The cloud-based solution aims to help accelerate the delivery of software in a rapidly-changing world while maintaining a high bar of quality.

Gareth Smith, CTO of Eggplant, said:

“The launch of our cloud platform is a significant milestone in our mission to rid the world of bad software. In our new normal, delivering speed and agility at scale has never been more critical.

Every business can easily tap into Eggplants’ AI-powered automation platform to accelerate the pace of delivery while ensuring a high-quality digital experience.” 

Enterprises have accelerated their shift to the cloud due to the pandemic and resulting increases in things such as home working.

Recent research from Centrify found that 51 percent of businesses which embraced a cloud-first model were able to handle the challenges presented by COVID-19 far more effectively.

Eggplant’s Digital Automation Intelligence (DAI) Platform features:

• Cloud-based end-to-end automation: The scalable fusion engine provides frictionless and efficient continuous and parallel end-to-end testing in the cloud, for any apps and websites, and on any target platforms. 
• Monitoring insights: The addition of advanced user experience (UX) data points and metrics, enables customers to benchmark their applications UX performance. These insights, added to the UX behaviour helps improve SEO. 
• Fully automated self-healing test assets: The use of AI identifies the tests needed and builds and runs them automatically, under full user control. These tests are self-healing, and automatically adapt as the system-under-test evolves.   

The solution helps to support the “citizen developer” movement—using AI to enable no-code/low-code development for people with minimal programming knowledge.

Both cloud and AI ranked highly in a recent study (PDF) by Deloitte of the most relevant technologies “to operate in the new normal”. Cloud and cybersecurity were joint first with 80 percent of respondents, followed by cognitive and AI tools (73%) and the IoT (65%).

Eggplant’s combination of AI and cloud technologies should help businesses to deal with COVID-19’s unique challenges and beyond.

(Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash)

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PAI is a US-led alliance which aims to foster the ethical development and deployment of AI technologies. Baidu was the only Chinese member.

The loss of Baidu’s expertise and any representation from China is devastating for PAI. Ethical AI development requires global cooperation to set acceptable standards which help to ensure safety while not limiting innovation.

Baidu has officially cited financial pressures for its decision to exit the alliance.

In a statement, Baidu wrote:

“Baidu shares the vision of the Partnership on AI and is committed to promoting the ethical development of AI technologies. 

We are in discussions about renewing our membership, and remain open to other opportunities to collaborate with industry peers on advancing AI.”

Directors from PAI hope to see Baidu renew its membership to the alliance next year.

Cooperation between American and Chinese firms

Cooperation between American and Chinese firms is getting more difficult as the world’s largest economies continue to implement sanctions on each other.

The US has criticised China for its handling of the coronavirus outbreak, trade practices, its mass imprisonment and alleged torture of Uyghur Muslims in “re-education” camps, and breaking the semi-autonomy of Hong Kong.

In the tech world, much of the focus has been on Chinese telecoms giant Huawei – which the US accuses of being a national security threat. Canada arrested Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou last year on allegations of using the company’s subsidiaries to flout US sanctions against Iran. Two Canadian businessmen that were arrested in China shortly after Meng’s detention, in a suspected retaliation, were charged with spying by Beijing this week.

An increasing number of Chinese companies, including Huawei, have found themselves being added to an ‘Entity List’ in the US which bans American companies from working with them without explicit permission from the government.

The US added six Chinese AI companies to its Entity List last October, citing their role in alleged human rights violations.

Earlier this week, the US Commerce Department made an exception to Huawei’s inclusion on the Entity List which allows US companies to work with the Chinese giant for the purposes of developing 5G standards. Hopefully, we can see the same being done for AI companies.

However, on the whole, cooperation between American and Chinese firms is getting more difficult as a result of the political climate. It wouldn’t be surprising to see more cases of companies like Baidu dropping out of well-intentioned alliances such as PAI if sensible resolutions to differences are not sought.

(Photo by Erwan Hesry on Unsplash)

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The new video courses assume the developer already has a basic standard of Python skills. If you don’t, I’m afraid you’ll need to brush up on those first. Fortunately, Microsoft released a 44-part “Python for Beginners” series last autumn (or “fall” for our American friends.)

For those with the Python skills, or if you’ve just consumed all 44-parts of Microsoft’s course in record time, the new courses are around three hours each. 

The first course, More Python for Beginners, features 20 videos and covers areas such as lambdas, inheritance, and asynchronous operations.

The second course, Even More Python for Beginners: Data Tools, consists of 31 videos and really dives into using Python for machine learning and data science. Students are taught how to use popular Python libraries for the aforementioned topics; along with using the Jupyter Notebooks browser-based development environment.

Each of the courses are still led by Christopher Harrison, senior program manager at Microsoft, and Susan Ibach, business development manager from Microsoft AI Gaming. 

“While we’re not going to get into conversations about choosing algorithms or building models, we are going to introduce what you’ll use when you begin the journey. We’ll highlight Jupyter Notebooks, the favorite tool of data scientists,” Harrison and Ibach wrote in a blog. 

As of writing, the first part in Microsoft’s Python course series has been viewed over 1.75 million times.

The course’s popularity is of little surprise given the huge interest in Python as AI talent becomes more in-demand; with six-figure salaries not unheard of. In last year’s GitHub Octoverse report, Python overtook Java to become the second most popular language on the world’s largest repository host.

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Edison is an AI platform launched last year to help with leveraging data from imaging devices.

Kieran Murphy, President and CEO at GE Healthcare, says:

“We introduced Edison just one year ago at RSNA to help health providers take advantage of data in new and significant ways.

With the introduction of the Edison Developer Program, and a suite of new intelligent applications and smart devices powered by Edison, we are building on that promise as we continue to work with partners to realize our collective goal of advancing the future of health.”

While there’s significant interest in using AI for healthcare, the time it takes for implementing new innovations is “cumbersome and complex,” according to GE Healthcare.

GE Healthcare aims to serve clinicians’ need for a single solution to assist with integrating AI algorithms into existing workflows to help them, and therefore their patients, benefit from the potential of these new technologies much faster.

Market-ready AI applications will be deeply integrated into GE Healthcare’s vast existing solutions – on medical devices, in the cloud, or at the edge of the network.

Developers jumping aboard the new initiative will have the reach of GE Healthcare’s large userbase. GE Healthcare’s business reported $19 billion in revenue last year and spans 160 countries. On average, three patients are imaged with the company’s solutions every second.

“The Edison Developer Program exposes a number of potential capabilities of the Edison platform, including secure device connectivity, data aggregation for clinical context, advanced visualization, workflow and AI orchestration, in addition to a rich set of AI capabilities for data traceability, curation, annotation, model training and inferencing,” the company wrote in a press release.

“This set of services will reduce the complexity of developing and integrating AI and data-based healthcare applications in clinical workflows. Program members are selected and vetted based on rigorous clinical and technical evaluations as well as regulatory clearance to ensure confidence and security of solutions offered through the Edison platform.”

GE Healthcare is currently working with a range of AI and analytics companies including Arterys, iCAD, Koios Medical, MaxQ AI and Volpara.

Koios Medical, for example, built and deployed Breast Assistant – an AI-based risk assessment for breast cancer that aligns to a BI-RADS (Breast Imaging-Reporting and Data System) category.

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A team of researchers from the Universities of Lyon and Purdue, along with game developer Ubisoft, have published a paper detailing how this works.

Games are an art form, and creative designers take a lot of pride in their work. As such, they will work closely with everyone working on the project to make sure their visions get brought to life as closely as possible.

Rather than hand over full control to the AI, and hope for the best, some basic input is required. This could define whether the intended world is more like a city or a forest, whether it’s an Earth-like planet or futuristic alien world, and whether it seems new or worn over time.

Artists can begin drawing their vision and then let the AI take over the time-consuming and tedious bit of filling in things such as elevation, ridges, vegetation, rock formations, and more.

Some of these things are beyond what current AI is capable of, but it offers a glimpse at where it’s headed. Nvidia recently showed off its own technology where AI convincingly generated fake celebrity mugshots; something which could one day be used for building game characters.

As with most industries, the use of AI for game development is proving itself able to increase efficiency rather than replace everyone’s jobs. AI has a long history with gaming, and we look forward to seeing what the latest advancements can do for improving the development process of new titles.

What are your thoughts on AI being used to build virtual worlds?

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By providing a common framework, Acumos intends to make artificial intelligence development more accessible. Acumos differs from TensorFlow, an existing popular framework, in that it will be offer a directory for sharing AI models in addition to working on them.

“An open and connected AI platform will promote collaboration as developers and companies look to define the future of AI,” said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director at The Linux Foundation.

“Because the platform is open source, it will be accessible to anyone with an interest in AI and machine learning, and customisable to meet specific needs. We expect interest from organisations doing work with autonomous vehicles, drones, content curation and analytics, and much more.”

The founding members of Acumos are AT&T and Tech Mahindra; both of whom are contributing the initial code. The Linux Foundation will host the platform and its AI marketplace in the hope its large developer community will help to nurture an active, large ecosystem around the project.

“In The Linux Foundation, we have an able partner to increase the adoption of Acumos across the community to help enrich the platform,” comments Raman Abrol, SVP & Business Unit Head of Americas, Comms, Media & Entertainment at Tech Mahindra. “This platform jointly developed with AT&T is a testimony to our continued commitment to the open source community.”

The ultimate goal for the project is to create an industry standard which makes AI development easier and builds a community around reusable code. Whereas most existing tools are complex and designed for data scientists, Acumos will be user-centric.

“The current state of today’s AI environment is fractured, which creates a significant barrier to adoption,” said Mazin Gilbert, Vice President of Advanced Technology at AT&T Labs. “Acumos will expedite innovation and deployment of AI applications, and make them available to everyone.”

Acumos will launch early 2018 and is expected to gain further members in the coming weeks prior to release.

To find out more and how to get involved, head this way.

What are your thoughts on Acumos and the current state of AI development?

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