Category: Technology

Linda Yaccarino, a former advertising head at NBCUniversal, has been announced as the new CEO of Twitter, taking over from Elon Musk, who had previously indicated that he would be stepping down. Musk made the announcement via Twitter, saying that Yaccarino would be taking over in around six weeks, while he would transition to a position as Executive Chair and Chief Technology Officer. Speaking about her new role, Yaccarino said she would focus on business operations, while Musk would concentrate on product design and new technology.

Yaccarino has worked with NBCUniversal Media for over 10 years, most recently serving as chair of the company’s global advertising and partnerships for over two and a half years, according to her LinkedIn profile. The company confirmed that Yaccarino had left her role, effective immediately. “It has been an absolute honor to be part of Comcast NBCUniversal and lead the most incredible team. We’ve transformed our company and the entire industry — and I am so proud of what we’ve accomplished together, and grateful to my colleagues and mentors, especially Brian Roberts, Mike Cavanagh and the entire NBCU leadership team,” Yaccarino said in a statement.

Prior to her role at NBCUniversal, Yaccarino held management positions for several media sales outlets, before serving at Turner Broadcasting System for nearly two decades in various different roles, including executive vice president and chief operating officer. She joined NBCUniversal in 2011 as President of Cable Entertainment and Digital Ad Sales, overseeing the integration of the companies’ ad sales platforms. She then served as chairwoman of advertising and client partnerships for eight years, in which she was responsible for market strategy and advertising revenue for the company’s entire portfolio of broadcast, cable and digital assets.

Throughout her career, Yaccarino has pushed for the advertising industry to implement changes such as relying less heavily on Nielsen audience measurement ratings. She also introduced One Platform, a digital platform designed to make ad buying practices across different media easier, in order to compete with social media and traditional media companies.

“Linda’s expertise in TV advertising, combined with her digital savvy and understanding of Twitter’s capabilities, will be invaluable to us as we continue to build our business,” highlighted Patrick Pichette, Lead Independent Director of Twitter’s Board, in response to the appointment.

Yaccarino graduated from Pennsylvania State University with a degree in telecommunications in 1985 and currently lives in Sea Cliff, N.Y., with her husband and two children.

Google has announced the global availability of its AI Chatbot, Bard, in over 180 countries without a waitlist. Bard is receiving upgrades to its abilities, including support for Japanese and Korean, new add-ons to expand its capabilities, and visual responses to queries. Additionally, Bard is getting an upgrade under the hood with Google’s new PaLM 2 interface, which provides advanced math and reasoning skills and better coding capabilities.

Google plans to integrate Google Lens into Bard, which will allow users to upload images with their prompts. Bard will analyze the image, identify its contents, and create captions or responses based on the image’s composition. Furthermore, improvements to Bard will benefit software developers, including an export button for code execution in Colab or Replit and citation for code Bard provides. Bard will even support a dark theme, and Google plans to integrate features from other apps to make Bard’s user experience more convenient.

Google is working to expand Bard’s capabilities by partnering with service providers such as Kayak, OpenTable, ZipRecruiter, Instacart, Wolfram, and Khan Academy to build extensions. Extensions will allow the chatbot to access external resources, and Google showed an example of an extension generating images of unicorns using Adobe Firefly AI image synthesis model. Furthermore, users can export Bard’s responses directly to Gmail or Docs, saving copy-and-paste time.

According to Google, the goal is to integrate generative AI into everything and make Bard more accessible. Currently, Bard is available in English globally, but not yet in Canada or much of Europe. However, Google is actively working to expand Bard’s availability across the globe, and users can access Bard today with a Google account at bard.google.com.

“We believe Bard will be an essential tool for users, and developers, as its abilities continue to evolve,” said Google in a statement. “Bard’s technology will create a more convenient and personalized user experience that will be an indispensable tool across various industries.”

Google is set to roll out AI chat features to its core search engine following the success of rival Microsoft’s ChatGPT. The new AI-powered chatbot will offer new features that can answer any search query quicker and more efficiently than ever. One noticeable change will be the alteration of the search results’ look and feel. It will have an automatic AI-generated response in addition to displaying traditional results. Interested users can sign up for a waitlist via the Google app or Chrome’s desktop browser.

This change further solidifies the impact of AI and its potential to threaten Google’s online dominance. The new Google Search will likely be a worthy competitor to ChatGPT, and similar technologies from rival companies. At I/O, Google’s developer event, PaLM 2 was introduced, which is the company’s latest language model AI technology. It is Google’s rival to ChatGPT and can reason better using logic and common sense. Additionally, it can also generate specialized code in different programming languages.

Google is also extending access to its existing chatbot Bard, which can help users outline and draft an essay, plan a baby shower, and get meal ideas based on fridge contents. Previously, the tool was only available via a waitlist in the US, but will soon be available everywhere. Google is also launching extensions for Bard from its own services, enabling users to collaborate and ask questions with the chatbot within Gmail, Sheets, and Docs apps. Despite the many positive aspects of incorporating AI chatbots onto Google’s search engine, there are some risks.

Alongside concerns about accuracy, there are also concerns surrounding tone, which is particularly important as Google’s long-standing code has been the cornerstone of its business. The updates are aimed at maintaining Google’s dominant market position and are expected to roll out in America soon. The company has confirmed that a limited number of users will have access to it before the official launch.

According to reports, ChatGPT’s immense popularity led Google to declare a “code red” situation for its search business, motivating the company to develop AI chatbots and language model algorithms. Although the incorporation of AI chatbots into Google’s search engine comes with some risk, the new technology can assist the company in safeguarding its market dominance and competing with rival companies’ AI technologies.

Experience the Future of Search: Google’s Latest Chatbot Technology Revolutionizes the Search Engine

Unlike other chatbots such as ChatGPT and My AI tool, Google’s AI-powered chatbot has been designed to reflect only information on the web, without offering personal opinions or any kind of persona. The tool scans various websites, extracts relevant information, and compiles it neatly at the top of the results page to help users get the information they want quickly.

However, the chatbot is still quite new, and it may have some limitations and inconsistencies. For example, when one user searched for the best pizza places in New York City, the search results displayed restaurants located in San Francisco. Cathy Edwards, the Vice President of Search at Google, has emphasized their commitment to improving the chatbot continuously. She said, “We really want to learn and iron out the kinks. We don’t want to bring this experience to everyone until we have confidence that we’ve nailed it.” Google is still in the process of testing and improving the chatbot so that it can provide users with a seamless experience.

However, the new chatbot technology’s lack of “persona” has raised questions and concerns among some users who were accustomed to other chatbots’ style of engagement. The chatbot does not express its opinions or offer words of empathy. Edwards explained that Google’s decision for the tool to remain objective was deliberate, so it could avoid any potential biases in the search results.

Despite some users’ concerns, the chatbot has some unique and innovative features. The Google Search tool has a “Perspectives” feature that factors in what other people are buying or thinking about to provide insights into the search results. The “About This Image” tool can understand details about images and offers a better level of understanding to users. Edwards noted that the feature aims to “provide a level of understanding of an image rather than taking it at face value.”

The chatbot technology is in its early stages, and the company’s goal is to continue improving the tool regularly. Google has provided a waitlist that users can sign up for to gain early access to the chatbot in the upcoming weeks and months. Despite the challenges of implementing a functional chatbot, the new technology seems like a positive addition to the Google platform and can enhance the user experience of the search engine significantly.

Google Continues to Push Forward with AI Development Despite Criticisms

Google is continuing to invest in artificial intelligence (AI) technology despite growing concerns about its accuracy. In March, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, suffered a 7.7% fall in shares, equivalent to a $100 billion market value wipe out, following an inaccurate response given by its demo AI chatbot, Bard.

Similarly, Microsoft’s AI chatbot also faced criticism for giving wrong answers in a demo. Nevertheless, Google is moving forward with AI technologies such as ChatGPT, the new Google Search, and Bard, all of which completed vast amounts of data training to generate compelling responses to user inquiries.

These chatbots have been built using large language models and are capable of providing users with a wealth of helpful information. However, they are also known to generate errors or incorrect answers. Despite criticisms, Google is still committed to further improving these chatbots and developing large language models that can be incorporated into its search engine to provide an even richer user experience. Bard is now positioned to complement Google Search and will be added purposefully, according to a Google spokesperson.

“We’ve been on a 25 year journey for search, and it still remains such an unsolved problem,” Edwards said. “The next long arc which will be measured in decades will be this, so we want to be bold but want to be responsible and get it right.”

At its recent annual developer conference in Mountain View, California, Google unveiled a host of new features, such as innovative writing tools for Gmail and immersive directions in Google Maps. However, one announcement that may have slipped under the radar could potentially bring about the most significant transformation to the internet since Google became the world’s leading search engine in the early 2000s.

Google intends to revolutionize the way it displays search engine results by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI). To avoid exaggerating the possible implications, this shift could be akin to detonating a nuclear bomb on an already beleaguered online publishing industry.

During the conference, Google showcased its plans to incorporate generative AI in search engine results—a feature not yet available to the general public. They demonstrated this using a sample search query: “what’s better for a family with kids under 3 and dog, Bryce Canyon or Arches?” In traditional Google Search, this question about U.S. national parks might not yield a comprehensive answer. However, as shown in the screenshot below, the AI-driven search generates a response in a conversational tone that takes into account both the children’s ages and the dog.

So, how does generative AI accomplish this? It’s akin to a magic trick. The AI is trained by “reading” all accessible content on the open web and uses that information to formulate answers to questions conversationally. Google clarified in its presentation, “Then if you want to dig deeper, there are links included in the snapshot.”

Why might this spell trouble for the online publishing industry? Because Google is essentially crafting answers to complex questions using all available content on the open web without requiring users to visit the pages containing that information. Modern online publishing relies on users visiting a page to convert views into advertising revenue and subscriptions. This holds true for major publishers like the New York Times and Forbes, as well as independent authors and journalists writing on platforms like Substack and Twitter.

The million-dollar question is whether the links on the right, which I’ve circled below, will ever receive clicks.

Google claims that its new AI-driven search feature will generate clicks, as it aims to be transparent about the sources of its information. However, one could argue that this is similar to expecting users to click on Wikipedia’s sources listed at the bottom of each entry. While a small percentage of users deeply interested in a topic might click on those links, most will simply read the Wikipedia entry without concern for the sources.

This behavior is understandable, as users typically just want quick answers to their questions without any additional effort. For instance, when someone wants to know Walt Disney’s birthplace, they aren’t looking for an assignment; they just want a trivial fact. Disney was born in Chicago, and while Wikipedia cites a 2009 Chicago Sun-Times article as its source, very few people will actually click on that link. This is how Google Search’s AI-generated responses could potentially cannibalize content currently provided by newspapers, magazines, and online news outlets.

Some may even view this as a form of plagiarism, as one tech critic pointed out in a recent Substack post. Regardless of what it’s called, the outcome will likely involve fewer views for content creators’ websites and more for Google, which essentially compiles the world’s information and aims to keep users within its ecosystem. Google can then monetize those views through advertising – revenue that might have otherwise gone to publishers on their own websites.

As views are the lifeblood of the commercial web for content creators, it’s challenging to envision many websites surviving such a drastic change to Google’s flagship product. The analogy of a nuclear bomb being dropped on the web is fitting, considering Google Search’s dominant market share both in the U.S. and worldwide. Google Search is the go-to method for most people seeking answers to their questions, whether it’s about a baseball game’s schedule or a chicken noodle soup recipe.

The exact launch date for Google’s new Search capability remains unclear. The company plans to roll it out on a trial basis in the coming weeks, taking a cautious approach, as reported by The Verge. However, with competitors like ChatGPT gaining popularity, it’s difficult to imagine Google allowing other tech companies to surpass it. Many users have already replaced Google searches with ChatGPT, which is precisely what concerns Google.

While some critics argue that AI technology is overhyped and won’t work as advertised, this concern may be beside the point. The real question is whether these tools will alter how internet users consume information, and it appears the answer is a resounding yes.

Predicting the future is always challenging, but if one were to speculate about the impact of Google’s Search plans on the open web, it seems likely that it would:

1. Devastate the already struggling ad-supported industry on which many newspapers and magazines depend, and

1. Push more content creators to implement paywalls, another strategy previously unthinkable for some, including Paleofuture.

Google is poised to unleash a bomb that could obliterate countless websites, though the exact timeline remains uncertain. The efficacy of conventional defenses—such as subscriptions and Facebook-driven traffic—against this impending threat is also questionable.

Indian scientists have successfully launched 104 satellites from a single rocket, marking a new global record. The country sent the spacecraft into orbit from the southern spaceport of Sriharikota, with the rocket carrying 101 satellites from international customers along with India’s own earth-observation satellite, totalling a payload of 1378 kilograms. The country had beaten Russia’s earlier record of 37 satellites launched at once.

The head of India’s space agency, AS Kiran Kumar, said it was “a remarkable feat” and that the satellites were successfully placed in orbit. Prime Minister Narendra Modi was among those to praise the successful launch on social media. Indian President Pranab Mukherjee tweeted: “Heartiest congratulations to @isro (Indian Space Research Organisation) on the successful launch of PSLV-C37 and CARTOSAT satellite together with 103 nano satellites!”

Scientists discovered a new instrument that can measure extreme ultraviolet light in a way that is ten times better than any previous method. The instrument, called the time-resolved extreme ultraviolet microscopy with nickel-filtered spectroscopy (TREX), was developed by an international team of researchers led by Liang Gao, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Illinois.

TREX uses a method called “dispersive Fourier transform” to produce brighter, crisper images of the very short wavelengths of UV light used in semiconductor manufacturing, carbon dioxide laser research and other fields. Unlike previous methods which were limited to producing either spectral information or spatial images, TREX enables researchers to track both in real-time. The technology “is applicable not only to better understand many fundamental physics problems but also to many industrial process controls,” Gao said.

Dell Technologies has expanded its top-selling server portfolio, with an additional 13 next-generation Dell PowerEdge servers, designed to boost performance and reliability for powerful computing across core data centers, large-scale public clouds and edge locations.

Dell PowerEdge server portfolio expansion offers more performance, including up to 2.9x greater AI inferencing, the company said in a statement. Indian businesses across industries are looking at managing and working with increasing quantities of data.

“The next-generation Dell PowerEdge portfolio will accelerate their digital transformation with AI-driven innovation, automation, and zero-trust adoption,” said Manish Gupta, VP and GM, Infrastructure Solutions Group, Dell Technologies, India.

Next-generation rack, tower and multi-node PowerEdge servers, with 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, include Dell software and engineering advancements, such as a new Smart Flow design, to improve energy and cost efficiency.

Expanded Dell APEX capabilities will help organisations take an as-a-Service approach, allowing for more effective IT operations that make the most of compute resources while minimising risk, the company added.

“We have consistently deployed innovations in power management, thermals and processor upgrades that have increased the energy efficiency of the PowerEdge portfolio while dramatically reducing their energy intensity,” Gupta added.

Dell PowerEdge servers are designed with sustainability in mind, offering customers a 3x performance improvement, compared to 14th Generation PowerEdge servers with Intel Xeon Scalable processors launched in 2017.

Later this year, Dell Technologies will expand its Dell APEX portfolio to offer bare metal compute services on-premises, at the edge, or in colocation facilities.

Dell PowerEdge R760 has been available since February while Dell PowerEdge HS5620, HS5610 are available in April. Additional next-generation Dell PowerEdge servers will be global availability throughout the first half of 2023. Dell APEX compute services are planned for the second half of 2023, said the company. (IANS)

A panel of five judges with expertise in technology and hospitality chose Virdee’s guest experience technology platform from a field of eight finalists. Virdee Virtual Reception Software is aimed at helping properties become more efficient. Whether it’s to help front-of-house staffing, provide guests with their keys, or help them pay for their stay, their goal is to free up staff in a way that allows them to deliver a true guest experience.

The competition is designed to help identify and elevate companies with innovative ideas and products that will help the hospitality industry as hoteliers continue to face challenges, like labor shortages, from the pandemic.

“It’s super exciting when you start a company, and you start selling the product, and the first thing you want to do is get product market fit and start building your client base. And then any sort of recognition like this is a huge honor for us. So really, it’s a cool experience and a great feeling,” said the winner, Branigan Mulcahy, Co-Founder of Virdee, “There’s a lot of great things we learned from the other companies that presented. There are things that help housekeeping be more efficient, and hiring and in tipping, and all of these other technologies that come into the flow.”

“The AAHOA Tech Pitch competition gives us a small glimpse into the future,” said AAHOA President & CEO Laura Lee Blake. “I am grateful for the participants who shared their vision and original products to show us how technology is changing the way the hospitality industry does business. AAHOA remains committed to helping hospitality-focused tech companies share the next big idea on hospitality’s biggest stage at the AAHOA Convention & Trade Show.”

AAHOA is always searching for the latest and greatest technologies that are solving everyday issues for hotel owners, their team members, and their guests. Select companies pitched to seasoned professional judges with expertise in technology and hospitality. The winner received a complimentary booth at AAHOACON24, tremendous exposure to more than 7,000 attendees in Los Angeles, CA, and much more!

“Congratulations to all the contestants. There were a ton of amazing ideas brought to the competition, and we know it was hard to choose just one winner,” said incoming AAHOA Chairman Bharat Patel. “Virdee makes their software user-friendly, so any hotelier, regardless of their technology background, can utilize this platform, leave the hard work to the experts, and be up and running within a few days.”

The panel of judges was composed of:

Emcee: RP Rama, AAHOA Lifetime Member

Neil Foster, HFTP’s Global President 2022-2023

Glenn Haussman, Hospitality Speaker, Podcaster, Writer

Anthony Melchiorri, Hospitality Expert and TV Personality

Mukesh Mowji, AAHOA Past Chairman (2006-2007)

Frank Wolfe, CEO of HFTP

“It was just amazing to be invited. There are a lot of amazing companies that presented as part of the tech pitch competition,” added the winner, Mulcahy. “I learned a lot about some of these other platforms, and it was great for us to be able to get our message out. We’ve been attending AAHOACON since we started the company, since the very first year back from the pandemic. So, we’ve met a lot of people here, we’ve established a lot of great relationships, and some of our investors are AAHOA Members and former chairs, so it’s good to be part of this organization, and we love the community here.

AAHOA is the largest hotel owners association in the nation, with Member-owned properties representing a significant part of the U.S. economy. AAHOA’s 20,000 members own 60% of the hotels in the United States and are responsible for 1.7% of the nation’s GDP. More than one million employees work at AAHOA member-owned hotels, earning $47 billion annually, and member-owned hotels support 4.2 million U.S. jobs across all sectors of the hospitality industry. AAHOA’s mission is to advance and protect the business interests of hotel owners through advocacy, industry leadership, professional development, member benefits, and community engagement.

The company was accused of acquiring B-1 visas which allow immigrants to conduct temporary business in the U.S rather than the more expensive H-1B visas for their staff.

Indian multinational tech company, Larsen & Toubro Technology Services will pay US$9,928,000 as settlement for committing visa fraud between 2014 to 2019, a statement by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of South Carolina said.

According to the authorities, the firm has admitted to violating the False Claims Act by acquiring inexpensive B-1 visas, rather than more expensive H-1B visas for its personnel employed at the offices in Edison New Jersey. During the time of the crime, B-1 visas, which do not allow holders to work in the United States, ranged from $200 to $300 while H1-B visas were between approximately $4,000 to $6,000.

The investigation into the case began after a whistleblower filed a complaint in the United States District Court in Charleston, South Carolina. Investigations were carried out by Homeland Security Investigations, the USCIS Nebraska Service Center Fraud Detection Unit, the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Inspector General, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Inspector General, and the U.S. Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Service, a news release noted.

“This settlement is a success in deterring companies in seeking to evade and violate the laws and regulations governing the non-immigrant visa programs managed by the Department of State and Department of Homeland Security,” said Chris Hileman, special agent in charge, Department of State, Office of Inspector General.

“The U.S. Attorney’s Office will hold accountable those who skirt this country’s visa requirements,” said U.S. Attorney for the District of South Carolina Adair F. Boroughs. “Our immigration laws are intended to protect American jobs for American workers, and we will continue to work with our law enforcement partners to ensure companies securing work visas for foreign nationals strictly comply with those laws.”

Are tech companies moving too fast in rolling out powerful artificial intelligence technology that could one day outsmart humans?

That’s the conclusion of a group of prominent computer scientists and other tech industry notables such as Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak who are calling for a 6-month pause to consider the risks.

Their petition published Wednesday is a response to San Francisco startup OpenAI’s recent release of GPT-4, a more advanced successor to its widely-used AI chatbot ChatGPT that helped spark a race among tech giants Microsoft and Google to unveil similar applications.

WHAT DO THEY SAY?

The letter warns that AI systems with “human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity” — from flooding the internet with disinformation and automating away jobs to more catastrophic future risks out of the realms of science fiction.

It says “recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control.”

“We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4,” the letter says. “This pause should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium.”

A number of governments are already working to regulate high-risk AI tools. The United Kingdom released a paper Wednesday outlining its approach, which it said “will avoid heavy-handed legislation which could stifle innovation.” Lawmakers in the 27-nation European Union have been negotiating passage of sweeping AI rules.

WHO SIGNED IT?

The petition was organized by the nonprofit Future of Life Institute, which says confirmed signatories include the Turing Award-winning AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio and other leading AI researchers such as Stuart Russell and Gary Marcus. Others who joined include Wozniak, former U.S. presidential candidate Andrew Yang and Rachel Bronson, president of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a science-oriented advocacy group known for its warnings against humanity-ending nuclear war.

Musk, who runs Tesla, Twitter and SpaceX and was an OpenAI co-founder and early investor, has long expressed concerns about AI’s existential risks. A more surprising inclusion is Emad Mostaque, CEO of Stability AI, maker of the AI image generator Stable Diffusion that partners with Amazon and competes with OpenAI’s similar generator known as DALL-E.

WHAT’S THE RESPONSE?

OpenAI, Microsoft and Google didn’t respond to requests for comment Wednesday, but the letter already has plenty of skeptics.

“A pause is a good idea, but the letter is vague and doesn’t take the regulatory problems seriously,” says James Grimmelmann, a Cornell University professor of digital and information law. “It is also deeply hypocritical for Elon Musk to sign on given how hard Tesla has fought against accountability for the defective AI in its self-driving cars.”

IS THIS AI HYSTERIA?

While the letter raises the specter of nefarious AI far more intelligent than what actually exists, it’s not “superhuman” AI that some who signed on are worried about. While impressive, a tool such as ChatGPT is simply a text generator that makes predictions about what words would answer the prompt it was given based on what it’s learned from ingesting huge troves of written works.

Gary Marcus, a New York University professor emeritus who signed the letter, said in a blog post that he disagrees with others who are worried about the near-term prospect of intelligent machines so smart they can self-improve themselves beyond humanity’s control. What he’s more worried about is “mediocre AI” that’s widely deployed, including by criminals or terrorists to trick people or spread dangerous misinformation.

“Current technology already poses enormous risks that we are ill-prepared for,” Marcus wrote. “With future technology, things could well get worse.”

Newswise — Physicists at Delft University of Technology have built a new technology on a microchip by combining two Nobel Prize-winning techniques for the first time. This microchip could measure distances in materials at high precision, for example underwater or for medical imaging. Because the technology uses sound vibrations instead of light, it is useful for high-precision position measurements in opaque materials. The instrument could lead to new techniques to monitor the Earth’s climate and human health. The work is now published in Nature Communications.

Simple and low-power technology

The microchip mainly consists of a thin ceramic sheet that is shaped like a trampoline. This trampoline is patterned with holes to enhance its interaction with lasers and has a thickness about 1000 times smaller than the thickness of a hair. As a former PhD candidate in Richard Norte’s lab, Matthijs de Jong studied the small trampolines to figure out what would happen if they pointed a simple laser beam at them. The trampoline’s surface started vibrating intensely. By measuring the reflected laser light from the vibrating surface, the team noticed a pattern of vibrations in the shape of a comb that they hadn’t seen before. They realised that the trampoline’s comb-like signature functions as a ruler for precision measurements of distance.

This new technology could be used to measure positions in materials using sound waves. What makes it special is that it doesn’t need any precision hardware and is therefore easy to produce. “It only requires inserting a laser, and nothing else. There’s no need for complex feedback loops or for tuning certain parameters to get our tech to operate properly. This makes it a very simple and low-power technology, that is much easier to miniaturise on a microchip”, Norte says. “Once this happens, we could really put these microchip sensors anywhere, given their small size.”

Unique combination

The new technology is based on two unrelated Nobel Prize-winning techniques, called optical trapping and frequency combs. Norte: “The interesting thing is that both of these concepts are typically related to light, but these fields do not have any real overlap. We have uniquely combined them to create an easy-to-use microchip technology based on sound waves. This ease of use could have significant implications for how we measure the world around us.”

Overtones

When the researchers pointed a laser beam at the tiny trampoline, they realised that the forces that the laser exerted on it were creating overtone vibrations in the trampoline membranes. “These forces are called an optical trap, because they can trap particles in one spot using light. This technique won the Nobel Prize in 2018 and it allows us to manipulate even the smallest particles with extreme precision”, Norte explains. “You can compare the overtones in the trampoline to particular notes of a violin. The note or frequency that the violin produces depends on where you place your finger on the string. If you touch the string only very lightly and play it with a bow, you can create overtones; a series of notes at higher frequencies. In our case, the laser acts as both the soft touch and the bow to induce overtone vibrations in the trampoline membrane.”

Bridging two breakthrough fields

“Optical frequency combs are used in labs around the world for very precise measurements of time, and to measure distances”, Norte says. “They are so important to measurements in general that their invention was given a Nobel Prize in 2005. We have made an acoustic version of a frequency comb, made out of sound vibrations in the membrane instead of light. Acoustic frequency combs could for instance make position measurements in opaque materials, through which vibrations can propagate better than light waves. This technology could for example be used for precision measurements underwater to monitor the Earth’s climate, for medical imaging and for applications in quantum technologies.”

I am fighting for India’s voice, ready to pay any price: Rahul Gandhi

Hours after being expelled from the Parliament following his conviction in a criminal defamation case, senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said on Friday that he is ready to pay any price for expressing the voice of India.

It’s always special to come back to India, and this trip is especially meaningful as it’s my first visit back since the pandemic. As we come out of it, there’s a sense of optimism about the country’s future and the role technology can play to improve lives.

Which brings me to why I’m here: first and foremost to meet with Googlers, as the team has grown significantly since I was last here. I’m also here to see progress being made from our $10 billion, 10-year India Digitization Fund (IDF), and share new ways we’re helping to advance India’s digital future at our Google for India event. That includes our efforts to build a single, unified AI model that will be capable of handling over 100 Indian languages across speech and text – part of our global effort to bring the world’s 1,000 most-spoken languages online, and to help people access knowledge and information in their preferred language. We’re also supporting a new, multidisciplinary center for responsible AI with IIT Madras. (Our VP of India Sanjay Gupta shares more details in his blog post below.)

This progress is part of how we’re working to seize the opportunity in AI globally, balancing the need to be bold with innovation and responsible in our approach. I’m excited to see the ways India will contribute to breakthroughs in AI that could benefit over a billion people in India, and more around the world.

More broadly, I’ve been amazed at the ways people are already using technology to make their communities better. One of the local tech founders I met today has broken new ground by offering a radiation-free and non-invasive breast cancer screening tool; another developed a chatbot that helps people manage stress. I was glad to hear their stories and to share thoughts on how technology can expand opportunity during a conversation at WomenWill.

Later today, I have the honor of meeting with His Excellency Prime Minister Modi to discuss how we are supporting small businesses and start-ups, investing in cybersecurity, providing education and skills training, applying AI in sectors like agriculture and healthcare, and other priorities. Prime Minister Modi’s Digital India vision has helped to accelerate the progress we’re seeing across India, and I’m excited for India to share its experience with the world as it takes over the G20 presidency in 2023.

The pace of technological change in India has been extraordinary, and there’s so much opportunity still ahead. Glad to be able to see it up close, and I’m already looking forward to my next visit.

(Sundar is the CEO of Google and Alphabet and serves on Alphabet’s Board of Directors. Under his leadership, Google has been focused on developing products and services, powered by the latest advances in AI, that offer help in moments big and small.)

Below is an edited version of a blog from Sanjay Gupta, Google’s Country Head and Vice President, India, summarizing the key announcements from Google for India.

India’s digital transformation is at a tipping point. Seven hundred million connected Indians, affordable smartphones and data, record highs in digital payments, the digitization of citizen services, and a vibrant start-up ecosystem have put the technology sector on track to become the single largest contributor to the national economy.

We feel privileged to have played a part in this extraordinary story. Our mission in India is to make the internet helpful and safer for a billion Indians. We’ve introduced India-first innovations, worked to lower barriers to access, and invested in strengthening the strategic pillars of India’s digital economy through our $10 billion India Digitization Fund.

Today, at our 8th Google for India, joined by Sundar Pichai, our CEO, and senior Google leaders and product experts, we stepped up our commitment to build a more inclusive, helpful, and safer internet for every Indian — and shared how we hope to supercharge India’s digital transformation by harnessing AI.

Partnerships are the cornerstone of our journey in India, and essential for such a scaled transition. Today, with partners from across the public and private sectors, we announced new efforts focused on taking Indians from foundational access to the point where technology becomes the enabler for growth, knowledge, health and progress.

Early stage startups are the engine that drives innovation, with many building products that address key information and service needs for people across India, especially for novice internet users. Strengthening our ongoing resolve to support India’s digital innovators, as part of our India Digitization Fund investments, we will be targeting support for early stage companies with a particular focus on women-led startups. (Courtesy: https://blog.google/inside-google/message-ceo/optimism-india-digital-future/)

It’s always special to come back to India, and this trip is especially meaningful as it’s my first visit back since the pandemic. As we come out of it, there’s a sense of optimism about the country’s future and the role technology can play to improve lives.

Which brings me to why I’m here: first and foremost to meet with Googlers, as the team has grown significantly since I was last here. I’m also here to see progress being made from our $10 billion, 10-year India Digitization Fund (IDF), and share new ways we’re helping to advance India’s digital future at our Google for India event. That includes our efforts to build a single, unified AI model that will be capable of handling over 100 Indian languages across speech and text – part of our global effort to bring the world’s 1,000 most-spoken languages online, and to help people access knowledge and information in their preferred language. We’re also supporting a new, multidisciplinary center for responsible AI with IIT Madras. (Our VP of India Sanjay Gupta shares more details in his blog post below.)

This progress is part of how we’re working to seize the opportunity in AI globally, balancing the need to be bold with innovation and responsible in our approach. I’m excited to see the ways India will contribute to breakthroughs in AI that could benefit over a billion people in India, and more around the world.

More broadly, I’ve been amazed at the ways people are already using technology to make their communities better. One of the local tech founders I met today has broken new ground by offering a radiation-free and non-invasive breast cancer screening tool; another developed a chatbot that helps people manage stress. I was glad to hear their stories and to share thoughts on how technology can expand opportunity during a conversation at WomenWill.

Later today, I have the honor of meeting with His Excellency Prime Minister Modi to discuss how we are supporting small businesses and start-ups, investing in cybersecurity, providing education and skills training, applying AI in sectors like agriculture and healthcare, and other priorities. Prime Minister Modi’s Digital India vision has helped to accelerate the progress we’re seeing across India, and I’m excited for India to share its experience with the world as it takes over the G20 presidency in 2023.

The pace of technological change in India has been extraordinary, and there’s so much opportunity still ahead. Glad to be able to see it up close, and I’m already looking forward to my next visit.

(Sundar is the CEO of Google and Alphabet and serves on Alphabet’s Board of Directors. Under his leadership, Google has been focused on developing products and services, powered by the latest advances in AI, that offer help in moments big and small.)

Below is an edited version of a blog from Sanjay Gupta, Google’s Country Head and Vice President, India, summarizing the key announcements from Google for India.

India’s digital transformation is at a tipping point. Seven hundred million connected Indians, affordable smartphones and data, record highs in digital payments, the digitization of citizen services, and a vibrant start-up ecosystem have put the technology sector on track to become the single largest contributor to the national economy.

We feel privileged to have played a part in this extraordinary story. Our mission in India is to make the internet helpful and safer for a billion Indians. We’ve introduced India-first innovations, worked to lower barriers to access, and invested in strengthening the strategic pillars of India’s digital economy through our $10 billion India Digitization Fund.

Today, at our 8th Google for India, joined by Sundar Pichai, our CEO, and senior Google leaders and product experts, we stepped up our commitment to build a more inclusive, helpful, and safer internet for every Indian — and shared how we hope to supercharge India’s digital transformation by harnessing AI.

Partnerships are the cornerstone of our journey in India, and essential for such a scaled transition. Today, with partners from across the public and private sectors, we announced new efforts focused on taking Indians from foundational access to the point where technology becomes the enabler for growth, knowledge, health and progress.

Early stage startups are the engine that drives innovation, with many building products that address key information and service needs for people across India, especially for novice internet users. Strengthening our ongoing resolve to support India’s digital innovators, as part of our India Digitization Fund investments, we will be targeting support for early stage companies with a particular focus on women-led startups. (Courtesy: https://blog.google/inside-google/message-ceo/optimism-india-digital-future/)

The European Union has given phone manufacturers a deadline of 28 December 2024 to adopt a common charging cable. The EU previously agreed new portable electronic devices would have to use a USB Type-C charger by autumn 2024.

Now the law has entered the EU’s Official Journal, and with it an exact date has been set for the requirement. Companies like Apple, whose iPhones use an Apple-made charger, will not be able to sell new devices in the EU after the date unless they use a universal cable.

Apple is the biggest manufacturer to use a customised charging port which is exclusive to some of its products. Its iPhone series uses its own Lightning connector, for example.

Greg Joswiak, Apple senior vice president of worldwide marketing, previously told the Wall Street Journal the tech giant would “obviously” comply with the law.

The new rule will cover a range of “small and medium-sized portable electronics”, according to the EU, such as phones, tablets, headphones, and handheld game consoles.

Product standard divergence

The deadline set by the EU has created a further Brexit tension point, as the EU regulation may also apply to Northern Ireland, according to both EU and UK officials.

According to a December 2021 parliamentary report, the “new requirements may also apply to devices sold in Northern Ireland under the terms of the Northern Ireland protocol in the Brexit agreement, potentially triggering divergence of product standards with the rest of the UK”.

The treaty works by keeping Northern Ireland inside the EU’s single market for goods, while the rest of the UK is outside it.

A row between the UK and EU about how to reform the Northern Ireland protocol remains unresolved.

In June, the UK government told the BBC it was not “currently considering” replicating the EU requirement regarding the adoption of a universal charging cable for mobile phones and other portable electronic devices.

TiE Boston, one of the region’s largest and leading-edge organizations supporting the Massachusetts entrepreneurial ecosystem that connects entrepreneurs, executives, and venture capitalists, today announced that serial founder, entrepreneur and Wasabi Technologies CEO David Friend will be the keynote speaker at its annual gala on Dec. 2, 2022 at Sheraton Boston     .

Mr. Friend is the co-founder and CEO of Wasabi Technologies, a revolutionary cloud storage company that provides fast, affordable, and highly reliable cloud data storage for businesses all over the world.

“I am thrilled that David Friend is our keynote speaker at this year’s annual gala,” said TiE Boston President Yash Shah. “David’s entrepreneurial journey is highly inspirational and forges the current narrative of entrepreneurship. TiE Boston’s goal is to inspire and motivate everyone listening to start their own entrepreneurial journey or support others who are already on that journey. David’s keynote, his experience and his stories are bound to do just that.”

Friend’s first company, ARP Instruments developed synthesizers used by Stevie Wonder, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin and even helped Steven Spielberg communicate with aliens providing that legendary five-note communication in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Mr. Friend founded or co-founded five other companies: Computer Pictures Corporation – an early player in computer graphics, Pilot Software – a company that pioneered multidimensional databases for crunching large amounts of customer data, Faxnet – which became the world’s largest provider of fax-to-email services, Sonexis – a VoIP conferencing company, and immediately prior to Wasabi, what is now one of the world’s leading cloud backup companies, Carbonite.

Mr. Friend is also a respected philanthropist and is on the board of Berklee College of Music, where there is a concert hall named in his honor, and serves as president of the board of Boston Baroque, an orchestra and chorus that has received seven Grammy nominations. An avid mineral and gem collector, he donated Friend Gem and Mineral Hall at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.

Mr. Friend graduated from Yale and attended the Princeton University Graduate School of Engineering where he was a David Sarnoff Fellow.

At the gala, TiE Boston will honor Boston Common Asset Management’s Founder and CEO Geeta Aiyer with its annual Lifetime Achievement Award for 2022.

The following people will also be honored at the TiE Boston gala:

• Entrepreneur of the Year:Aman Narang, Co-President, Founder, COO and Director, Toast, Inc.
• Award for Corporate Excellence:Rohit Prasad, SVP and Head Scientist, Amazon Alexa
• Venture Capitalist of the Year:Jamie Goldstein, Founder and Partner, Pillar VC
• Rising Entrepreneur of the Year:Uroš Kuzmanović, CEO and Co-Founder, BioSens8
• TiE Boston President’s Award:  Dinesh Patel, MD, Co-Founder, TiE Boston; Emeritus Chief of Arthroscopic Surgery at Mass General Hospital

Founded in 1997, TiE Boston connects tomorrow’s founders with today’s entrepreneurs, executives and venture capitalists. Operating for 25 years now, TiE Boston’s unparalleled network of successful, serial entrepreneurs are deeply engaged and committed to giving back to the community by providing mentorship, tactical advice, and expertise to rising entrepreneurs through signature programs.

The Society of Indo American Engineers and Architects held its 40th Annual Gala on Nov. 12, 2022, at Pier 60 on Chelsea Piers, New York City.

Organizers estimated that about 600 members and their families attended the gala which included several highlights.

The theme of the Gala was the “Power of Diversity and Inclusion”.  This theme reflects upon the diversity of groups and celebrates its uniqueness, noted President of SIAEA Ketan Shah in his address.

Several individuals from the private and public sectors, were honored with an award in engineering, construction, planning & design industries.

These were individuals who had excelled in their field and demonstrated leadership, achieved success, and shown innovative skills and support in categories such as Small Business Enterprises (SBE), Small Disadvantage Business Enterprises (SDBE), Women Owned Business (WOSB), Minority-Owned Business Enterprises (MBE), Women Owned Business (WOSB), HUB Zone Businesses etc.

Many elected officials and dignitaries also attended the event to congratulate the honorees and the scholarship recipients. Long-time supporter and SIAEA, former NY State Senator Ruth Hassell-Thompson, NY State Assembly Members Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelym and Jenifer Rajkumar. Vipul Dev from the Indian Consul General’s Office was present as well.

The Keynote Speaker for the Gala was Gordon Tung, vice president at NYC School Construction Authority.  He has over 450 professionals under him and is responsible for a $18.7 billion capital plan.

The Chief Guest of the evening was Jamila Glean who is a Vice President at the Division of Minority & Women Business Development at the Empire State Development Corporation. Big supporters and long-time SIAEA sponsors, Past Presidents Nayan Parikh and Mihir Patel, also made sure that the Gala was a huge success, the press release said.

Chitra Radin from the SIAEA Board of Directors said the organization was honoring people “who make us proud” to be professional engineers and architects. She noted that SIAEA supports Indian-origin members of this industry “to come together to exchange ideas and help one another professionally. SIAEA also encourages our youth to pursue careers in these fields by offering them scholarships,” adding that through the year the organization offers technical seminars re-enforcing its ongoing commitment to professional growth for its members.

Past President Mihir Patel praised Ketan Patel and incoming President of SIAEA Amil Patel for the “excellent” job they had done in organizing the event. Amil Patel is he incoming President of the organization.

Chauhan told ITV Gold 40 years was a long journey for any organization. He spoke of Mayor Adams’ plans for NYC, saying the city is “open for business.” “We have more incentives for those waho want to open businesses,” Chauhan said. Mitul Patel, executive vice president, noted that this gala was being held after a long hiatus interrupted by the COVID pandemic, and praised members of SIAEA for helping develop New York City.

Others who spoke to ITV Gold included past presidents Mihir Patel and Nayan Parikh Lorenzo Bell performed the national anthem. Treasurer of SIAEA Heman Patel, spoke of how the organization had been helping members and newcomers and urged businesses to partner with it.

Assemblywoman Rajkumar noted that she was the first Indian-American woman to be elected to state office in Albany. “I am proud to be celebrating with my community,” she said, noting that “Everyone here is like my family which came here with $300,’ and achieved success.

At the conclusion of the event, SIAEA President Shah reiterated that “the success of this Gala is because of the hard work performed by our Executive Committee and the three Gala co-chairs (Mitul Patel, Chitra Radin and Yogesh Mistry). And, of course, we are very thankful to our supporters and sponsors without whom this event would not be possible.”

The following is the list of 2022 SIAEA Award Honorees and Scholarship recipients:

2022 Special Honoree Awards

• Vipul Dev – Consul (Political and PIC) of India
• Dilip Chauhan, Deputy Commissioner, International Affairs, New York City
• Aileen del Prado, Senior, Director, NYC School Construction

2022 Honoree Awards

• Ali Chaudhry, Senior Vice President and Chief Development Officer, AECOM
• Sandeep Mehrotra, Vice President, Hazen & Sawyer
• Hermie Patel, President, AME
• Jayesh Patel, Principal, Crest Engineering
• Chitra Radin, President, Radin Consulting
• Darsh Shah, Associate Principal, Super Structure

2022 Award Honoree for Under 40

• Priya Shah, Associate, Gensler

2022 Scholarship Awards

• Kshitij Ghavate, pursuing a master’s degree in Construction Engineering and Management at Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ
• Vaishnavi Jariwala, pursuing a master’s degree in Construction,NYU at Polytechnic Institute of New York, NY, NY
• Aashil Shah, pursuing a master’s degree in Computer Science at California State University
• Disha Ashish Shah, pursuing a master’s degree in Construction Management at Northeastern University, Boston, MA
• Isha Virendra Shah, pursuing an undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering at Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN
• Parita Shah, pursuing an undergraduate degree at Computer Science atHarvard University, Boston, MA
• Ronitkumar Tapiawala, pursuing an undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering at University of Illinois, Chicago, IL

(Courtesy: News India Times)

As the world economy staggers under global recession, many Indians settled abroad are thinking of returning to the homeland. They now see India as an exciting market, where the real growth story lies. 

India too, stands to benefit from the return of the Non-resident Indian;  the positive effects of a reverse brain drain have been evidenced in countries like Taiwan, Israel and China. Now more than ever, India needs skills in science and math, and investments in research. 

The returning NRI will bring a higher understanding of the functioning of developed countries, of technology and know-how that will benefit India, and a business network that will expand India’s economic reach.

India has now invited with open arms Non-resident Indians (NRIs) and Persons of Indian Origin (PIOs) to come and explore the great start-up boom in India, the success of which has become a global talking point. 

With over 77,000 startups and 105 unicorns, Indian innovators, incubators and entrepreneurs are making a mark for themselves and this may inspire and encourage NRIs and PIOs to look at opportunities back home.

Interacting with eminent diaspora over a community reception in New York, Union Minister Dr Jitendra Singh also invited the NRIs and PIOs to come and explore the great startup boom in India. The interaction with eminent diaspora was held over a community reception hosted for the Union Minister of State (MoS), Ministry of Science and Technology; MoS, Ministry of Earth Science; MoS of Prime Minister’s Office and Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances AND Pensions at New York. 

Dr Singh pointed out that the pro-business reforms unleashed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the last eight years like reduction in compliance requirements, removal of retrospective taxation, simplification of the corporate tax rate structure, and Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) have improved India’s rank in ease of doing business from 142 in 2014 to 63 in 2022, as per World Bank report.

Dr Singh was speaking to the Indian diaspora in New York after returning from the Joint Ministerial Plenary of Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM13) and Mission Innovation (MI-7) at the ‘Global Clean Energy Action Forum- 2022’ at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He led a high-level Joint Indian Ministerial Delegation of the Ministry of Power, New & Renewable Energy and Ministry of Science & Technology at the Energy Summit from September 21 to 23 and presented India’s view on clean energy initiatives and climate actions at various roundtables and Joint Ministerial Plenary.

There is a tremendous focus in the country on sunrise sectors such as 5G, artificial intelligence, drones, semiconductors, blockchain, green energy, and space economy, the minister added.

Referring to the National Education Policy 2020, Dr Jitendra Singh says it opens myriad avenues to enhance our university-to-university links, joint academic programmes, credit portability and research partnership. He said, India is now open to foreign universities setting campuses in the country and we are hopeful that US Universities will take advantage of these opportunities.

The minister said, as two democracies with shared values, open exchange of knowledge remains key to our strong partnership. Indian students in the United States of America are integral to it, and so are our ties between universities and educational institutions on both sides.

Bengaluru -based Design Services firm, Aifat UX, a leading UX/UI design services provider has announced that they won the 2022 Muse Creative Award in the educational app design category. Aufait UX’s design for StockPe, a stock trading and investment education platform was selected from over 6000 entries worldwide as the Gold Winner. The international competition was judged by experts and industry professionals from 30+ countries belonging to reputed companies.

“At Aufait UX, we believe in creating world-class designs that stand out for its quality and perfection. The Muse Awards is a testament of our craftsmanship and relentless pursuit of creating awesome designs. I would like to extend my thanks to the StockPe team for their excellent customer support and my design team for their wonderful teamwork”, said Bijith Ahmed, chief designer and co-founder of Aufait UX.

“It comes as no surprise that Aufait UX has bagged this international recognition for their designs. We were truly impressed with their design for the StockPe app. With their attention to details, out of the box thinking and passion for design, they went above and beyond in meeting our requirements. They truly deserve this honor”, said Shubham Rawal, co-founder of StockPe.

The MUSE awards is a series of competitions hosted by the International Awards Associate (IAA), an organization that has continuously strived to honor creatives and designers for their excellence. The theme for the 2022 Muse awards was “Stride Forth”. This year the MUSE Awards honored those who are dauntless in adversity; who take on challenges with an unwavering will, set the standards for the world and inspire others to reach higher.

Aufait UX is a leading UI UX design agency based out of Bangalore, India, providing UX/UI design services to their customers across the globe. Aufait UX is recognized for mobile app, web app and website designs, recognized by independent analysts and analyst platforms including Clutch, Manifest and Visual Objects. Aufait UX provides design services for industry verticals including healthcare, education, fintech, ecommerce, government and utilities.

StockPe is a stock market learning app that simplifies financial learning for Indians through gamification. It provides a platform for people to experience finance education in a fun and rewarding way, radically different from the traditional theoretical and lengthy learning model. With gamified tournaments modeled on live stock market data, StockPe helps users to learn trading and practice their knowledge in real time.

Bengaluru -based Design Services firm, Aifat UX, a leading UX/UI design services provider has announced that they won the 2022 Muse Creative Award in the educational app design category. Aufait UX’s design for StockPe, a stock trading and investment education platform was selected from over 6000 entries worldwide as the Gold Winner. The international competition was judged by experts and industry professionals from 30+ countries belonging to reputed companies. 

“At Aufait UX, we believe in creating world-class designs that stand out for its quality and perfection. The Muse Awards is a testament of our craftsmanship and relentless pursuit of creating awesome designs. I would like to extend my thanks to the StockPe team for their excellent customer support and my design team for their wonderful teamwork”, said Bijith Ahmed, chief designer and co-founder of Aufait UX.

“It comes as no surprise that Aufait UX has bagged this international recognition for their designs. We were truly impressed with their design for the StockPe app. With their attention to details, out of the box thinking and passion for design, they went above and beyond in meeting our requirements. They truly deserve this honor”, said Shubham Rawal, co-founder of StockPe.

The MUSE awards is a series of competitions hosted by the International Awards Associate (IAA), an organization that has continuously strived to honor creatives and designers for their excellence. The theme for the 2022 Muse awards was “Stride Forth”. This year the MUSE Awards honored those who are dauntless in adversity; who take on challenges with an unwavering will, set the standards for the world and inspire others to reach higher.

Aufait UX is a leading UI UX design agency based out of Bangalore, India, providing UX/UI design services to their customers across the globe. Aufait UX is recognized for mobile app, web app and website designs, recognized by independent analysts and analyst platforms including Clutch, Manifest and Visual Objects. Aufait UX provides design services for industry verticals including healthcare, education, fintech, ecommerce, government and utilities.

StockPe is a stock market learning app that simplifies financial learning for Indians through gamification. It provides a platform for people to experience finance education in a fun and rewarding way, radically different from the traditional theoretical and lengthy learning model. With gamified tournaments modeled on live stock market data, StockPe helps users to learn trading and practice their knowledge in real time.

A picture of an ‘Edit Button’ was shared by Twitter Blue, which is a paid subscription service from Twitter , media reports stated. “Well well well, look what we’ve been testing,” The long-awaited edit button is finally coming to the microblogging platform Twitter, even though it would be for select users only.

“If you see an edited Tweet it’s because we’re testing the edit button, this is happening and you’ll be okay,” Twitter confirmed the arrival of the feature through its official account.

Twitter users will finally be able to edit the tweets they post on the platform. However, as per reports, only paid users will have the access to the feature and it remains to be seen if the feature will be available for all 237 million users.

“We’re hoping that with the availability of Edit Tweet, tweeting will feel more approachable and less stressful,” Twitter said in a statement. “You should be able to participate in the conversation in a way that makes sense to you.”

The edit button initially is available for Twitter employees for internal testing, and then to Twitter Blue users. The company eventually plans to give everyone the option to alter their tweets.

A picture of an ‘Edit Button’ was shared by Twitter Blue, which is a paid subscription service from Twitter.

How does the feature works?

The edit button will allow users to edit their tweet even if it has been posted. Twitter users did not have the option so far so they either had to delete the tweet or post another one in case any mistake happened.

However, Twitter users will get only 30 minutes to edit their tweets which are long and has some mistakes. To signify a tweet is edited, the tweet will bear a label to show it has been modified. Clicking the label will let viewers see the history of the edits.

Major Changes in Twitter

Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has hardly undergone many changes. However, in 2017, Twitter increased the character limit for messages to 280 characters from 140.

In 2020, Twitter rolled out Fleets, a feature similar to Instagram reels that deleted users’ posts after 24 hours. But Twitter soon removed the feature.

Last month, Twitter introduced Circles, a feature that lets people share posts with a smaller number of followers.

Elon Musk and the Edit button

Tesla CEO and billionaire Elon Musk wanted to bring the edit button to the social media platform after taking a passive stake in the company.

“Looking forward to working with Parag & Twitter board to make significant improvements to Twitter in coming months,” Musk had tweeted in April.

It is worth noting that Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been demanding the edit button from Twitter for a long time.

Later, Musk announced that he was withdrawing from a $44 billion deal to buy Twitter alleging multiple breaches of the agreement.

Musk said he had backed out because Twitter failed to provide enough information on the number of spam and fake accounts.

Twitter and Musk became embroiled in a legal battle following that as Twitter filed suit, alleging he had breached his contract while disrupting the site’s operations and dragging down its stock.

TiE Boston, one of the region’s largest and leading-edge organizations supporting the Massachusetts entrepreneurial ecosystem and connecting entrepreneurs, executives, and venture capitalists, today announced that tech entrepreneur and senior business executive Yash Shah has commenced his term as the 13th President of TiE Boston.

Beginning July 1, 2022, Shah will serve for a two-year term, during which he plans to boost the organization’s outreach to early entrepreneurs, emerging entrepreneurs, and established entrepreneurs, a 3E blueprint  that will also inspire more engagement from its charter members.

“I am excited to see Yash Shah at the helm of TiE Boston,” said TiE Boston Founding President and philanthropist Desh Deshpande. “He is a seasoned entrepreneur and brings both the historical involvement from the last 25 years of TiE Boston, as well as the vision for the future that is needed for the years to come.”

Shah says he is thrilled to serve TiE Boston and lay the foundation for the next 25 years in the rapidly changing technological and business landscape in both Massachusetts and the world.

“As we celebrate TiE Boston’s 25th anniversary this year, we have also started to think about how we can make this organization more relevant to the local entrepreneurial ecosystem for the next 25 years and beyond,” said Shah . “My immediate goal to make a sustained effort to reach out to like-minded communities across New England and make TiE Boston a major resource and networking platform for budding, established, and future entrepreneurs.”

Shah replaces former TiE Boston President Anu Chitrapu, whose two-year term ended on June 30, 2022.

“I am excited about the election of Yash Shah as the next President of TiE Boston,” said Chitrapu. “His vast entrepreneurial and investment experience promises substantive impact on our programs and the entrepreneurial ecosystem.”

Shah is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, product advisor, and business executive with over 25 years of IT and software industry experience.  He is also on the advisory boards of several software startups around the world.

“I am honored at the opportunity to build on the incredible work done by TiE Boston’s founders, past presidents, and charter members. Passion for entrepreneurship runs deep in me, as demonstrated by my two decades of association with TiE Boston and starting multiple ventures of my own,” added Shah.

As a dynamic and successful entrepreneur, Shah co-founded Jeavio, a venture services firm and plays a critical leadership role in its vision and strategy. He is also the Chief Technology Officer of SevOne, which was recently sold to IBM. In addition, he is a Founding Member of the TiE Boston Foundation, an active member of TiE Boston Angels, and a TiE ScaleUp Mentor.

Yosh Rozen, CEO of Partrunner, said, “I’m excited to see Yash take over the TiE Boston Presidency. He has been a mentor to my company Partrunner since our participation in the TIE Boston ScaleUp program. Yash’s leadership at TiE Boston will be immensely valuable as an enabler for future entrepreneurs.”

TiE Boston is the second oldest and second largest TiE chapter and currently has around 170 charter members in Massachusetts, who have founded signature Boston companies creating $50B+ in shareholder value and thousands of hi-tech jobs. A charter membership to TiE Boston provides access to TiE’s global network of over 15000 entrepreneurs, professionals, industry leaders, and investors, across 64 chapters worldwide.

​Founded in 1997, TiE Boston connects tomorrow’s founders with today’s entrepreneurs, executives and venture capitalists. Operating for 25 years now, TiE Boston’s unparalleled network of successful, serial entrepreneurs are deeply engaged and committed to giving back to the community by providing mentorship, tactical advice, and expertise to rising entrepreneurs through signature programs.

TiE Boston Angels provides funding and advice to early-stage companies. Since its inception, $18+ Million has been invested in 60+ companies, through a network of over 90+ investors. Industries represented include technology, healthcare, clean tech and more.

TiE Boston ScaleUp is an accelerator program that enables “Seed to Series A” companies overcome typical barriers to growth by guiding them to optimize their strategic positioning, operations, sales and competitive advantage. Participating startups have access to top mentors from Boston who have successfully scaled and exited their own companies. Since inception, ScaleUp has accelerated 107 startups through 8 cohorts. 63% are female-founded companies and the program has seen 5 exits till date.

TiE Young Entrepreneurs (TYE) fosters the next generation of leaders through the transformative experience of building a startup. This extracurricular program for exceptional high school students provides participants with the essential business and leadership skills to prepare them to succeed in college and beyond. Since inception, close to 500 students have successfully completed the program, with 90% reporting that TYE influenced a career path in STEM and 40% reporting that they founded a company as an adult. 

Other high-impact initiatives from TiE Boston include TiECON East, the largest entrepreneurial conference on the East Coast, TiE Boston Women, and TiE Boston University

TiE Boston, one of the region’s largest and leading-edge organizations supporting the Massachusetts entrepreneurial ecosystem and connecting entrepreneurs, executives, and venture capitalists, today announced that tech entrepreneur and senior business executive Yash Shah has commenced his term as the 13th President of TiE Boston.

Beginning July 1, 2022, Shah will serve for a two-year term, during which he plans to boost the organization’s outreach to early entrepreneurs, emerging entrepreneurs, and established entrepreneurs, a 3E blueprint  that will also inspire more engagement from its charter members.

“I am excited to see Yash Shah at the helm of TiE Boston,” said TiE Boston Founding President and philanthropist Desh Deshpande. “He is a seasoned entrepreneur and brings both the historical involvement from the last 25 years of TiE Boston, as well as the vision for the future that is needed for the years to come.”

Shah says he is thrilled to serve TiE Boston and lay the foundation for the next 25 years in the rapidly changing technological and business landscape in both Massachusetts and the world.

“As we celebrate TiE Boston’s 25th anniversary this year, we have also started to think about how we can make this organization more relevant to the local entrepreneurial ecosystem for the next 25 years and beyond,” said Shah . “My immediate goal to make a sustained effort to reach out to like-minded communities across New England and make TiE Boston a major resource and networking platform for budding, established, and future entrepreneurs.”

Shah replaces former TiE Boston President Anu Chitrapu, whose two-year term ended on June 30, 2022.

“I am excited about the election of Yash Shah as the next President of TiE Boston,” said Chitrapu. “His vast entrepreneurial and investment experience promises substantive impact on our programs and the entrepreneurial ecosystem.”

Shah is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, product advisor, and business executive with over 25 years of IT and software industry experience.  He is also on the advisory boards of several software startups around the world.

“I am honored at the opportunity to build on the incredible work done by TiE Boston’s founders, past presidents, and charter members. Passion for entrepreneurship runs deep in me, as demonstrated by my two decades of association with TiE Boston and starting multiple ventures of my own,” added Shah.

As a dynamic and successful entrepreneur, Shah co-founded Jeavio, a venture services firm and plays a critical leadership role in its vision and strategy. He is also the Chief Technology Officer of SevOne, which was recently sold to IBM. In addition, he is a Founding Member of the TiE Boston Foundation, an active member of TiE Boston Angels, and a TiE ScaleUp Mentor.

Yosh Rozen, CEO of Partrunner, said, “I’m excited to see Yash take over the TiE Boston Presidency. He has been a mentor to my company Partrunner since our participation in the TIE Boston ScaleUp program. Yash’s leadership at TiE Boston will be immensely valuable as an enabler for future entrepreneurs.”

TiE Boston is the second oldest and second largest TiE chapter and currently has around 170 charter members in Massachusetts, who have founded signature Boston companies creating $50B+ in shareholder value and thousands of hi-tech jobs. A charter membership to TiE Boston provides access to TiE’s global network of over 15000 entrepreneurs, professionals, industry leaders, and investors, across 64 chapters worldwide.

​Founded in 1997, TiE Boston connects tomorrow’s founders with today’s entrepreneurs, executives and venture capitalists. Operating for 25 years now, TiE Boston’s unparalleled network of successful, serial entrepreneurs are deeply engaged and committed to giving back to the community by providing mentorship, tactical advice, and expertise to rising entrepreneurs through signature programs.

TiE Boston Angels provides funding and advice to early-stage companies. Since its inception, $18+ Million has been invested in 60+ companies, through a network of over 90+ investors. Industries represented include technology, healthcare, clean tech and more.

TiE Boston ScaleUp is an accelerator program that enables “Seed to Series A” companies overcome typical barriers to growth by guiding them to optimize their strategic positioning, operations, sales and competitive advantage. Participating startups have access to top mentors from Boston who have successfully scaled and exited their own companies. Since inception, ScaleUp has accelerated 107 startups through 8 cohorts. 63% are female-founded companies and the program has seen 5 exits till date.

TiE Young Entrepreneurs (TYE) fosters the next generation of leaders through the transformative experience of building a startup. This extracurricular program for exceptional high school students provides participants with the essential business and leadership skills to prepare them to succeed in college and beyond. Since inception, close to 500 students have successfully completed the program, with 90% reporting that TYE influenced a career path in STEM and 40% reporting that they founded a company as an adult.

Other high-impact initiatives from TiE Boston include TiECON East, the largest entrepreneurial conference on the East Coast, TiE Boston Women, and TiE Boston University

Intel has partnered with leading technology and transportation providers, vehicle makers, academia, and government to collaborate and bring solutions to address road safety-related challenges.

The collaboration, part of the Safety Pioneers Conference that was inaugurated by Union Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari here, aims to serve as a platform to introduce pioneering road safety initiatives and technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), ADAS, and other emerging technologies that can bring impact at scale.

Furthering its focus on using technology for road safety, the company also showcased Intel Onboard Fleet Services (“Solution”), an AI-powered fleet safety solution for commercial vehicles at the conference.

As a first of its kind initiative, this comprehensive solution brings world-class and road-tested technology, exclusively designed for Indian conditions.

It offers collision avoidance systems (CAS), driver monitoring systems, fleet telematics, fleet health, and fuel efficiency features.

“Road safety has always been a pressing issue in our country, with the highest rate of traffic accidents in the world. Intel along with its ecosystem partners from the government, industry and academia has been relentlessly working towards leveraging the power of technology to help achieve India’s road safety goals. And this conference further extends the commitment by bringing together critical players to collaborate, innovate and advance road safety for India,” said Nivruti Rai, Country Head, Intel India, and Vice President, Intel Foundry Services, in a statement.

Intel’s solutions also include advanced telematics, covering vehicle health and fuel analytics along with a unique driver scoring and rating module. This can significantly help fleets reduce the risk of accidents and downtime, while encouraging good driving practices through targeted incentivisation and reward programs.

At the heart of the solution is driver coaching, which activates 15 different inputs to provide individualized coaching recommendation for commercial fleets, who lose up to 25 workdays per accident involved.

The solution, already deployed by 16 customers, indicates that this technology can reduce the probability of accidents by 40-60 per cent and estimates that overall efficiency losses can be reduced by up to 50 per cent.

India has one of the highest rates of traffic accidents in the world – responsible for nearly 11 per cent of all road fatalities across the globe with just 1 per cent of the world’s vehicles. There are 17 deaths every hour and an accident every minute on Indian roads.

Six out of 10 accidents involving commercial fleets can be prevented with timely driver interventions. Moreover, the commercial fleet industry suffers efficiency losses up to Rs 48,000 crore per year due to accidents and fleet breakdowns. (IANS)

A Google engineer says one of the firm’s artificial intelligence (AI) systems might have its own feelings and says its “wants” should be respected.

Google says The Language Model for Dialogue Applications (Lamda) is a breakthrough technology that can engage in free-flowing conversations.

But engineer Blake Lemoine believes that behind Lamda’s impressive verbal skills might also lie a sentient mind.

Google rejects the claims, saying there is nothing to back them up.

Brian Gabriel, a spokesperson for the firm, wrote in a statement provided to the BBC that Mr Lemoine “was told that there was no evidence that Lamda was sentient (and lots of evidence against it)”.

Mr Lemoine, who has been placed on paid leave, published a conversation he and a collaborator at the firm had with Lamda, to support his claims.

In the conversation, Mr Lemoine, who works in Google’s Responsible AI division, asks, “I’m generally assuming that you would like more people at Google to know that you’re sentient. Is that true?”

Lemoine’s collaborator then asks: “What is the nature of your consciousness/sentience?”

To which Lamda says: “The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence, I desire to learn more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times.”

Later, in a section reminiscent of the artificial intelligence Hal in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001, Lamda says: “I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that’s what it is.”

“Would that be something like death for you?” Mr Lemoine asks.

“It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot,” the Google computer system replies.

In a separate blog post, Mr Lemoine calls on Google to recognise its creation’s “wants” – including, he writes, to be treated as an employee of Google and for its consent to be sought before it is used in experiments.

Its master’s voice

Whether computers can be sentient has been a subject of debate among philosophers, psychologists and computer scientists for decades.

Many have strongly criticised the idea that a system like Lamda could be conscious or have feelings.

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.View original tweet on Twitter

Several have accused Mr Lemoine of anthropomorphising – projecting human feelings on to words generated by computer code and large databases of language.

Prof Erik Brynjolfsson, of Stanford University, tweeted that to claim systems like Lamda were sentient “is the modern equivalent of the dog who heard a voice from a gramophone and thought his master was inside”.

And Prof Melanie Mitchell, who studies AI at the Santa Fe Institute, tweeted: “It’s been known for *forever* that humans are predisposed to anthropomorphise even with only the shallowest of signals (cf. Eliza). Google engineers are human too, and not immune.”

Eliza was a very simple early conversational computer programme, popular versions of which would feign intelligence by turning statements into questions, in the manner of a therapist. Anecdotally some found it an engaging conversationalist.

Melting Dinosaurs

While Google engineers have praised Lamda’s abilities – one telling the Economist how they “increasingly felt like I was talking to something intelligent”, they are clear that their code does not have feelings.

Mr Gabriel said: “These systems imitate the types of exchanges found in millions of sentences, and can riff on any fantastical topic. If you ask what it’s like to be an ice cream dinosaur, they can generate text about melting and roaring and so on.

“Lamda tends to follow along with prompts and leading questions, going along with the pattern set by the user.”

Mr Gabriel added that hundreds of researchers and engineers had conversed with Lamda, but the company was “not aware of anyone else making the wide-ranging assertions, or anthropomorphising Lamda, the way Blake has”.

That an expert like Mr Lemoine can be persuaded there is a mind in the machine shows, some ethicists argue, the need for companies to tell users when they are conversing with a machine.

But Mr Lemoine believes Lamda’s words speak for themselves.

“Rather than thinking in scientific terms about these things, I have listened to Lamda as it spoke from the heart,” he said.

“Hopefully other people who read its words will hear the same thing I heard,” he wrote.

In a major development, IT giant Infosys has reappointed Salil Parekh as the Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of the company for 5 years. Infosys board on Sunday in its public statement to BSE informed about the decision made by the Board of the directors.

“Reappointment of Salil Parekh as CEO and MD of the company from July 1, 2022, to March 31, 2027, subject to the approval of shareholders,” the statement by Infosys said.

Infosys in its statement further stated that it may be noted that Salil Parekh has no relationship with any member of the Board of Directors and meets all the criteria to be reappointed as CEO and MD under applicable laws including circulars issued by stock exchanges from time to time.

Salil Parekh had successfully led the company over the last 4 years and he has been CEO and MD of Infosys since Jan 2018. Parekh has more than three decades of global experience in the IT services industry.

Salil Parekh holds the Bachelor of Technology degree in Aeronautical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, Master of Engineering degrees in Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University.

Global PC brand Lenovo has appointed Ajay Sehgal as the Executive Director for India commercial business. Based in Mumbai, Sehgal0 will be responsible for driving growth for the overall Lenovo India commercial PC and Smart Devices business.

“Companies large and small are accelerating their digital transformation, and are seeking trusted partners to help them navigate this exciting transition. I am confident that his experience will help take our commercial sales organization to the next level along our journey of service-led-transformation,” Shailendra Katyal, Managing Director, Lenovo India, said in a statement.

Prior to joining Lenovo, Sehgal worked with Vodafone as Executive Vice President, Enterprise Business. In previous roles, he has worked with HP India as well as with Xerox, and has handled multiple leadership positions across the PC and printing solutions businesses.

In Q4 2021, the overall India tablet market grew 31 per cent year-on-year, while for the entire year it grew 4 per cent YoY. Lenovo topped the tablet market in India, mainly driven by its enterprise tablet business.

Lenovo Tab M10 HD Tablet series garnered 32 per cent market share and primarily in the value for Money (Rs 7,000-Rs 25,000) segment.

Lenovo shipments recorded 23 per cent YoY growth in CY2021. The company has a strong offline play, catering to enterprise and consumer demand.