President Trump Signs the American AI Initiative
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| President Trump Signs the American AI Initiative | |
| Number | 748 |
| Broadcast Date | FEBRUARY 11, 2019 |
| Episode Length | 3:59 |
| Hosts | Rich Stroffolino |
President Trump signs the American AI Initiative, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey summoned to testify in India, and Paris sues Airbnb.
Headlines
- President Trump will sign the American AI Initiative Executive order today, designed to boost the country's AI industry. The order makes federal data available to AI researchers, asks agencies to prioritize worker retraining for changes brought by AI, and directs federal agencies to prioritize AI funding although no new funding is allocated in the initiative. The order also requires the National Institute of Standards and Technology to create standards to allow the development of "reliable, robust, trustworthy, secure, portable, and interoperable AI systems.”
- India's parliamentary committee on information technology issued a summons to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey for February 25 after the CEO did not appear for a meeting with the committee on February 11th. The meeting was meant to discuss protecting citizens’ rights on social media and online news platforms ahead of the upcoming parliamentary elections, and was attended by executives from Twitter's India office. Failure to appear on the 25th would be seen as a breach of parliamentary privilege according to the committee's chairman.
- The City of Paris is suing AirBnB for publishing 1,000 illegal rental ads, which are punishable by fines of up to 12,500 euros per ad. French law limits home owners to 120 days of short term rentals per year, and all ads for these rentals must carry a registration number to monitor this. Paris is currently Airbnb's single biggest market with roughly 65,000 homes listed.
- Uber released an open source AI toolbox named Ludwig, which would allow users to train and test AI models without writing code. Ludwig is built on top of Google's TensorFlow and allows for models to be trained with a tabular dataset, like a CSV file, and a YAML config file that specifies input and output columns. Ludwig includes a flexible encoder-decoder architecture that can be used for text classification, object classification, image captioning, sequence tagging, regression, language modeling, machine translation, time series forecasting, and question answering. Ludwig and it's source code are available on GitHub.
- Fitbit added two new fitness trackers to its website, the Fitbit Inspire and Inspire HR. These are described as devices for corporate, wellness, health plan, and health systems partners rather than consumer-focused. Pricing will vary for employer and provider. The Inspire features basic activity and sleep tracking, supports call and text alerts, offers a monochrome touchscreen, water resistance to 50 meters, and a 5 day battery life. The Inspire HR adds 24/7 real time heart rate monitoring and comes with a silicon band included. In a statement about the new trackers, CEO James Park told CNBC that 6.8 million patients, employee and health plan members incorporate Fitbits into wellness programs, and company revenue is increasingly tied to business customers.
- A new report by the analyst firm IDC showed the Chinese smartphone shipments contracted 9.7% on the year in Q4. Xiaomi and Apple saw shipments decrease 35 and 20% respectively, while Huawei grew its overall marketshare to 29% as shipments increased 23% in the quarter.
- Apple announced that Health Records on iPhone will soon allow veterans receiving care through the Veterans Health Administration to view medical records in the app. This is the first consumer record-sharing platform used by the VA, which currently provides service to nine million veterans in the country.
- Another day, another streaming service. This time MGM is jumping into the fray with Epix Now. The service starts at $5.99, and is available on iOS, Apple TV, and Google Play at launch, with Roku and Amazon Fire support expected to be available soon. Aside from VOD, Epix Now will also offer Epix’s four linear channels in the service for a more passive experience. Epix plans to ramp up production of original content, including a newly announced deal to turn the Slate podcast Slow Burn into a 6-part docu-series.
Links
| Preceded by: "Week in Review for the Week of 2/4/19" |
President Trump Signs the American AI Initiative |
Followed by: "Amazon Buys eero" |