Radical Open Innovation News week 28-2018

Welcome to our weekly selection of digital innovation news. Based on our opinionated always changing automated token based selection algorithm we present some top innovation news to get you thinking, debating and collaboration to make our world better.

1 NLP’s ImageNet moment has arrived

Big changes are underway in the world of Natural Language Processing (NLP). The success of ImageNet highlighted that in the era of deep learning, data was at least as important as algorithms. While NLP models are typically more shallow and thus require different fine-tuning techniques than their vision counterparts, recent pretrained models are getting deeper. If learning word vectors is like only learning edges, these approaches are like learning the full hierarchy of features, from edges to shapes to high-level semantic concepts.

(The Gradient)

2 Regulating AI in the era of big tech

The development of a responsible national AI strategy requires competent, knowledgeable, and neutral authorities who understand new AI technologies and their implications on privacy, security, and other ethical concerns.

During early April 2018, Mark Zuckerberg testified before a confused Congress about issues relating to the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal. But ultimately, we do need the government to assume its rightful role in protecting personal privacy and rights in the AI era. The first report had discussed a host of issues core to establishing a ethical AI policy: applications of AI for public good; AI regulation, fairness, safety; international cooperation; cybersecurity; and human considerations regarding use of AI in weapon systems. The Trump administration has since disbanded that taskforce and dismissed the two reports issued by the Obama administration on AI technology.

(The Gradient)

3 The Linux Foundation Transforms the Energy Industry with New Initiative: LF Energy

With the technical and operational guidance of The Linux Foundation, LF Energy will create a sustainable ecosystem to quickly and efficiently deliver robust, secure and innovative solutions. LF Energy invites collaboration and open source innovation with all participants in the energy and electricity sectors. See today’s news to learn about our new LF Energy projects and hear from these partners. Open source has transformed industries as vast and different as telecommunications, financial services, automobiles, healthcare, and consumer products.

(Linux Foundation)

4 Bradley M. Kuhn: On Avoiding Conflation of Political Speech and Hate Speech

OSCON (in particular) has a long history — on political issues of software freedom — of promoting (and even facilitating) certain political speech, even while squelching other political speech. First, OSCON has always been political: software freedom is inherently a political struggle for the rights of computer users, so any conference including that topic is necessarily political. More than that, ORA has missed a key opportunity to delineate hate speech and political speech in a manner that is sorely needed here in the USA and in the software freedom community. They still have no improved solution for the original problem that O’Reilly states they wanted to address (i.e., preventing hate speech). In other words, in a political climate where the party-ticket- headline candidate is exposed for celebrating his own sexual harassing behavior and gets elected anyway, we are culturally going to have trouble nationwide distinguishing between political speech and hate speech.

(Planet GNOME)

5 An Invisible Tax on the Web: Video Codecs

In browsers, codecs decode video files so we can play them on our phones, tablets, computers, and TVs. But when it comes to video codecs, Xiph.org Foundation isn’t the only game in town. Over the last decade, several companies started building viable alternatives to patented video codecs. That’s because about 4 in 5 videos on the web today rely on a patented technology called the H.264 video codec. It took years for companies to put this complex, global set of legal and business agreements in place, so H.264 web video works everywhere.

(Mozilla BLOG)

6 Cooling buildings worldwide

About 40 percent of all the energy consumed by buildings worldwide is used for space heating and cooling. Taken together, the researchers’ findings provide two key messages for achieving more efficient indoor cooling worldwide. The pump then raises the pressure to ambient levels so the water vapor becomes liquid water before being ejected from the system. In this system, a vacuum pump pulls the water vapor through a membrane—now called membrane unit 1. But the captured water vapor is then pushed across the membrane in unit 2 and joins the exhaust air stream — without ever turning into liquid water.

(MIT Reseach)

7 Making nuclear energy safer and more affordable

He learned that nuclear energy supplied a significant proportion of France’s electricity, and he became captivated by the sheer power generation at nuclear power plants. “I was really passionate about the complexity of the nuclear systems. Ten days after that disaster happened, I submitted my application” to a nuclear engineering program, Zhao recalls. “I said to myself, ‘Why don’t you study nuclear and try to make a contribution, to make nuclear reactors safer, to try to mitigate people’s concerns or fears?’” Zhao went on to study nuclear engineering at the National Institute for Nuclear Science and Technology in France, where he tuned into the details of nuclear technology and the societal implications of nuclear energy development. To find out just how low, Zhao refers to the principles of physics. “At the end of the day, nuclear engineering is all about physics,” Zhao says. I couldn’t imagine how you could generate such a huge amount of power out of [a small reactor],” Zhao says. “[Nuclear energy] is really amazing, and it’s clean energy. No matter where I would be, my intrinsic motivation will stay the same.” In the long-term, Zhao hopes to make an impact on the international nuclear community. “I think that in a new nuclear world, people from different countries have to collaborate more,” Zhao says. “We need to work together as a team and make nuclear energy safer and more affordable.”

(MIT Reseach)

8 Datepicking Beyond the Gregorian Calendar

The Julian Day counts the number of days since the beginning of the Julian Period in 4713 BCE. The Julian Day can be calculated from a given calendar date and freely be converted to another calendar date, e.g., the Julian calendar date October 13th 1729 can be converted to the Gregorian calendar date October 24th 1729 and vice versa since they have the same Julian Day Number which is 2352861. For our users, it is important to know if a letter’s date is indicated in the Gregorian or the Julian calendar. It only offered support for the modern western Gregorian calendar. Euler began writing his letters using the Julian calendar while he lived in St. By solving the calendar conversion problem in Angular Material, all our projects at the DHLab may take advantage from that solution and potentially also other projects that use Angular Material may take advantage of it.

(Angular Blog)

The Radical Open Innovation weekly overview is a brief overview of innovation news on Digital Innovation and Management Innovation from all over the world. Your input for our next edition is welcome! Send it to [info] at [bm-support]dot[org]