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Yashica Vashishtha

Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.

Facebook

Facebook Starts a Three-Step Initiative to Fight Fake News and Misinformation

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Though social media was developed for entertainment purposes, it has become the biggest source of spreading misinformation and fake news. We have seen the impact of all the misinformation in the form of major steps taken by the general public, violence being one of them. Being the biggest social media platform, Facebook is the one that is most of the time blamed for spreading misinformation and hate among people.

Last month too, after the Capitol Hill riots, Facebook had to face a lot of criticism and had to suspend a few groups for spreading misinformation and call for violence. For the past many years, too, the company has been warned by several governments to work on its moderation policies.

Now, after the misinformation spread about COVID-19, the company has come up with its new three-step policy, to help to reduce the rate of spread of rumors. The three steps include, “Remove, Reduce, and Inform”. Maybe, the company has finally realized that it is losing its credibility. So it has to take some serious steps to maintain its position as one of the most used social media platforms.

Facebook Three-Step Initiative Remove, Reduce, and Inform

Facebook on Thursday held a small briefing session, where it addressed the issue of the spread of fake news and rumors. In this virtual meeting, the company talked about its new “Remove, Reduce, and Inform” policy, which would help curb the spread of fake news and misinformation in the coming future. Facebook already includes the option to report and take down posts related to hate-speech or misinformation. It also has its native similarity detection system used to filter the content posted on the platform. Now, for the new policy, Facebook has tied up with more than 80 fact-checker companies, including Fact Crescendo and Boom. These companies deal in over 60 languages and are certified by the nonpartisan International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN).

Facebook
Image Source: Pixabay

These fact-checkers will help Facebook identify false, altered, or partly false information on the platform. Currently, the company along with its partner fact-checkers is working towards labeling and checking vaccine-related posts, such that to identify their authenticity. It is also keeping a check on the ads and posts that includes selling of COVID-19 vaccine. The visibility of the groups that are spreading any sort of fake or partly false information about COVID-19 and its vaccine, has also been reduced, such that to lessen the reach of their posts.

Though the company is taking Stringent steps to fight misinformation, the Facebook Product Policy Manager, Misinformation Alice Budisatrijo admitted that it is impossible to combat this issue completely. “However, we take our responsibility seriously. We are a service for more than 2 billion people around the world. So we know how essential it is for people to have access to credible information, and for us to remove harmful content,” she said. “Even with the combination of artificial intelligence and the human reviewers that we have all over the world, we can never 100% guarantee that content that violates our policies is not on the platform,” she added.

Losing Credibility

Facebook has been facing a lot of criticism from around the world for being a major source of misinformation and hate spread. According to Rahul Namboori, co-founder of Fact Crescendo, Facebook was one of the most used social media platforms to cause chaos and hate among people in India in 2020. The year started with misinformation about the CAA and NRC bill proposed in India and lead to spreading fake news about COVID-19. 2021 also started with another protest about the Farm bill and people around the world have witnessed what happened on 26th Jan in Delhi, because of the misinformation on different social media platforms, including Facebook.

Facebook has also marked a ban from the Myanmar government recently, so to oppose possible violence over the military coup due to fake news in the country. After facing so much criticism from all around the world, the company is now trying to fix its image by added new policies against misinformation. Recently, it took some steps to oppose the spread of fake news about COVID-19 and its vaccine. It has removed many posts as well as suspended a few pages on the platform that included false information about the disease.

Controlling the Fake News on Other Platforms

Apart from Facebook, the company is going to strict its policies for its other platforms, i.e. Instagram and What’s App, too. On the other hand, Twitter is also taking some stringent actions on the same. It has started to label the posts that offer baseless rumors, disputed claims, incomplete information, and the information that is out-of-context for COVID-19 vaccines. Even Google has announced a fund of $3 million to fight the misinformation regarding the COVID-19 vaccines, such that it will try to show the most authentic results about the disease and its vaccine on every search on Google.

Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos To Quit as the CEO of Amazon by the End of Third Quarter of 2021

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The former richest man in the world, and the founder of the largest e-Commerce business, Amazon, Jeff Bezos has announced he’s stepping down as the CEO of Amazon. Bezos on Tuesday told its 1.3 million employees through an e-mail that he would be stepping down from his position of CEO of Amazon by the end of the third quarter of this year. After leaving his post as the CEO, he will join as the executive chairman of the board of directors of the company. On the other hand, Andy Jassy, the head of Amazon’s cloud division Amazon Web Services (AWS), will replace Bezos as the CEO of Amazon.

More About Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos is the founder of Amazon, one of the biggest e-commerce platforms in the world. He is a 57 years old American entrepreneur who founded Amazon on July 5, 1994. The company started as a seller of music and videos and became public only in three years of its founding. Today, the company is one of the biggest players in the online selling and purchasing business, offering major sales in grocery to electronics. Along with e-Commerce, the company is a major cloud computing provider, and the subsidiary that provides the service is called AWS (Amazon Web Service).

Jeff Bezos
Image Source: cnbc.com

Other than that, Amazon’s products and services include Kindle, FireTv, Alexa, Amazon Prime, Amazon Drive, Echo, Amazon Wireless, etc. Last year the company recorded a total sales of $386 Billion, 38% more than its sales in 2019. Jeff Bezos, too, for the past three consecutive years has been named as the richest person in the world by Forbes, having $202 billion net worth in 2020. Though this year he was replaced by the Tesla supremo Elon Musk.

What the Letter Said

Amazon’s current CEO, Jeff Bezos, announced he’s stepping down as the CEO of Amazon through an e-mail. He wrote, “I’m excited to announce that this Q3 I’ll transition to Executive Chair of the Amazon Board and Andy Jassy will become CEO. In the Exec Chair role, I intend to focus my energies and attention on new products and early initiatives. Andy is well known inside the company and has been at Amazon almost as long as I have. He will be an outstanding leader, and he has my full confidence.” In the letter, he talked about his 27 years of journey with Amazon and mentioned all the hard work put by his 1.3 million employees into the growth of the company.

Addressing his employees, he said, “I find my work meaningful and fun. I get to work with the smartest, most talented, most ingenious teammates. When times have been good, you’ve been humble. When times have been tough, you’ve been strong and supportive, and we’ve made each other laugh. It is a joy to work on this team.” He even talked about how Amazon has been helping the world with innovation, and about the rise in competition in this field, that too, inspired by Amazon only. He also wrote that the company like now will be focusing on new products and services for the people.

Not the End

Though Bezos is quitting as the CEO, he will be chairing the board of executives of the company. Also, being the major shareholder in Amazon, he will have most of the company’s operations under his control. On the other hand, the upcoming CEO of Amazon, Andy Jassy, has been working with Amazon since 1997 and has played a major role in the growth of AWS. About Andy Bezos said that since Andy has been working with Amazon since the beginning, everyone inside Amazon is familiar with him and Bezos has all the confidence in Andy.

The reaction of the Rivals

Amazon’s major rivals, including Sunder Pichai from Google, Marc Benioff from SalesForcea, and Satya Nadela the CEO of Microsoft, congratulated Bezos on joining as the chairman of the board of directors of Amazon. Sunder Pichai toasted Bezos for his two major projects Day 1 and the Earth Fund through his official Twitter account. Satya Nadela also took it to Twitter to congratulate the new Chairman and the upcoming CEO of Amazon for their new job roles. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce also expressed his joy by writing on Twitter that Amazon could not be in better hands.

Touch Surgery

Touch Surgery: Digital Innovation Empowering Medical Sciences

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Edtech is one of the booming industries today, and would you believe it if we tell you that you can also learn the complete procedure of a surgery simulated in an operating room on your smartphones? Believable enough, but most of us would have not thought of it yet, right? Medical studies are the most expensive of all and getting to see and learn the procedure for all types of surgeries is not even possible for those studying medical sciences. The same thought came into the minds of two medical residents at the Imperial College London, Jean Nehme, and Andre Chow, and they end up developing Touch Surgery.

Touch Surgery

Touch Surgery has played a vital role in transforming the medical world with the help of digital technology. It is a training app for medical students that simulate surgical procedures, validated by 19 independent peer-reviewed publications. The company Digital Surgery LTD is the parent company of Touch Surgery, having its headquarters in three major cities, i.e. London, New York City, Auckland, and Sydney. In the beginning, the company name was Kinosis and later was changed to Digital Surgery, to reflect the border scope and mission of the company.

Digital Surgery is a healthcare technology company that is using digital technology to help in making all the surgeries even safer. The app includes a near to reality simulator and AI-powered surgical video management platform, offering accurate surgical content for the doctors to enhance their skills and for the medical students to practice in the operating room.

The interactive simulator of Touch Surgery helps the medical trainees to learn the step-by-step surgical procedure and test their knowledge and skills related to medical operations, through the simulator. Most importantly, it helps in enhancing their skills of decision-making in a real-time environment. The app has also proved to be useful for patients who are about to go under surgery. They use this app to know more about their surgical procedure.

Digital Surgery tied up with Microsoft in 2018 to use Microsoft’s under development Microsoft Hololens (mixed reality smartglasses for surgery) to accomplish the company’s mission of safe surgery for all. The app includes around two hundred surgery training in seventeen different specialties and is used by many medical institutions to provide the ‘to-be doctors’ with a great learning experience. Currently, the app has got over 2 million users registered to it. The Dublin-based Irish company Medtronic, a Medtech conglomerate, acquired Touch Surgery for an amount of $500 million in 2020.

The Idea Behind Touch Surgery

Jean Nehme and Andre Chow the co-founders of Touch Surgery was still working as medical residents at the Imperial College London when they thought of the idea. Since the two were residents, they did not have the access to the resources that could help them enhance their skills as a surgeon. They realized that most of the medical students do not get to try their hands on all types of surgical procedures lacking additional experience. The only source to help them to enhance their skills was surgical simulators, but these too were too expensive to get.

This led the two to think of a cheaper and more accessible simulator for all, i.e. Touch Surgery. They discussed the idea of Touch Surgery in 2010 and founded the app in 2012. The idea was innovative and useful so, they easily got connected to many investors for their research and development work too. Today, Touch Surgery has partnered with numerous surgeons, combining their expertise and digital technology to empower the surgical community.

The Founders Touch Surgery

Jean Nehme has got an MBBS BSc MRCS MSc (Hons) and specializes in plastic surgery. Nehme is an awardee of multiple awards for his research work in innovation and his contribution to digitizing medical education. He has been named as one of the most influential 500 people in the UK by Debrett. On the other hand, Andre Chow is a general surgeon.

Touch Surgery Founders
Touch Surgery Founders: Andre Chow and Jean Nehme
Image Source: balderton.com

Both the co-founders graduated from the Imperial College School of Medicine in London. During the time, the two thought of developing Touch Surgery, Chow was pursuing a Ph.D. in Stem Cells and Biotechnology. Currently, Jean Nehme is working as the CEO, and Andre Chow is working as the COO of Touch Surgery.

BenevolentAI

BenevolentAI: Bringing Innovation in the Field of Bioscience

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Artificial Intelligence is a wonder that people would have laughed about two decades ago, but today, this technology is attracting almost every other type of field. In the past, futuristic sci-fi movies did give us a glimpse of AI in the form of flying cars and automated homes, etc. But we did not know that this technology will be here so soon, making a mark in every category in the world. After bringing a revolution in the field of technology, automobile, and more, medicine and pharmaceutical companies are also up for investing in AI and machine learning to make their research and drug discovery even better and faster. One such drug discovery startup is BenevolentAI.

BenevolentAI

BenevolentAI is a London-based drug discovery startup, that has adopted Artificial Intelligence and machine learning to speed up medicinal research and reduce the overall cost to half. The company was founded by Ken Mulvany on 13 November 2013, in London with co-founders Michael Brennan and Ivan Griffin. It uses AI technology such as pattern recognition to find a match for existing genetic, metabolic, and clinical information in order to develop new drugs. According to the founder, the drug discovery industry has a vast amount of information, that is impossible to handle by humans alone, so using AI, this information can not only stored but also be used to target different diseases.

Most of the clinical trials are focused on hypotheses for a particular disease, but with the AI technology at BenevolentAI, the existing research is used for finding a new disease to target and for which the existing hypothesis fits the best. This way there is no waste of time in discovering a new compound from scratch, but the drugmakers can jump straight to the clinical trials to find new drug candidates from existing information. The company uses AI combined with the expertise of qualified scientists to make sure that the end result is effective.

Ken Mulvany founded the company with a target to find a cure for ALS and Alzheimer’s using AI, and in 2021, the company will also be starting clinical trials for excessive daytime sleepiness in Parkinson’s disease in the US. The company currently has got 90 people working for it in the UK and US. In September 2016, only after four years of its founding, it raised $1.4 billion, becoming a unicorn. In 2018, the company raised another $115 million and valued at $2 billion. Benevolent AI has also acquired the UK operations of Proximagen for an undisclosed sum.

Idea Behind BenevolentAI

BenevolentAI is a machine intelligence company with an aim to develop drugs for every existing disease in the world with the help of artificial intelligence. The company is focusing on using AI to mine and analyze the already existing biochemical information to develop new drugs for the diseases. According to Jackie Hunter, the Board director at BenevolentAI, every 30 seconds a research paper is published, and 95% of them fail. There is vast information about discovery and research for drugs that are going in vain. It takes about ten years and over $2.5 billion to develop, test, and get ‘the drug’ for a particular disease, but with AI and machine learning the time and the cost of producing a drug can be reduced by 30% to 50%.

BenevolentAI collects the already existing drug research data that was for a particular condition but could not yield the desired results. Though the research might have failed for a certain disease, BenevolentAI uses the same research and clinical trials data to test for other diseases, such that the deep research will not go waste, and the existing information is used to find new drug candidate for other diseases.

The Founder

Ken Mulvany has got more than 20 years of experience as an entrepreneur and investor. Currently, he sits as the Chairman of BenevolentAI. Before Benevolent AI, Mulvany also founded another biotech company named Proximagen and served as the CEO of the company. Proximagen was into developing the drugs for central nervous system disorders.  Mulvany sold Proximagen in 2012 to Upsher-Smith Laboratories for $553million.

BenevolentAI Founder
Image Source: miro.medium.com

Today, Mulvany is a member of various advisory boards of different organizations, including the UK Government on Artificial Intelligence and the Oxford Sciences Innovations advisory boards. Apart from that, he chaired the Trustees of the Cure Parkinson’s Trust and is also a member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Artificial Intelligence.

Glassdoor

Glassdoor: The Story Behind the Biggest Online Review Portal for Job Seekers

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Years ago, people were practicing the traditional approach to finding jobs, i.e., through the newspaper classified section, local ads, brokers, or a reference from a friend or relative. But as the internet evolved with time, people started using online job portals, which became the most convenient method for all sorts of job seekers. Today millions of users, both employers and job seekers, can easily connect through such portals. In the same league, when one is looking for a job and gets an offer, they now can look for the company reviews on similar review-based websites, and easily make their mind on taking or not taking the offer. One such leading review-based online portal is Glassdoor.

Glassdoor is a review-based website that lets its users anonymously submit their reviews about a company, their experience, satisfaction with the company, salary, other workplace-related data, etc. This information is publicly available to job seekers, who want to know about the work environment of a certain company. The website also includes the feature to post or search for a job.

The Founders of Glassdoor

The co-founders of Glassdoor include Tim Besse, Robert Hohman, and Rich Barton. Both Robert Hohman and Rich Barton were working for Microsoft. Barton founded Expedia (a Microsoft spun-off company) in 1996, where Hohman was one of the team members. Later, after the spin-off, Barton became the chairman and Hohman the CEO of Expedia.

Glassdoor Founders
Glassdoor Founders: Robert Hohman, Tim Besse, and Rich Barton
Image Source: geekwire.com

On the other hand, Tim Besse met his future partners Hohman and Barton at Expedia only. He joined the company as his first job immediately after graduating from the Case Western Reserve University. Besse worked as the director of the Product Management and Online Marketing for the Asia Pacific division at Expedia.

The Story Behind

Rich Barton had been in the online business industry from before and had co-founded companies like Expedia and Zillow. He had a mind that would ask questions and try to answer them, even if he had to opt for an unconventional path. Going off track, with Expedia, he was providing airline ticket prices to the public and, with Zillow, he was revealing the exact real estate prices for the people. With Glassdoor too, he took an unconventional step.

During a brainstorming session for a new business idea in 2007, Barton and Hohman remembered an incident when Barton had left some employee survey data on the printer. This survey had information about employee satisfaction, their salaries, and reviews of their workplace. Though Barton’s assistant had grabbed that file safely, the two discussed the bad and the good aspects of that information going public. It was the trigger point for their new business idea. The two thought that even if that data had got revealed, it would have not caused any harm to anyone. In fact, if there was such a public platform, where people could submit such reviews of their companies, it would have been helpful for the job seekers to make better career choices.

The Working of Glassdoor

Tim Besse was impressed by the idea and left Expedia to join Hohman and Barton for their new business.  Finally, in June 2008, with an investment of around $10 million, they founded Glassdoor. The concept behind the platform was the anonymous rating of companies by the people who have worked with them. People now had a platform, where they could put their reviews on their experience with a company, how much they got paid, and how satisfied they were while working in it. Glassdoor also enabled the users to post any company-related media on the platform, to make their reviews more authentic.

The Platform uses smart technology and a team of people to filter the original reviews from original people so that the reviews are always trustworthy. With time, the platform started posting their rating for the companies, by averaging the reviews, salaries of employees, rating for the management, culture, etc. Later, based on the rating, Glassdoor started offering the ‘Best Places to Work Awards’ to the top listed companies.

The Journey of the Company in the Past Decade

In 2010, the company added a new feature to the website, i.e. Enhanced Employer Profiles. This new feature allows the users to add content other than reviews on the website. This feature is paid and offers the users to add content like social media links, interview questions, classified, etc. to their account. This paid content became useful for the people who wanted to prepare for a certain company interview. Glassdoor also provided features to submit a job opening for companies.

From 2012 to 2015, the company had raised around $160 million through venture capital. By 2015, Glassdoor had registered over 20 million users, and in the following two years, there were 41 million unique users at the platform. Glassdoor became a unicorn company within ten years of its founding. More than one-third of the biggest companies in the world have partnered with Glassdoor as its corporate clients. It has become the most trustworthy platform for job seekers. Glassdoor has been a winner of the Red Herring North America Award for Social Media Innovation 2013.

In June 2018, Recruit Holdings acquired Glassdoor for $1.2 billion in cash. Currently, Christian Sutherland-Wong is working as the CEO of Glassdoor.

MSI

MSI is All Set to Introduce its Business Summit, Prestige, and Modern Laptops in India

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MSI the Taiwanese multinational tech giant is all set to target the Indian laptop market with its newly announced high-end laptops. Reportedly the company has upgraded its business laptop series, i.e., the Summit, Prestige, and Modern laptop series. MSI will be introducing these high-tech laptops to its Indian customers very by the end of January 2021. The three category laptops have got a total of nine laptops, i.e., Summit E15 and Summit B15 (Summit series), Prestige 14, Prestige 15 and Prestige 14 EVO (Prestige series), and Modern 15 and Modern 14 (the Modern series, a total of four variants).

According to a statement from the company, all the laptops will be equipped with the latest 11th generation Intel Core processors. MSI is a company known for its gaming laptops, but with this new launch, it has come up with non-gaming business laptops.

MSI Summit

All the new MSI laptops are thin and lightweight. Both the Summit laptops, E15, and B15 boast a thin bezel 15.6-inch 4K display and have got support for 100% Adobe RGB color gamut. The laptops are around 16.9 millimeters thick and weigh about 1.79 kilograms.

MSI Summit Series
Image Source: digit.in

These new business laptops from MSI support enterprise-grade security and include a 4GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650Ti graphic card. Along with the SSD storage, the memory is extendable up to 64GB. The Summit laptops come with two DDR4 slots. These high-end laptops have got high-end technologies like a TPM 2.0 module, a fingerprint reader, and an IR scanner camera. 

MSI Prestige

For the Prestige laptops, the display is different for all. The MSI Prestige 15 has got up to a 15.6-inch display, whereas the MSI Prestige 14 and 14 EVO laptops feature up to 14-inch display. The MSI Prestige 15 and 14 laptops have the 4K UHD display, while the 14 EVO has a full HD display. The Prestige 15 is around 16.9 millimeters thick and weighs 1.65 kilograms. On the other hand, both Prestige 14 and 14 EVO are 15.9 millimeters in thickness and weighs almost 1.29 kilograms.

Equipped with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Ti Max-Q GPU graphics, the Prestige laptops include two DDR4 slots along with the two SSD storage slots. The RAM size for the Prestige laptops i.e., 15, 14, and 14 EVO are up to 64GB, up to 32GB of RAM, and up to 16GB of RAM, respectively. All three laptops support M.2 SSD storage. Instant wake, quicker login, and faster Wi-Fi connection are the main highlights of these laptops.

MSI Modern

Lastly, the Modern laptops feature full HD displays, the Modern 15 having a 15.6-inch and the Modern 14 having a 14-inch display. These laptops are integrated with Nvidia GeForce MX450 GPU and come with up to 32GB DDR4 of RAM. Modern 15 has got two SSD slots, whereas the Modern 14 consists of a single NVMe SSD slot.

Price Range

Since the laptops are high-end business laptops, the price range for these laptops goes really high. The company has announced the price for its laptop for the Indian market. The price of MSI Summit E15 A11SCST starts at Rs. 1,79,990, whereas the MSI Summit B15 A11M will be available for a price range of Rs. 1,23,990. The MSI Prestige 15 A11SCX costs around Rs. 1,34,990, MSI Prestige 14 A11SCX at Rs. 1,28,990, and MSI Prestige 14 Evo will be available for Rs. 95,990. Lastly, the price of Modern 15 A11SB is set to be Rs. 95,990, MSI Modern 15 A11M will cost Rs. 70,990, and MSI Modern 14 B11SB costs Rs. 89,990. The MSI Modern 14 B11M starts at Rs. 55,990, making it the cheapest laptop among them all.

The company has partnered with Flipkart for the marketing and sale of the laptop in India, and the Summit E15 and Prestige 15 laptop models are the ones that will arrive in the Indian market first. These laptops will be available in India from January 24. The company hasn’t mentioned any dates for the launch of the rest of its laptops in India. But according to the reports, all of them will be available by the first quarter of the year.