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Apple is expected to announce plans next week to make its Siri voice assistant work with a larger variety of apps, as the technology company looks to counter the runaway success of Amazon.com’s competing Alexa service.

But the Cupertino, California, company is likely to stick to its tested method of focusing on a small amount of features and trying to perfect them, rather than casting as wide a net as possible, according to engineers and artificial intelligence industry insiders.

Currently, Apple’s Siri works with only six types of apps: ride-hailing and sharing; messaging and calling; photo search; payments; fitness; and auto infotainment systems. At the company’s annual developer conference next week, it is expected to add to those categories.

Some industry-watchers have also predicted Apple will announce hardware similar to Amazon’s Echo device for the home, which has been a hot-seller recently. Apple declined comment.

But even if Siri doubles its areas of expertise, it will be a far cry from the 12,000 or so tasks that Amazon.com’s Alexa can handle.

Apple vs Amazon

The difference illustrates a strategic divide between the two tech rivals. Apple is betting that customers will not use voice commands without an experience similar to speaking with a human, and so it is limiting what Siri can do in order to make sure it works well.

Amazon puts no such restrictions on Alexa, wagering that the voice assistant with the most “skills,” its term for apps on its Echo assistant devices, will gain a loyal following, even if it sometimes makes mistakes and takes more effort to use.

The clash of approaches is coming to a head as virtual assistants that respond to voice commands become a priority for the leading tech companies, which want to find new ways of engaging customers and make more money from shopping and online services.

Siri vs Alexa

Now, an iPhone user can say, “Hey Siri, I’d like a ride to the airport” or “Hey Siri, order me a car,” and Siri will open the Uber or Lyft ride service app and start booking a trip.

Apart from some basic home and music functions, Alexa needs more specific directions, using a limited set of commands such as “ask” or “tell.” For example, “Alexa, ask Uber for a ride,” will start the process of summoning a car, but “Alexa, order me an Uber” will not, because Alexa does not make the connection that it should open the Uber.

After some setup, Alexa can order a pizza from Domino’s, while Siri cannot get a pie because food delivery is not — so far — one of the categories of apps that Apple has opened up to Siri.

“In typical Apple fashion, they’ve allowed for only a few use cases, but they do them very well,” said Charles Jolley, chief executive of Ozlo, maker of an intelligent assistant app.

Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller said the company does not comment on its plans for developers.

Amazon said in a statement: “Our goal is to make speaking with Alexa as natural and easy as possible, so we’re looking at ways to improve this over time.”

Side dish, not entree

Apple’s narrower focus could become a problem, said Matt McIlwain, a venture capitalist with Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group.

The potential of Apple’s original iPhone did not come to light until thousands of developers started building apps.

McIlwain said he expects Apple to add new categories at its Worldwide Developers Conference next week, but not nearly enough to match Alexa’s number of skills.

“To attract developers in the modern world, you need a platform,” McIlwain said. “If Apple does not launch a ‘skills store,’ that would be a mistake.”

Neither Siri nor Alexa has a clear path to making money.

Siri works as an additional tool for controlling traditional apps, and Apple pays money to owners of those apps. Alexa’s skills are free, and developers are not paid.

At the moment, because of their limits, voice apps are “a side dish, not the entree,” according to Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
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The world is watching closely as food shortages grip parts of Africa and the Middle East. As humanitarian groups respond to the crisis, they have to solve a major problem: how to track food security in areas that are simply too remote or too dangerous to access.

The Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWSNET) has come up with an innovative answer. The U.S.-funded organization is working with DigitalGlobe, a Colorado satellite company, to crowdsource analysis of satellite imagery of South Sudan.

The effort will rely on thousands of volunteers — normal people with no subject matter expertise — to scour satellite images looking for things like livestock herds, temporary dwellings and permanent dwellings. The group has selected an area of 18,000 square kilometers across five counties in South Sudan to analyze.

“The crowd can identify settlement imagery, they can identify roads, hospitals, airplanes, you name it. It allows us to tap into this network of folks around the world, not necessarily in country, but they are folks who are interested and compelled by whatever the campaign is,” said Rhiannan Price, senior manager of the Seeing a Better World Program at DigitalGlobe.

“Rather than clicking through your phone and passively taking in information, our users are actively engaging and putting information back out there that is really helpful for our partners.”

DigitalGlobe’s platform, known as Tomnod, has more than 2 million unique users. Other crowdsourcing observation campaigns using satellite imagery include the effects of a wildfire in South Africa and counting seals in Antarctica.

But the work is particularly valuable in South Sudan, where an estimated 100,000 people have been forced to flee their homes in the five-county area because of violence. Conflict-ridden South Sudan is the only place in the world where famine has been declared in the past six years.

“For humanitarians to cover that kind of ground, especially when it’s insecure, is just not a safe approach,” said Price. “Satellite imagery offers a really helpful tool when it comes to assessing and evaluating what’s happening on the ground, trying to find those folks so we can get resources and actually quantify the situation there.”

DigitalGlobe owns and operates a constellation of high-resolution satellites and has collected thousands of recent images of the area in question. In order to best track damage and displacement, they are comparing the images with ones from 2015, when they did a similar project.

Chris Hillbruner, deputy chief of party at FEWSNET, said his organization is trying several innovative approaches in different parts of the world to collect data. In Yemen and northeast Nigeria, it has assembled a network of local data collectors that relays information. It has also launched a pilot project using cellphones to collect wage and market data in Madagascar to determine when laborers are in low demand, signaling a bad year for harvests.

“We’re piloting a variety of tools and I think technology can help us, but I would also say that there are limitations,” Hillbruner said. “At the end of the day, we still get the best information when people are able to go into these areas and get on the ground to collect information about what is happening.”

But high-resolution satellite imagery, where each pixel in the photograph represents 30 centimeters on the ground, may be the next best thing to having a person on the ground.

To date, Tomnod’s team of volunteers has identified more than 180,000 objects of interest, including traditional dwellings known as tukuls and herds of livestock. This is invaluable information that tells humanitarian organizations where they need to send help.

“When you think of some of the drivers behind food insecurity, things like conflict or drought or flood, things that affect food supplies, or affect population migration, those are areas where remote sensing, satellite imagery, really excel in a way that other analyses simply can’t compete with,” Price said.
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Announcing that the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris climate accord, President Donald Trump misplaced the blame for what ails the coal industry and laid a shaky factual foundation for his decision. A look at some of the claims in a Rose Garden speech and an accompanying fact sheet about the deal to curtail emissions responsible for global warming:

WHITE HOUSE: The Paris climate accord “would effectively decapitate our coal industry, which now supplies about one-third of our electric power.”

THE FACTS: The U.S. coal industry was in decline long before the Paris accord was signed in 2015. The primary cause has been competition from cleaner-burning natural gas, which has been made cheaper and more abundant by hydraulic fracturing. Electric utilities have been replacing coal plants with gas-fired facilities because they are more efficient and less expensive to operate.

TRUMP: Claims “absolutely tremendous economic progress since Election Day,” adding “more than a million private-sector jobs.”

THE FACTS: That’s basically right, but he earns no credit for jobs created in the months before he became president. To rack up that number, the president had to reach back to October. Even then, private-sector job creation from October through April (171,000 private-sector jobs a month) lags just slightly behind the pace of job creation for the previous six months (172,000), entirely under President Barack Obama.

TRUMP: “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.”

THE FACTS: That may be so, but Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, is not Trump country. It voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in November, favoring her by a margin of 56 percent to Trump’s 40 percent. The city has a climate action plan committing to boost the use of renewable energy. Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto, a Democrat, has been an outspoken supporter of the Paris accord, and tweeted after Trump’s announcement that “as the Mayor of Pittsburgh, I can assure you that we will follow the guidelines of the Paris Agreement for our people, our economy & future.”

WHITE HOUSE: “According to a study by NERA Consulting, meeting the Obama administration’s requirements in the Paris Accord would cost the U.S. economy nearly $3 trillion over the next several decades. By 2040, our economy would lose 6.5 million industrial sector jobs _ including 3.1 million manufacturing sector jobs.”

THE FACTS: This study was paid for by two groups that have long opposed environmental regulation, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Council for Capital Formation. Both get financial backing from those who profit from the continued burning of fossil fuels. The latter group has received money from foundations controlled by the Koch brothers, whose company owns refineries and more than 4,000 miles of oil and gas pipelines.

The study makes worst-case assumptions that may inflate the cost of meeting U.S. targets under the Paris accord while largely ignoring the economic benefits to U.S. businesses from building and operating renewable energy projects.

Academic studies have found that increased environmental regulation doesn’t actually have much impact on employment. Jobs lost at polluting companies tend to be offset by new jobs in green technology.

WHITE HOUSE, citing a study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “If all member nations met their obligations, the impact on the climate would be negligible,” curbing temperature rise by “less than .2 degrees Celsius in 2100.”

THE FACTS: The co-founder of the MIT program on climate change says the administration is citing an outdated report, taken out of context. Jake Jacoby said the actual global impact of meeting targets under the Paris accord would be to curb rising temperatures by 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit.

“They found a number that made the point they want to make,” Jacoby said. “It’s kind of a debate trick.”

One degree may not sound like much, but Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute in Germany, says, “Every tenth of a degree increases the number of unprecedented extreme weather events considerably.”
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When General Motors CEO Mary Barra introduced the Chevrolet Bolt at the CES gadget show last year, she took a shot at Tesla.

Buyers can be confident because Chevy has 3,000 U.S. dealers to service the new electric vehicle, she said. The implication was that Tesla, with just 69 service centers nationwide, can make no such promise.

 

The uncharacteristic insult from Barra was designed to highlight the difference between 108-year-old GM and Tesla, a disruptive teenager. It also acknowledged a budding rivalry that could help determine whether Detroit or Silicon Valley sets the course for the future of the auto industry.

The tale of the tape favors GM. It has made billions in profits since returning to the public markets in 2010. GM got the Bolt, a $36,000 car that goes 238 miles per charge, to market before Tesla’s Model 3. Tesla, the 14-year-old company led by flamboyant CEO Elon Musk, has never posted an annual profit.

 

Yet, as both CEOs face shareholders for annual meetings Tuesday, it is Barra who must explain to skeptical investors why GM’s future is as bright as Tesla’s.

 

GM’s stock is trading around the $33 price of its initial public offering seven years ago. During that time, Tesla shares have soared more than tenfold to $335. Wall Street now values Tesla at about $55 billion, compared to around $50 billion for GM.

 

Despite efforts to paint themselves as technology companies, automakers can’t shake their giant, capital-intensive global manufacturing operations. The huge investment needed to build vehicles yields low profit margins compared with tech companies that make software or cell phones, says Michael Ramsey, an analyst with Gartner. GM’s net profit margin in 2016 was 5.7 percent. By comparison, Alphabet Inc., parent of Google, had a 22 percent margin.

 

Although it’s an automaker, Tesla started in the tech bucket and remains there in the eyes of investors and buyers, Ramsey says.

 

Tesla’s electric cars are the envy of the industry, and its semi-autonomous technology is among the most advanced on the road. Musk says Tesla’s California assembly plant – which used to be GM’s – will soon be among the most efficient in the world. And it’s branching into areas with potential for bigger returns, including solar panels, energy storage and trucking.

Tesla is absurdly overvalued if based on the past, but that’s irrelevant. A stock price represents risk-adjusted future cash flows,” Musk tweeted in April.

 

Still, Musk can’t risk any missteps as Tesla pivots from a niche manufacturer of 84,000 high-priced cars per year. The Model 3 sedan, Tesla’s first mainstream car, is due out later this year, but previous launches have been plagued with delays. Tesla has yet to prove it can build high-volume vehicles with quality and reliability, as GM does. Musk aims to make 500,000 vehicles per year in 2018; GM made more than 10 million cars and trucks last year.

GM, too, is stretching into new areas. Its Maven car-sharing service has 35,000 members in 17 North American cities, and it’s providing cars for ride-hailing services. GM is developing autonomous cars with Cruise Automation, a software company purchased last year. Its SuperCruise semi-autonomous driving system, due out this year, is designed to be safer than Tesla’s.

 

And GM isn’t the only automaker with a stagnant stock price. Of the seven best-selling carmakers in the U.S., only Toyota and Fiat Chrysler have seen significant growth in seven years. Ford, Honda and Hyundai all have lost value.

 

“Investors and the financial markets are much more interested in investing in the potential of what might be huge than in the reality of what’s already profitable and likely to remain so for years to come,” says Sam Abuelsamid, a senior analyst with Navigant Research.

 

Abuelsamid says GM could better trumpet its technology achievements. For instance, it scarcely markets the Bolt. By contrast, Musk builds hype with nightclub-like events for Tesla owners and Twitter banter with 8.8 million followers.

 

“The only way you can get people to perceive you in the same light as a company like Tesla is to demonstrate it,” Abuelsamid says.

 

Musk is crucial to Tesla’s success. The risk-taking billionaire founded PayPal and rocket company SpaceX before taking over Tesla. He espouses big ideas like Hyperloop high-speed transportation and colonizing Mars.

 

Barra, on the other hand, is a methodical engineer who rarely strays from script. She has only 29,500 Twitter followers. She’s a GM lifer who earned a company-paid MBA from Stanford; Musk left a Stanford graduate physics program after just two days to form a publishing startup.

 

“Mary is like a normal high-level performing executive,” Ramsey says. “Elon Musk is like an almost unrivaled superstar, even in comparison to Silicon Valley executives.”

 

Still, the big changes in the auto industry are in the early stages. Electric vehicles make up less than 1 percent of global auto sales and fully self-driving cars are years away. The economy can falter and company fortunes can shift. Already this year, sales in the U.S. and China are slowing, and GM pulled out of the European and Indian markets because they weren’t profitable.

 

GM knows the ups and downs of auto sales, but Tesla will have to learn to manage them. If the Model 3 is late and Tesla sales fall, its stock price could drop and reduce Tesla’s access to cheap capital, Ramsey says.

 

“I don’t think they’re completely immune to economic cycles,” he says. “That will be when we really know if Tesla can maintain this out-of-whack share value with their fundamentals.”
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The United States Army is taking another step toward developing autonomous trucks this month when it tests them on a Michigan highway.

The test, the first on a public road, will feature only flatbed trucks, but the technology could eventually be used in other military vehicles and could help protect troops on the battlefield.

As with the many tests of driverless cars, the trucks will have sensors to stay on course and communicate with one another. Also, like current driverless car efforts, the Army’s test will still see a human behind the wheel just in case something goes wrong.

“In order for automated vehicles to work and work correctly and work safely, that automated vehicle needs to talk very fast, sending data back and forth, first to the vehicles around it,” said Doug Halleaux, public affairs officer for the U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC) in an interview with the Times Herald newspaper.

One potential hurdle the test will have to overcome is crossing a steel girder bridge called the Blue Water Bridge. Researchers say the steel could present a challenge to the radar readings, possibly confusing the autonomous system.

The push for autonomous military vehicles stems from the number of deadly attacks on U.S. military convoys in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Michigan highway will remain open to normal traffic during the testing.
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Social media companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube have stepped up both the speed and number of removals of hate speech on their platforms in response to pressure from the European Union to do more to tackle the issue, according to the results of an EU evaluation.

Facebook won particular praise for reviewing most complaints within a 24-hour target timeframe set down in a code of conduct agreed in December by the European Commission,

Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube

Calling the results “encouraging” for the Commission’s push for self-regulation, Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova said the proportion of offending items taken down had doubled and action was being taken more quickly than when the EU checked six months ago.

“This … shows that a self-regulatory approach can work, if all actors do their part. At the same time, companies … need to make further progress to deliver on all the commitments,” Jourova said in a statement, adding that firms should provide more feedback to people who brought abuses to their attention.

Facebook scored highly on this, Twitter and YouTube less so.

The voluntary code of conduct obliges firms to take action in Europe within 24 hours, following rising concerns about the proliferation of racist and xenophobic content on social media triggered by the refugee crisis and attacks in Western Europe.

This included removing or disabling access to the content if necessary, better cooperation with civil society organizations and the promotion of “counter-narratives” to hate speech.

Facebook assessed notifications of hateful content in less than 24 hours in 58 percent of cases, up from 50 percent in December, according to the report.

Twitter also sped up its dealing with notifications, reviewing 39 percent of them in less than 24 hours, as opposed to 23.5 percent in December, when the Commission first reviewed the companies’ progress and warned them they were being too slow.

YouTube, on the other hand, slowed down, reviewing 42.6 percent of notifications in less than 24 hours, down from 60.8 percent in December, the results showed.

“IT companies have all been improving time and response to notifications on manifest illegal hate speech,” Jourova said at a meeting of the EU High Level Group on combating racism, xenophobia and other forms of intolerance on Wednesday.

“There are differences among the companies … but we can objectively say that all have improved.”

All the companies significantly increased the number of removals. Overall, content was removed in 59.2 percent of cases, more than double the rate in December which was 28.2 percent.

The proliferation of hate speech on social media has increased pressure on the companies to remove the content swiftly as they face the prospect of legislation at both EU and national level.

Last week EU ministers approved plans to force social networks to take measures to block videos with hateful content while the German government approved a plan in April to fine companies up to 50 million euros if they fail to remove hateful postings quickly.

The most common ground of hate speech the Commission identified was xenophobia, including expressions of hatred against migrants and refugees, together with anti-Muslim hatred, followed by ethnic origin.

The spread of fake news and racist content has taken on more urgency in Germany after the arrival of about a million migrants over the last two years.
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Today’s travelers on land, sea and air rely on one of the satellite-based navigational systems commonly known as GPS, where the G stands for Global. Scientists at NASA will soon start experiments aiming at changing Global to Galactic. For that, they plan to use neutron stars, also known as pulsars, as positioning beacons. VOA’s George Putic visited NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center to talk with astrophysicists involved with the project.
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Fighting hunger around the globe is uniquely challenging. It’s not just getting the food to those who need it. It includes growing, or in the case of protein, raising the food that will feed the hungry. But a group of California researchers may have an answer to the protein problem. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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An Indian charity is using big data to pinpoint human trafficking hot spots in a bid to prevent vulnerable women and girls vanishing from high-risk villages into the sex trade.

My Choices Foundation uses specially designed technology to identify those villages that are most at risk of modern slavery, then launches local campaigns to sound the alarm.

“The general Indian public is still largely unaware that trafficking exists, and most parents have no idea that their children are actually being sold into slavery,” said Elca Grobler, the founder of My Choices Foundation.

“That’s why grass-roots awareness and education at the village level is so important to ending the human traffic trade,” Grobler said in a statement released late Tuesday.

The analytics tool — developed by Australian firm Quantium — uses a range of factors to identify the most dangerous villages.

It draws on India’s census, education and health data and factors such as drought risk, poverty levels, education and job opportunities to identify vulnerable areas.

Red alert

There are an estimated 46 million people enslaved worldwide, with more than 18 million living in India, according to the 2016 Global Slavery Index. The Index was compiled by the Walk Free Foundation, a global organization seeking to end modern slavery.

Many are villagers lured by traffickers with the promise of a good job and an advance payment, only to find themselves or their children forced to work in fields or brick kilns, enslaved in brothels and sold into sexual slavery.

Almost 20,000 women and children were victims of human trafficking in India in 2016, a rise of nearly 25 percent from the previous year, according to government data.

While India has strengthened its anti-trafficking policy in recent years, activists say a lack of public awareness remains one of the biggest impediments.

In 2014, My Choices Foundation launched “Operation Red Alert,” offering educational programs to inform parents, teachers, village leaders and children about traffickers.

But with more than 600,000 villages across India and limited resources, the charity teamed up with Quantium to build the new data tool and use methods old and new to fight the criminals.

“We are helping to banish human trafficking, one village at a time, through a combination of highly sophisticated technology and grass-roots … education,” said Grobler.
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Nest Labs is adding Google’s facial recognition technology to a high-resolution home-security camera, offering a glimpse of a future in which increasingly intelligent, internet-connected computers can see and understand what’s going on in people’s homes.

The Nest Cam IQ, unveiled Wednesday, will be Nest’s first device to draw upon the same human-like skills that Google has been programming into its computers — for instance, to identify people in images via its widely used photo app. Facebook deploys similar technology to automatically recognize and recommend tags of people in photos posted on its social network.

Nest can tap into Google’s expertise in artificial intelligence because both companies are owned by the same parent company, Alphabet Inc.

With the new feature, you could program the camera to recognize a child, friend or neighbor, after which it will send you notifications about that person being in the home.

Nest isn’t saying much about other potential uses down the road, though one can imagine the camera recognizing when grandparents are visiting and notifying Nest’s internet-connected thermostat to adjust the temperature to what they prefer. Or it might be trained to keep a close eye on the kids when they are home after school to monitor their activities and send alerts when they’re doing something besides a list of approved activities.

The cost of facial recognition

The new camera will begin shipping in late June for almost $300. You’ll also have to pay $10 a month for a plan that includes facial recognition technology. The same plan will also include other features, such as alerts generated by particular sounds — barking dogs, say — that occur out of the camera’s visual range.

The camera will only identify people you select through Nest’s app for iPhones and Android devices. It won’t try to recognize anyone that an owner hasn’t tagged. Even if a Nest Cam IQ video spies a burglar in a home, law enforcement officials will have to identify the suspect through their own investigation and analysis, according to Nest.

Privacy concerns

Facial recognition is becoming more common on home-security cameras. Netatmo, for instance, introduced a security camera touting a similar facial recognition system in 2015. That camera sells for about $200, or $100 less than the Nest Cam IQ.

The way that the Nest and Netatmo cameras are being used doesn’t raise serious privacy concerns because they are only verifying familiar faces, not those of complete strangers, said Jennifer Lynch, who specializes in biometrics as a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital advocacy group.

But Lynch believes privacy issues are bound to crop up as the resolution and zoom capabilities of home security cameras improve, and as engineers develop more sophisticated ways of identifying people even when an image is moving or only a part of a face is visible. Storing home-security videos in remote data centers also raises security concerns about the imagery being stolen by computer hackers. “It definitely could become a slippery slope,” Lynch said.

The privacy issues already are thorny enough that Nest decided against offering the facial recognition technology in Illinois, where state law forbids the collection and retention of an individual’s biometric information without prior notification and written permission.

Further details

Nest’s $10-a-month subscription includes video storage for 10 days. Video can be stored up to 30 days with an upgrade to a subscription plan costing $30 per month.

The high-end camera supplements lower-resolution indoor and outdoor cameras that Nest will continue to sell for almost $200. Neither of the lower-end cameras is equipped for facial recognition.
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Inside the sprawling Acer stall at Computex Taipei, Asia’s largest tech show, staff displayed a laptop computer that’s ready for virtual reality play yet thinner than most PCs for gaming.  At the same exhibition, the Taiwanese tech hardware maker showed how its internet cloud uses artificial intelligence to predict what customers will do when shopping and allow the shop to make decisions accordingly.

VR and AI usher in a new world of technology

Acer was riding two major new themes at the annual show: virtual reality, often abbreviated to VR, and artificial intelligence, or AI.

Demand from gamers, a lucrative market of people willing to pay more than $10,000 for a personal computer (PC), is driving the VR side, compelling Acer and its peers to install new lines of processors that support immersive, 3D play with headgear and hand controls.

“You can see that the company is moving into more gaming centric, VR, new experience innovation,” said Vincent Lin, senior director of Acer’s global product marketing. “Not all gaming notebooks or not all notebooks are VR ready. There are certain requirements needed to be VR ready. VR, certainly it’s a growth area. It’s supposed to like grow five times or something over next 3 years.”

Revenue is forecast to rise quickly

Silicon Valley investment advisory firm Digi-Capital forecasts a surge in global revenue from $20 billion this year to $108 billion in 2021 in virtual reality technology and a similar technology known as augmented reality. 

The anticipation of growth inspired 60 Computex exhibitors to show games, gear or PCs that support virtual reality. The technology that first popped into public view in the 1980s is normally aimed now at computer gamers, though scientific researchers have used VR as well as the related augmented reality to model processes they can’t duplicate in real life. 

Near Acer’s stall, Computex visitors donned thick, black head-mounted goggles to race cars or fire at things, yelling in excitement through the dimly lit booths as they tested new products. 

PCs will be thinner, quieter and quicker to support VR

Developers were excited about Nvidia’s newly announced graphics processors that are designed to make PCs thinner and quieter. They also noticed the seventh update of Intel’s Core i5 processor, which stands to make PCs faster.

At one stall, Hong Kong developer Zotac showed off backpacks that can hold a gamer’s VR hardware system to prevent any tripping over wires – which might happen to someone immersed in a 3D scenario and unable to see the real floor.

“Right now the way the virtual reality equipment is made, you’re tethered to a system. That means you have to worry about tripping over cables, wrapping them around yourself as well,” Zotac product marketer Buu Ly said. “With our VR backpack, that removes those barriers so you are more free to experience VR the way it was supposed to be experienced.”

AI attracting much interest this year

Artificial intelligence also made its way into the show, where about 1,600 exhibitors occupied 5,010 booths, this year as companies test a relatively new technology that teaches computers to make decisions based on patterns they detect through analysis of user commands. 

Voice-activated assistants on mobile phones use artificial intelligence by searching the phone for requested information, even sending commands across apps to get answers.

Computex organizers have not tallied the number of exhibitors showing AI technology, but analysts in Taipei say a number are pursuing servers that can speed up development of AI functions allowed by the likes of Nvidia’s Jetson TX computer processing module.

With a compound annual growth rate of 63 percent from 2016 to 2022, the artificial intelligence market should be worth $16.06 billion by 2022, according to forecasts by the research firm Markets and Markets.

“AI has caught much of the spotlight in various exhibitions around the world and has become one of major deployment highlights for many companies in recent years,” said Ray Han, industry analyst with the Marketing Intelligence & Consulting Institute in Taipei. “The next battlefield will lie on platforms or chips.”

Internet of things

One contender is Socionext, a Japanese developer that has developed a processor partly for AI and the Internet of things, or IoT, which means using phones or PCs to control other electronic objects. Five customers are evaluating whether to install the chip, said Fumitaka Shiraishi, a Socionext business project management group member. 

“Our chip is a processor chip, so not too specific for AI but also suitable for AI because of the low power,” Shiraishi said. 

Artificial intelligence can help the Internet of things by picking the most relevant points from vast fields of data collected.

“In the future five years, I think IoT devices also need to judge some information — not just sensing,” Shiraishi said. 
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Solar power is lighting up the night sky in Jordan and making life easier for the 20,000 Syrian refugees at a camp that once had no reliable source of electricity. Faith Lapidus reports.
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Andy Rubin, the co-creator of the Android mobile phone operating system, has launched a new company called Essential Products to sell a high-end smartphone and a home assistant device.

Palo Alto-based Essential said the new Essential Phone features an edge-to-edge screen, a titanium-and-ceramic case and dual cameras. The phone sells for $699 and will run the Android operating system. The price pits it against high-end smartphones including Apple Inc’s iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy S8.

Essential also launched a household assistant called Home that looks like an angled hockey puck with a screen. The device will compete against the Amazon.com Echo and Alphabet’s Google Home speaker, which are powered by the Alexa and the Google Assistant voice services respectively.

Essential confirmed the Home device will let the user choose between Alexa, Google Assistant or Siri. It was not immediately clear how Siri would be available on Essential. While Amazon and Google have released the software needed to embed their assistants on devices they do not make, Apple has not done so.

Essential declined to elaborate on how it plans to embed Siri on the device, and Apple declined to comment.

The Essential Home takes a page from Apple’s privacy play book. Like an iPhone, the Home will do much of the processing for voice and image recognition on the device itself rather than sending data to remote servers.

Essential also said the Home device will communicate with home appliances like lights and thermostats directly over the home network, rather than sending data to remote servers.

Apple’s HomeKit system takes similar approach. Rubin, Essential’s CEO, co-founded Android and sold it to Google in 2005. He ran Google’s mobile efforts until 2013 before a brief stint running the firm’s robotics division. He left Google in 2014 to focus on starting hardware companies. Investors in Essential include Chinese tech company Tencent Holdings, iPhone contract manufacturer Foxconn, Redpoint Ventures and Altimeter Capital.

Essential plans to announce a ship date for the devices in the next few weeks. The company did not say whether it planned to sell the phone directly to customers online or in physical stores.

Essential for the first time revealed its staff on its website, listing Wolfgang Muller as head of channel sales.

Muller previously ran North American retail operations for phone maker HTC, according to his LinkedIn profile, suggesting that Essential plans to sell phones through retail stores, carriers or both.
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Computer algorithms power much of modern life from our Facebook feeds to international stock exchanges. Could they help end malnutrition and hunger in Africa? The International Center for Tropical Agriculture thinks so.

 

The International Center for Tropical Agriculture has spent the past four years developing the Nutrition Early Warning System, or NEWS.

The goal is to catch the subtle signs of a hunger crisis brewing in Africa as much as a year in advance.

 

CIAT says the system uses machine learning. As more information is fed into the system, the algorithms will get better at identifying patterns and trends. The system will get smarter.

 

Information Technology expert Andy Jarvis leads the project.

“The cutting edge side of this is really about bringing in streams of information from multiple sources and making sense of it. … But it is a huge volume of information and what it does, the novelty then, is making sense of that using things like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and condensing it into simple messages,” he said.

 

Other nutrition surveillance systems exist, like FEWSnet, the Famine Early Warning System Network which was created in the mid-1980s.

 

But CIAT says NEWS will be able to draw insights from a massive amount of diverse data enabling it to identify hunger risks faster than traditional methods.

 

“What is different about NEWS is that it pays attention to malnutrition, not just drought or famine, but the nutrition outcome that really matters, malnutrition especially in women and children. For the first time, we are saying these are the options way ahead of time. That gives policy makers an opportunity to really do what they intend to do which is make the lives of women and children better in Africa,” said Dr. Mercy Lung’aho, a CIAT nutrition expert.

 

While food emergencies like famine and drought grab headlines, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture says chronic malnutrition affects one in four people in Africa, taking a serious toll on economic growth and leaving them especially vulnerable in times of crisis.

Senior policy officer Olufunso Somorin is with the Africa Development Bank.

“In 2030, 13 years from now, Africa is going to have 200 million children below the age of five. Now once a child is stunted or misses a level of nourishment at that age, it affects that child psychologically, economically, socially. So a stunted child in the future is actually a stunted economy. So linking issues of nutrition at individual level to Africa’s development and transformation on a broader scale is important,” said Somorin.

 

CIAT says African governments will be able to access NEWS via “nutrition dashboards” where they can get risk assessments, alerts, and recommendations.

The system is expected to become operational in four African countries, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia and Nigeria, by year’s end.
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The U.S. Homeland Security chief says he’s considering banning laptop computers from the passenger cabins of all international flights to and from the United States.

John Kelly says there are signs of a “real threat” against civilian aviation from carry-on electronic devices.

Speaking on the Fox News Sunday television program, Kelly said terrorists are “obsessed” with the idea of “knocking down an airplane in flight.”

The ban would expand a March order that affects about 50 flights per day to the United States from 10 cities, in the Middle East and North Africa. The ban requires all electronics larger than a smartphone to be checked in.

About 3,250 flights a week are expected this summer between European Union countries and the United States, according to aviation industry figures.

Britain has taken similar measures targeting flights from Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia.

In Europe last week, during President Donald Trump’s nine-day foreign trip, Kelly met with European Commission officials in Brussels to discuss a possible laptop ban in airplane cabins.

 

 
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Bitcoin, the controversial digital currency, recently made headlines for reaching a record high valuation of more than $2,700, but perhaps the bigger growth potential lies in blockchain. The technology behind bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies is being explored by more conventional companies and businesses. VOA’s Tina Trinh reports from New York.
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In their Hacking for Defense class, students at Stanford University in California don’t hit the books or work on problem sets in the library. They go out into the field, tackling real world problems given to them by the Department of Defense and the U.S. military. The unusual 10-week course is an eye opener for the students who learn up close the challenges facing national security. VOA’s Michelle Quinn checked it out.
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It took seven years for the deep-space probe Cassini to reach Saturn. Since 2005 it has been studying the planet and its moons, sending troves of photos and information. As the spacecraft reaches the end of its useful life, scientists will soon send it into Saturn’s atmosphere until it burns up. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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A budget proposal by the Trump administration in March outlines a commitment to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) effort to send astronauts to Mars. About $3.7 billion is earmarked for development of the Space Launch System and the Orion capsule, crucial parts of NASA’s effort to send humans deeper into space. VOA’s Kane Farabaugh explores the effort of contractors working on the project, united by the commitment to “boldly go” further into the final frontier.
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It’s probably not a good idea to decide what to eat based on how many calories your wearable fitness tracker says you’ve burned, according to a new study.

Researchers at Stanford University in California, who tested several popular fitness trackers on 60 volunteers, say the fitness trackers are good for measuring heart rate and counting steps, but they’re bad at measuring energy expenditure.

The volunteers, 29 men and 31 women, engaged in a variety of physical activities, including walking or running on a treadmill or riding a stationary bike. Their heart rates were measured using a medical-grade electrocardiograph. Energy expenditure was determined by measuring the levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the volunteers’ breath.

Six of the seven devices tested, which included the Apple Watch, Basis Peak, Fitbit Surge, Microsoft Band, Mio Alpha 2, PulseOn and the Samsung Gear S2, did a good job measuring heart rate, coming within 5 percent of the accuracy of the electrocardiograph.

However, when it came to measuring calories burned, they did not do a very good job, with the most accurate tracker off by 27 percent. One was off by 93 percent.

“People are basing life decisions on the data provided by these devices,” said Euan Ashley, a professor of cardiovascular medicine, of genetics and of biomedical data science at Stanford, who added that consumer devices aren’t held to the same standards as medical devices.

Ashley was surprised by the results.

“The heart rate measurements performed far better than we expected,” he said. “But the energy expenditure measures were way off the mark. The magnitude of just how bad they were surprised me.”

The findings were published May 24 in the Journal of Personalized Medicine.
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A computer beat China’s top player of go, one of the last games machines have yet to master, for a second time Thursday in a competition authorities limited the Chinese public’s ability to see.

Ke Jie lost despite playing what Google’s AlphaGo indicated was the best game any opponent has played against it, said Demis Hassabis, founder of the company that developed the program.

AlphaGo defeated Ke, a 19-year-old prodigy, in their first game Tuesday during a forum organized by Google on artificial intelligence in Wuzhen, a town west of Shanghai. They play a final game Saturday.

AlphaGo previously defeated European and South Korean champions, surprising players who had expected it to be at least a decade before computers could master the game.

Internet users outside China could watch this week’s games live but Chinese censors blocked most mainland web users from seeing the Google site carrying the feed. None of China’s dozens of video sites carried the live broadcasts but a recording of Tuesday’s game was available the following night on one popular site, Youku.com.

State media reports on the games have been brief, possibly reflecting Beijing’s antipathy toward Google, which closed its China-based search engine in 2010 following a dispute over censorship and computer hacking. Google says 60 million people in China watched online when AlphaGo played South Korea’s go champion in March 2016.

The official response to the match, a major event for the worlds of go and artificial intelligence, reflects the conflict between the ruling Communist Party’s technology ambitions and its insistence on controlling what its public can see, hear and read.

The government encourages internet use for business and education but tries to block access to material considered subversive.

The possible reason for suppressing coverage while allowing Google to organize the event was unclear. Censorship orders to Chinese media are officially secret and government officials refuse to confirm whether online material is blocked.

On Thursday, AlphaGo “thought that Ke Jie played perfectly” for the first 50 moves, Hassabis said at a news conference.

“For the first roughly 100 moves, it is the closest game we have ever seen anyone play against the master version of AlphaGo,” he said.

Ke said the computer made unexpected moves after playing more methodically on Tuesday.

“From the perspective of human beings, it stretched a little bit and I was surprised at some points,” he said.

“I also thought that I was very close to winning the match in the middle,” Ke said. “I could feel my heart thumping. But maybe because I was too excited, I did some wrong or stupid moves. I guess that’s the biggest weak point of human beings.”

Go players take turns putting white or black stones on a rectangular grid with 361 intersections, trying to capture territory and each other’s pieces by surrounding them. The game is considered more difficult than chess for machines to master because the near-infinite number of possible positions requires intuition and flexibility.

This week’s games are taking place in a hall where Chinese leaders hold the annual World Internet Conference, an event attended by global internet companies.

China has the world’s biggest population of internet users, with some 730 million people online at the end of last year, according to government data.

Censors block access to social media and video-sharing websites such as Facebook and YouTube. Internet companies are required to employ teams of censors to watch social media and remove banned material.

Web surfers can get around online filters using virtual private networks, but Beijing has cracked down on use of those.
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California-based company Rocket Lab said Thursday it had launched a test rocket into space from its New Zealand launch pad, although the rocket didn’t reach orbit as hoped. 

 

The company said its Electron rocket lifted off at 4:20 p.m. Thursday and reached space three minutes later. 

 

“It has been an incredible day and I’m immensely proud of our talented team,” company founder Peter Beck said in a statement. 

 

Beck, a New Zealander, said the early stages of the mission went well. 

 

“We didn’t quite reach orbit and we’ll be investigating why, however reaching space in our first test puts us in an incredibly strong position,” he said. 

More tests approved

Rocket Lab was given official approval last week to conduct three test launches from the remote Mahia Peninsula on the North Island. The company hopes to begin commercial launches later this year and eventually launch about one rocket every week. 

 

The company said it will target getting to orbit on the second test and will look to carry the maximum payload. 

 

New Zealand has never had a space program but officials hope regular launches could change perceptions of the South Pacific nation and generate hundreds of millions of dollars each year in revenue. 

 

Rocket Lab plans to keep costs low by using lightweight, disposable rockets with 3D-printed engines. It sees an emerging market in delivering lots of small devices into low Earth orbit. The satellites would be used for everything from monitoring crops to providing internet service. 

New space club member

 

Politicians are rushing through new space laws and the government has set up a boutique space agency, which employs 10 people. 

 

“So far, it’s only superpowers that have gone into space,” Simon Bridges, New Zealand’s economic development minister, told The Associated Press last week. “For us to do it, and be in the first couple of handfuls of countries in the world, is pretty impressive.” 

 

Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket is unusual in many respects. It carries only a small payload of about 150 kilograms (331 pounds). It’s made from carbon fiber and uses an electric engine. Rocket Lab says each launch will cost just $5 million, a tiny fraction of a typical rocket launch. 

 

It’s a different plan than some other space companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which uses larger rockets to carry bigger payloads. 

 

Rocket Lab was founded by Beck and is privately held. The company has received about $150 million in venture capital funding. 
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In a San Francisco kitchen, chefs are re-creating everyday foods, such as eggs, mayonnaise, salad dressings and cookies from unconventional sources. 

“Playing with ingredients that are totally different in the food system is a lot like walking on the moon. We’re doing things no one has ever done before so it’s challenging,” said chef Chris Jones, who heads product development at the Hampton Creek technology company. 

While vegetarian foods have been around as long as there have been vegetarians, a new generation of companies, mostly from California, is using new technology to look for alternative protein sources that do not come from an animal. 

Hampton Creek 

Hampton Creek uses robotics to identify plants from around the world that can help re-create traditional foods substituting animal products with plant material. 

“We look into the different molecular characteristics and ultimately we’re able to identify relationships between what we see on a molecular level and whether it causes a cake to rise or what makes a mayo taste good or whether it binds a cookie together or makes a nice creamy butter,” said Hampton Creek founder Josh Tetrick. 

“It’s been really recent advances, both in screening methodologies as well as data science, that actually makes it possible,” said Jim Flatt, Hampton Creek’s chief of research and development.

Beyond burger 

In the lab of another company, Beyond Meat, scientists re-created a hamburger patty out of proteins from yellow peas, soy and beets for the look of blood. The scientists are breaking down the building blocks of meat and going into the plant kingdom to look for those same elements. They’re then rebuilding them into a new kind of food that uses plant-based protein to create a patty that looks just like a beef patty 

“What we’re doing is we’re taking plant matter. We’re running it through heating, cooling and pressure and that’s basically stitching together the proteins so they take on the fibrous texture of animal muscle,” said Beyond Meat founder Ethan Brown 

These companies say plants hold the key to solving global food problems. 

“Whether it’s Asia, Africa, India, you’re seeing a very strong trend toward increasing animal protein consumption. I don’t think as a globe we can afford that,” Brown said.   

“The planet actually cannot work with the way we are consuming meat because we don’t have enough arable land to create enough cereals for all the animals that we need if we are to feed the world through meat,” said Jeremy Coller of Coller Capital, an investor of alternative protein foods. 

“Food security is an increasingly big issue, particularly because of climate change and some other issues. I think if you expand the number of tools we can use to feed people really well, you help to mitigate against these risks,” said Tetrick, who envisions bringing healthier, new plant-based foods, that are culturally relevant to local cuisines, to regions in the world such as Africa, where hunger is no stranger. 

For now, Beyond Meat’s patties are sold in Hong Kong and the U.S.  Hampton Creek’s mayonnaise, salad dressings and cookies can be found in Mexico, Hong Kong and U.S. grocery stories.  Both companies are trying to improve and expand their range of products. 

“How do we figure out a way to make food healthier, that’s more sustainable, to actually taste good that’s actually affordable for everyone,” explained Tetrick of his mission. 

Because of this greater global goal, those who work in this industry say the subject of alternative sources of protein is not a fad, but a trend that is here to stay.
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According to the National Institutes of Health, 17 percent of people around the world will be 65 or older by 2050. Currently it is just more than 8 percent. That expected flood of elderly people is prompting authorities to think about new ways to care for them, and no surprise, the internet is involved. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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