY XC40 located at the Supercomputer Education and Research Centre (SERC) at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore has maintained its position as the most powerful machine in India as per the Top500 list.
China has maintained its top 1 and 2 ranking going neck and neck with the US in the number of systems that made it to the list 171 systems apiece.
After US and China, Germany claims the most systems with 31, followed by Japan with 27, France with 20, and the UK with 13. A year ago the US was the clear leader with 200 systems, while China had 108, Japan had 37, Germany had 33, and both France and the UK had 18.
In addition to matching each other in system count in the latest rankings, China and the US are running neck and neck in aggregate Linpack performance. The US holds the narrowest of leads, with 33.9 percent of the total; China is second with 33.3 percent. The total performance of all 500 computers on the list is now 672 petaflops, a 60 percent increase from a year ago.
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Seven Shades of Fake and AI to the Aid
Listing out the three biggest threats to the online world, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, put fake news on th...
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Listing out the three biggest threats to the online world, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, put fake news on th... -
CHINA MAINTAINS LEAD WITH TOP TWO SYSTEMS NECK AND NECK WITH US ON NUMBER OF SYSTEMS IN LIST India’s ranking in the Top 500 supercom...