Microsoft's Ups Its AI Ante: During an event in London this week, Microsoft outlined a number of announcements related to its AI strategy, but the most significant one was the unveiling of Microsoft Research AI, a new group within Redmond's research organization. Its task? Here's how Microsoft describes it:
[A] core goal of Microsoft Research AI is to reunite AI research endeavors such as machine learning, perception and natural language processing that have evolved over time into separate fields of research. This integrated approach will allow us to develop sophisticated understandings and tools that can help people do complex, multifaceted tasks.
Take machine reading. It’s an emerging field that has incredible potential for situations such helping a doctor quickly find important information amid thousands of documents, saving time for higher-value and potentially life-saving work. To do machine reading well requires combining AI disciplines such as natural language processing and deep learning.
POV: Microsoft is putting serious resources behind Research AI. It has assigned about 100 researchers to the effort, which is 10 percent of Microsoft Research's overall staff. The new group already has more than a dozen projects up and running as well. Microsoft clearly wants to step up competitively to Google's DeepMind, which has also been pursuing general-purpose AI technology.
New UK customs system facing Brexit deadline: Sometimes it's necessary to hit the accelerator on digital transformation projects. To wit, the UK is in grave danger of failing to complete a new customs declaration system by March 2019, the date upon which the UK is set to leave the European Union, according to a National Audit Office report.
The system, which will replace a 25-year-old one, is budgeted at £157 million and was originally planned for completion in December 2020, but the Brexit vote moved up that deadline significantly, and also changes the project's stakes. The current system collects duty tax on imports through about 55 million customs declarations per year.
The new system was scoped to handle 150 million declarations, a significant upgrade, but officials estimate that post-Brexit, the UK could see 255 million declarations annually.
"Customs is at the heart of the Brexit debate," UK Treasury Committee chairman Andrew Tyrie said earlier this year. "It is part of the essential plumbing for international trade, and ensuring it continues to function smoothly post-Brexit has to be a priority for the Government. The consequences of this project failing, or even being delayed, could be serious. Much trade could be lost."
POV: While there should be some sense of urgency around any IT modernization project, the situation with the UK's new customs system is of another order, with massive financial stakes in play. How officials respond to the challenge should provide valuable lessons, whatever the outcome.
Google Cloud Platform expands European presence: Another salvo in the public cloud arms race has been fired, with Google Cloud Platform opening up a new region in London. The move brings GCP's region footprint to 10, and adds to its existing presence in Belgium. Next up will be regions on Frankfurt, the Netherlands and Finland, Google said.
While noting the new region can help satisfy data sovereignty requirements, Google emphasized the reduction in latency UK customers will experience:
In cities like London, Dublin, Edinburgh and Amsterdam, our performance testing shows 40%-82% reductions in round-trip time latency when serving customers from London compared with the Belgium region.
POV: With the speed of light remaining an immutable limitation, adding more regions is the best way for public cloud vendors to increase performance and user experience. Meanwhile, Google's move to open a London region only now is a bit surprising, given how long the city has been one of the world's biggest Internet hubs.
Amazon mulls giving developers access to Alexa audio transcripts: Amazon archives the data generated by conversations customers have with devices powered by its Alexa digital assistant, in order to add to the corpus used to train its underlying machine learning models. But unlike chief competitor Google, Amazon doesn't give developers access to transcripts of audio logs generated by their Alexa-powered applications. That could be about to change as Amazon feels pressure to keep pace with Google, according to a report from The Information (via the Verge).
POV: Amazon declined to comment on any future plans but said it only provides personally identifiable information to third-party Alexa developers with a customer's consent. In any case, voice-powered digital assistants have already raised privacy concerns, and this just adds to that debate.
Legacy Watch: Aussie train commuters stranded: An AUS$88 million train control system went dark abruptly this week during the evening commute in Melbourne, leaving thousands of commuters stranded in cars while technicians tried to find the source of the problem. While they got things running within about an hour—an inconvenience, surely, but it could have been much worse—a columnist for The Age makes a salient point about the situation:
[The system] was meant to improve the reliability of Melbourne's public transport system.
It's fair to say it mostly has until today, exposing yet again the fragility of Melbourne's 869-kilometre metropolitan rail network, where one problem in one room can spread to virtually every corner of the city.
One computer failure shouldn't shut down a city's rail system.
POV: Amen to that. The Age notes that the system was first proposed in 1999 but didn't go online until 2014. That's obviously more than enough time to architect a system that doesn't suffer from a single point of failure.
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