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Anki, the Robotics and AI Company, is Shutting Down

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The producers of cute little robots that were credited to teach the children how to code, Anki, has announced that it is going to cease all its operations by 1st May, as a result of lack of finances to fund its future products.

Anki is a decade old company, which is famous for its robots Vector and Cozmo, Vector being the latest product the company had launched last fall. With the popularity of Anki’s robots, getting convinced about the news of Anki’s shut down is quite unbelievable, but according to the reports the company had already informed its employees, about the same, a few days ago.

anki shuts down
Image Source: digitaltrends.com

Noticeably, the company had raised over $200 millions from its investors, and its revenues had approached $100 million in 2017. In fact, Vector had received $2 million in funding through a Kickstarter campaign, last fall, and also, the Anki products had received the Alexa integration just recently. Despite all those highs, the company has to see the lows now.

During the shutdown, the company will be laying off 200 of its employees, providing them with a week’s salary as the compensation. The CEO of the company, Boris Sofman, broke the news to the employees on Monday and confirmed that the company has failed to raise the money for the company after a new round of financing fell through.

“It is with a heavy heart to announce that Anki will be letting go of our employees, effective Wednesday. We’ve shipped millions of units of product and left customers happy all over the world while building some of the most incredible technologies pointed toward a future with diverse AI and robotics driven applications. But without significant funding to support a hardware and software business and bridge to our long-term product roadmap, it is simply not feasible at this time. Despite our past successes, we pursued every financial avenue to fund our future product development and expand on our platforms. A significant financial deal at a late stage fell through with a strategic investor, and we were not able to reach an agreement. We’re doing our best to take care of every single employee and their families, and our management team continues to explore all options available.” the company said in a statement.

Even though the company had seen success as a robotics company, and the time it had launched its first product, it was a big deal to have an Anki robot, after ten years the company is seen as a toy company, which might be a reason for the company being not able to raise the required funds.

Contradicting to that Sofman said, “For us, it was never meant to be a toy company or even an entertainment company. It’s a robotics and AI company.”

Though companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Comcast had come in front with the intentions to acquire Anki, the company will still have to shut down this Wednesday.

Walmart Launches its First AI Store, Isn’t Trying to Replace Humans with Machines

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Last year, Amazon launched a chain of its AI-powered convenience stores, i.e. Amazon Go. The stores are cashier-less and have cameras all around in the stores to charge the customers automatically. Yesterday, Walmart, the biggest retail store franchise, also launched an AI-powered store, i.e. Intelligent Retail Lab (IRL), in Levittown, New York, which is a bit different from its contemporary Amazon’s cashier-less stores.

Walmart has launched a store similar to its other stores, except it will be operated by intelligent technology. The new Walmart store, like Amazon Go, has got cameras over the ceiling, but these cameras have not been installed to automatically charge the customers but will keep the track of the inventory of the store.

walmart IRL store
Image Source: Tech Crunch

Yes! The company has confirmed that now the store will be able to manage the inventory through AI. Reportedly, if any of the items get out of stock, even from a single shelf, the cameras will inform the sales persons around, to restock the shelves. Also, if a fresh fruit has been on the shelf for a longer time, the cameras will indicate the sales persons to replace that fruit with a fresh one. E.g. if bananas on a shelf have got bruises, the cameras will ask the salesperson to replace them. This way, the salespersons will not have to roam around the store all the time to keep a check on the inventory and will only go to the back-inventory when the cameras will notify them for replacement or to re-stock the shelves.

Since operating so many cameras all the time will require a lot of data and data storage, the company has built a data centre in the inventory itself. Though the data will be stored only for a week, the sensors and the cameras will pump out 1.6 TB of data per second.

Since it is not a cashier-less store, like Amazon Go, the store is having over 100 employees and is selling over 30,000 items. Also, the store is a 50,000 square foot store, having giant servers bathed in the blue light situated inside the store, which can be easily seen by the public. Also, the retailer has built an AI-powered informational store and a Welcome store for its customers, where they can know about its technical specifications.

For the people who are with the shoppers, can spend their time in front of the AI-powered interactive wall, built inside the store. The wall is able to imitate the body gestures and postures by estimating body positions and is quite a good pass time.

By far, the new Walmart store is quite interesting, and it seems that the company is trying to take full advantage of AI by making its use in most practical ways. And, the company has ensured that it is not up to replacing the human jobs at all, but is trying to reduce the workload for its staff.

Sony Introduces New Ride-hailing Service in Tokyo, Launches S.Ride App Powered by AI

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The conglomerate company Sony has been a leader in various fields of technological product manufacturing. From video games to smartphones, and from television to home appliances, the company has marked its name in all those fields. But now with its new S.Ride app, the company is stepping into the business of taxi-hailing service.

sony s.ride
Image Source: trendingonlinenow.in

The company has launched a taxi-hailing service in Japan, along with an app, i.e. S.Ride app, through which the users will be able to hire a taxi for them. Though the service is a similar car-rental service to Uber and other car-rental services, the app is the main attraction of this service.

According to the advertisement, the company has produced for the service, the S in the S.Ride does not stand for Sony, but it refers to “simple”, “smart” and “speedy”. The app is based on AI technology, and the UI of the app works on the sliding gesture. According to Sony, the app with the help of artificial intelligence is able to figure out the area with the most demand for the taxis, and this way the driver can be sent to that very location.

Though the ride-sharing service is banned in Japan, and Uber is one of the leading taxi-hailing services of the country, Sony is likely to become popular in the field really soon, as it has partnered with five other leading taxi-hailing services of Japan. The app is officially launched by Minna no Taxi, a joint venture launched by Sony Corporation, Sony Payment Services and several Japanese taxi companies, last year.

Currently, Sony’s taxi-hailing service will be available only in Tokoyo, with over 10,000 taxis available for hire. The company has provided the S.Ride users with various payment option, including through cash, credit/debit card and digital wallets.

Sony had made an announcement about starting the car-hailing service, last year in the month of February. The company has never been in providing services but is a leader in the hardware manufacturing and supply. After Sony’s new CEO, Kenichiro Yoshida, took his position in the company last April, the company has been trying its hands in selling content and the services to its users.

George Hotz : The First Person to Unlock the iPhone & the Founder of AI Startup comma.ai

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iPhone indeed is the most loved smartphone and was one of the first keyboard-less mobile phones available in the market. iPhone is not only known for its unique features, but also for the high security it provides to its users. But there was a 17 years old hacker, George Hotz, from New Jersey, who unlocked the newly launched iPhone, allowing the phone to be used with other wireless carriers and became the first person to do so. He is not only a famous hacker but has also founded his vehicle automation machine learning company named comma.ai. Also known as Geohotz, even having hacked major security programs, Hotz has always said that he never support hacking into someone else’s server and stealing databases of user information.

Early Life

Hotz was born on 2 October 1989 in Glen Rock, New Jersey, as George Francis Hotz Jr. He completed his high school from Bergen County Academies in Hackensack, New Jersey and attended the Academy for Engineering and Design Technology. Hotz also attended the Rochester Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University for a brief time.

Being a brilliant student and always ahead in every competition in science and technology in middle and high school, he even won the $15,000 scholarship at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in 2007.

Hacking Career

Hotz was always interested in programming and had developed his interest in hacking. In August 2007, only after two months of the launch of the iPhone, Hotz was able to unlock the iPhone. After doing so, he became the first person to unlock an iPhone. Also in 2009, he released a jailbreaking tool for the iPhone 3GS on iPhone OS 3.0. Though in 2010, he discontinued the jailbreaking software.

George Hotz
Image Source: spectrum.ieee.org

In December 2009, he started working on a new program to breach security on the Sony PlayStation 3. by January 2010, he was able to create a thesis on the hack, but soon in July 2010, he abandoned the idea of entering the security of PS3. But another hacking group fail0verflow also started working on the same, generating the root signing and encryption keys for PS3.

Hotz too published those root signing and encryption keys over his website that led to a serious lawsuit from Sony for both Hotz and fail0verflow. After many court sessions, Sony and Hotz settled the matter outside the court on the condition that Hotz will never try to do any hacking work on Sony products.

Career with Facebook and Google

Hacking had always been his hobby, and his early achievements and knowledge of security algorithms landed Hotz a job with Facebook in 2011 for an unknown role.

Later in July 2014, Google hired Hotz to work with its security auditing team on Project Zero. He stayed in the team for five months and developed an open source program, for dynamically analysing application binaries, named Qira.

In January 2015, he joined Vicarious.com where he worked for 7 months and developed AI algorithms for the company.

Founding Comma.AI

In September 2015, Hotz founded comma.ai, that works on building AI based vehicular automation technology. In 2016, the company built a working self-driving Acura ILX. Later, the company started working on Comma One, a $1,000 software kit that could allow some cars to operate semi-autonomously. But after receiving a special order from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the further production of the software was cancelled.

During the same time, he was also in talks with Elon Musk to sell his autonomous software for Tesla cars, but the talks never met any conclusion.

On 30 November 2016, the company open sourced its self-driving car software. The open source driving agent from the company runs on some of the car models from companies like Honda, Toyota, and GM, making those models semi-autonomous. Reportedly in 2018, the company served over 4,500 drivers.

Personal Life

Hotz aka Geohotz has been always a keen learner for AI and software development. In 2004 he participated in the ISEF competition in Portland where he demonstrated “The Mapping Robot”. He was among the finalists and got featured on the Today Show and Larry King. He also developed another project named The Googler in 2005 and participated in the ISEF competition with the project, here too, he was one of the finalists.

In 2008, he was among the top 10 Overachievers under 21 listed in the March edition of PC World magazine. In 2014 he won the DEF CON CTF tournament for the second time in a row.

On 14 September 2018, Hotz stepped down from the post of the CEO of the company and became the Head of Research Team.

Google to Reward $25 Million to the Winners of AI Impact Challenge 2019

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Artificial Intelligence holds a great contribution to the world of technology. But like the sci-fi movies, the AI has got various hazardous impacts to the world, too. Maybe thinking of that, Google is inspired to obtain something better from the AI, and at an event called AI for Social Good, held at the company’s Sunnyvale, California office, it announced a competition for the AI developers, called the AI Impact Challenge.

Google
Image Source: express.co.uk

According to the announcement, the competition will include non-profit organizations, like universities and colleges, and the other organizations that are not related to the corporate world. The teams will participate in the competition with ideas that will focus on solving social problems with the help of AI.

Google will provide the participants with cloud resources for their projects, and the winners will be rewarded with an amount of $25 million. The initiative is a part of Google’s charitable unit Google.org. The company has said that the participants can be professional AI experts or maybe with no AI skills, as the company will provide the competitors with guides who will help them with their projects. During the event, Google said, “An international panel of experts, who work in computer science and the social sector will assess the proposals to select top winners in the spring of 2019.”

The initiative taken by Google is a part of the ‘AI for Social Good’ and will address the issues like data security, environmental conservation, human trafficking, health care, and other serious issues like controversial military works. In the competition, the participants will be finding the best solution for those issues, using the AI.

Google’s artificial intelligence chief, Jeff Dean, said, “Artificial intelligence is not just helping people create more useful products, we use it in a lot of ways throughout many Google products but is also emerging as a really powerful tool for improving the society that we live in.”

Google is accepting the applications for the competition from today, and the names of the accepted grantees will be announced at the Google I/O developer conference next year. Also, after the competition, the participants may receive some job offers from the Google AI research centres, established earlier this year, in places like France and Ghana, etc.