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Machine Learning confronts elephant in the room-by Kevin Hartnet

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Score one for the human brain. In a new study, computer scientists found that artificial intelligence systems fail a vision test a child could accomplish with ease.

“It’s a clever and important study that reminds us that ‘deep learning’ isn’t really that deep,” said Gary Marcus, a neuroscientist at New York University who was not affiliated with the work.

The result takes place in the field of computer vision, where artificial intelligence systems attempt to detect and categorize objects. They might try to find all the pedestrians in a street scene, or just distinguish a bird from a bicycle (which is a notoriously difficult task). The stakes are high: As computers take over critical tasks like automated surveillance and autonomous driving, we’ll want their visual processing to be at least as good as the human eyes they’re replacing.

It won’t be easy. The new work accentuates the sophistication of human vision — and the challenge of building systems that mimic it. In the study, the researchers presented a computer vision system with a living room scene. The system processed it well. It correctly identified a chair, a person, books on a shelf. Then the researchers introduced an anomalous object into the scene — an image of an elephant. The elephant’s mere presence caused the system to forget itself: Suddenly it started calling a chair a couch and the elephant a chair, while turning completely blind to other objects it had previously seen.

“There are all sorts of weird things happening that show how brittle current object detection systems are,” said Amir Rosenfeld, a researcher at York University in Toronto and co-author of the study along with his York colleague John Tsotsos and Richard Zemel of the University of Toronto.

Researchers are still trying to understand exactly why computer vision systems get tripped up so easily, but they have a good guess. It has to do with an ability humans have that AI lacks: the ability to understand when a scene is confusing and thus go back for a second glance.

The Elephant in the Room

Eyes wide open, we take in staggering amounts of visual information. The human brain processes it in stride. “We open our eyes and everything happens,” said Tsotsos.

Artificial intelligence, by contrast, creates visual impressions laboriously, as if it were reading a description in Braille. It runs its algorithmic fingertips over pixels, which it shapes into increasingly complex representations. The specific type of AI system that performs this process is called a neural network. It sends an image through a series of “layers.” At each layer, the details of the image — the colors and brightnesses of individual pixels — give way to increasingly abstracted descriptions of what the image portrays. At the end of the process, the neural network produces a best-guess prediction about what it’s looking at.

“It’s all moving from one layer to the next by taking the output of the previous layer, processing it and passing it along to the next layer, like a pipeline,” said Tsotsos.

Graphic: Deep neural networks learn by adjusting the strengths of their connections to better convey input signals through multiple layers to neurons associated with the right general concepts. When data is fed into a network, each artificial neuron that fires (labeled “1”) transmits signals to certain neurons in the next layer, which are likely to fire if multiple signals are received. The process filters out noise and retains only the most relevant features.
posted by f.sheikh

Cryptocurrency Libra White Paper

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Libra’s mission is to enable a simple global currency and financial infrastructure that empowers billions of people.

This document outlines our plans for a new decentralized blockchain, a low-volatility cryptocurrency, and a smart contract platform that together aim to create a new opportunity for responsible financial services innovation.

Problem Statement

The advent of the internet and mobile broadband has empowered billions of people globally to have access to the world’s knowledge and information, high-fidelity communications, and a wide range of lower-cost, more convenient services. These services are now accessible using a $40 smartphone from almost anywhere in the world.1 This connectivity has driven economic empowerment by enabling more people to access the financial ecosystem. Working together, technology companies and financial institutions have also found solutions to help increase economic empowerment around the world. Despite this progress, large swaths of the world’s population are still left behind — 1.7 billion adults globally remain outside of the financial system with no access to a traditional bank, even though one billion have a mobile phone and nearly half a billion have internet access.2

For too many, parts of the financial system look like telecommunication networks pre-internet. Twenty years ago, the average price to send a text message in Europe was 16 cents per message.3 Now everyone with a smartphone can communicate across the world for free with a basic data plan. Back then, telecommunications prices were high but uniform; whereas today, access to financial services is limited or restricted for those who need it most — those impacted by cost, reliability, and the ability to seamlessly send money.

All over the world, people with less money pay more for financial services. Hard-earned income is eroded by fees, from remittances and wire costs to overdraft and ATM charges. Payday loans can charge annualized interest rates of 400 percent or more, and finance charges can be as high as $30 just to borrow $100.4 When people are asked why they remain on the fringe of the existing financial system, those who remain “unbanked” point to not having sufficient funds, high and unpredictable fees, banks being too far away, and lacking the necessary documentation.5

Blockchains and cryptocurrencies have a number of unique properties that can potentially address some of the problems of accessibility and trustworthiness. These include distributed governance, which ensures that no single entity controls the network; open access, which allows anybody with an internet connection to participate; and security through cryptography, which protects the integrity of funds.

But the existing blockchain systems have yet to reach mainstream adoption. Mass-market usage of existing blockchains and cryptocurrencies has been hindered by their volatility and lack of scalability, which have, so far, made them poor stores of value and mediums of exchange. Some projects have also aimed to disrupt the existing system and bypass regulation as opposed to innovating on compliance and regulatory fronts to improve the effectiveness of anti-money laundering. We believe that collaborating and innovating with the financial sector, including regulators and experts across a variety of industries, is the only way to ensure that a sustainable, secure and trusted framework underpins this new system. And this approach can deliver a giant leap forward toward a lower-cost, more accessible, more connected global financial system.

The Opportunity

As we embark on this journey together, we think it is important to share our beliefs to align the community and ecosystem we intend to spark around this initiative:

  • We believe that many more people should have access to financial services and to cheap capital.
  • We believe that people have an inherent right to control the fruit of their legal labor.
  • We believe that global, open, instant, and low-cost movement of money will create immense economic opportunity and more commerce across the world.
  • We believe that people will increasingly trust decentralized forms of governance.
  • We believe that a global currency and financial infrastructure should be designed and governed as a public good.
  • We believe that we all have a responsibility to help advance financial inclusion, support ethical actors, and continuously uphold the integrity of the ecosystem. Full Article
  • posted by f.sheikh

Receiving your salary in cryptocurrency is now a thing -By Reuben Jackson

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  • Cryptocurrencies are constantly becoming more mainstream.
  • With the changing landscape of work and workers, financial systems also need to evolve.
  • Cryptocrrencies have a lot to offer workers in this new age, but they still have some hurdles to face before they become the norm.Since 2018, cryptocurrencies are no longer operating just on the fringes of the financial system.Digital currencies have made significant inroads at traditional financial institutions so much that many banks already offer Bitcoin investment options. Several prominent retailers, including Starbucks, Whole Foods, and Nordstrom, are already accepting Bitcoin at checkout. More importantly for the future of the currency, global regulatory oversight has matured since Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies burst on the scene a few years ago.

    With cryptocurrencies becoming more mainstream all the time, it only makes sense for them to be affecting other elements of the financial system, which is exactly what we are starting to see in the significant sector of employee wages.

    While it’s true that right now those receiving their salaries in crypto are an oddity, this won’t be so in the long run.

    The way we view work is changing

    There is a shift happening in the very way work and compensation are viewed in the world today. Rather than working traditional 9-5 jobs, many employees, particularly younger ones, are joining the gig economy, choosing to be their own bosses and work for short-term, temporary contracts for everything from freelance work to driving an Uber.

    In the U.S. alone, 57 million people participate in the gig economy, where transfers and transaction costs are the norm. This is a landscape in need of secure, fast, and cheap solutions that will improve participants’ lives significantly.

    Currently there are many pain points and regularly occurring annoyances in the market.

    For example, 58% of freelancers have experienced not getting paid for their work, an issue that can be easily solved with the usage of smart contracts—a blockchain-based technology that enforces contracts without the need of a third party.

    Full Article

    posted by f.sheikh

The Perils of Empire-America’s Future-By Tick Atkinson

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Empires are hard to build and even harder to keep intact. No sooner does an empire congeal than centrifugal forces — overreach, complacency, strategic miscalculation and enemies, foreign and domestic — threaten to tug it apart.

As we celebrate our 243rd Independence Day, and the resultant American empire that would come to dominate the modern world, it’s worth considering the 18th-century British Empire against which we rebelled in a bleak and bloody eight-year war. We have become more like that Anglo imperium than perhaps we suspect, and we face some of the same head winds that caused so much grief for King George III and his nation.

Several dynastic coalition wars against European adversaries had ended indecisively before Britain’s wildly successful triumph in 1763 over France and Spain in the Seven Years’ War, called the French and Indian War in America. Britain massed firepower in her blue-water fleet and organized enough maritime mobility to transport assault troops vast distances, capturing strongholds from Quebec and Havana to Manila in what London also called the Great War for the Empire. “Our bells are worn threadbare with ringing for victory,” one happy Briton reported.

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Spoils under the Treaty of Paris were among the greatest ever won by force of arms, including Canada, a half-billion fertile acres west of the Appalachians, various sugar islands in the West Indies, Florida and parts of India. Britain emerged from the war with the most powerful navy in history and the world’s largest mercantile fleet, some 8,000 vessels. She cowed her rivals and so dominated Europe’s trade with Asia, Africa and North America that by 1773, the writer George Macartney could celebrate “this vast empire on which the sun never sets.”

Britain was ascendant, with its own mighty revolutions — agrarian and industrial — underway. A majority of all European growth in the first half of the 18th century had occurred in England, a proportion that would increase with the arrival of the steam engine, patented in 1769, and the spinning jenny a year later. Canals were cut, roads built, highwaymen hanged, coal mined, iron forged. Sheep would double in weight during the century; calf weights tripled. “I felt a completion of happiness,” the Scottish diarist James Boswell wrote. “I just sat and hugged myself in my own mind.”

A map of the British Empire in North America in 1762, by John Gibson. The shaded areas are territories formerly claimed by France or Spain. (Library of Congress)

Hubris, the disease of victory, also set in. Britain viewed the new empire as an affirmation of her virtues — tenacity and martial prowess among them — as well as the fountainhead of national wealth and power. Colonies existed to provide raw materials for the mother country and to buy her finished products, not to find their own way in the world or to extend prosperity to the masses.

But Britain had emerged from the Great War for the Empire deeply in debt. Interest payments devoured half of the government’s yearly tax revenue. Britons were among Europe’s most heavily taxed citizens, paying excise fees on items from soap and salt to male servants and racehorses that might exceed 25 percent of an item’s value.

It seemed only fair that colonists should help shoulder the burden: a typical American, by Treasury Board calculations, paid no more than sixpence a year in Crown taxes, one-fiftieth of the average Englishman’s payment, even as Americans benefited from eradication of the French and Spanish threats and the Royal Navy’s protection of North American trade.