Amazon has always been a fan of automation. And under the same light, it had been working on a system since 2014 that would be able to review applications and short-list the most suitable candidates. However, in response to a major gender bias trait in its recruiting system, Amazon went on to dump the idea this October!
The way it worked was by assigning a certain number of stars to the candidate based on the quality of his/her application, ranging from 1 to 5 stars. But here was the problem, the recruitment system learnt to make these decisions after analyzing the data of all the resumes submitted to the company, over a period of 10 years. And since most of them came from male-candidates, the system self-taught itself to give priority to male candidates.
Before scrapping the system completely, Amazon tried to edit out the programmes in an attempt to make them gender neutral. However, they still thought that there was a high possibility of the program self-teaching itself again in a biased manner!
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Amazon is one of the first companies to invest in the idea of implementing Cashier-Less grocery stores. Starting at Seattle in January 2018, it now has its stores at Chicago and San Francisco as well. Amazon had started with architecturally small stores so that it will be easier for the cameras to scan and add the products being purchased to the checkout cart of the customer.
However, recently it has been contemplating on whether or not its time for them to scale up the stores. It predicts to open as many as 3000 stores by the year 2021 but are all of them gonna be architecturally small? If Amazon company has to disrupt the already existing supermarket chains, it has to go from a small corner store to a large supermarket chain.
Following Amazon, other large supermarket chains like Walmart also now want to invest in their first cashier-less store. In fact, in October 2018, Walmart announced that it was opening an experimental outlet under the name of Sam’s Club in Texas, in which customers would use their phone to scan items, rather than relying on the store’s systems to track their purchases. If Amazon company has to disrupt the already existing supermarket chains, it has to go from a small corner store to a large supermarket chain.
Implementing cashier-less stores are definitely time-saving for the general public and it will be interesting to witness the future of these stores!
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In an attempt to cut down the pollution levels, the Chinese Government has been stressing on adopting energy efficient modes of transportation. One of the strategies was to convince the public to invest in electric cars, a move that has been showing positive results. In recent times, the government has come to certain terms with more than 200 automakers (including foreign companies) under which the auto company agreed to share location data with them, in addition to other details like the make and model of the vehicle.
This, as per the Chinese Government, will be a crucial step towards “improving public safety” and “facilitate industrial development and infrastructure planning.” In a positive response to this step taken by the government, big auto companies are now showing interest in building electric cars in China. In fact, recently Ford signed on a $765 million deal towards the same.
In a comment made by the officials at Daimler, the parent company of Mercedes-Benz, the customers are actively informed of the data being shared and how it can be leveraged in the future. Taken the point that the data being shared is conveyed to the user and is completely anonymous, but is it safe from all sorts of cyber attacks at all times? We are all aware of the fact that data once on the internet, can never be taken down. Sure this step is something that other countries should adopt as well, but is the cost being paid too high? Can it not lead to invasion of privacy and hence derail the government from the whole idea of leveraging the information for the greater good of the citizens, if a malicious event takes place?
It is a no-brainer that new technological advancements are being implemented day by day. Hence, the question of whether we completely know our current devices or not still reigns. Focusing on the capabilities of voice-activated, internet-enabled speakers, they are still not completely smooth in some domains. News briefing is one such domain.
A new report from the Reuters Institute suggests that the institute’s survey finds that users simply aren’t enjoying the news briefings, and they’re taking a backseat to more concrete functions like information searches and immediate tasks. Moreover, the fact that there are so many features which are aimed at solving this particular problem being used by tech giants like Google has still not amounted to much. For example, Alexa has a bunch of different Flash Briefings designed to give you a quick rundown of everything that’s happened. Google Home has a whole set of custom news commands which allows users to skim through different stories or find stories on particular topics. A lot of time and energy from tech and media companies alike went into making this work, but for whatever reason, it just never came together.
The Reuters report gives us a few hints about why that is. Sometimes the reports would be outdated or mangled through awkward text-to-speech programs. Other reports were too long which caused mental fatigue for some users. Among other users, the audio-only interface made it hard to keep track of whom they were listening to.
But the biggest problem is that we simply don’t know what we want. Though the fact that smart speakers aren’t radios stands true, there are some features which are handled with great efficiency. For example, these smart assistants are great at handling specific questions like “Alexa, what’s the capital of US?” — but walking through the most important events of the day is a different thing. It may be that smart speakers are just not ready for it!
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Amazon, a corporation that first started as an online bookselling company, has now become one of the most powerful and valuable companies in the world. Despite having its foot in multiple industries like digital publishing, AI products, consumer services, media& entertainment, it has managed to meet the expectations of its customers in almost all the fields. And, all this in addition to earning huge amounts of profit year after year.
According to a study The Verge conducted in partnership with consulting firm Reticle Research last year, Amazon is the most-liked and trusted technology brand by a wide margin. One of the major factors that substantiates this outcome is the strong sense of trust between the company and its customers. To fully comprehend just how big the company has grown over the last 25 years, let’s analyze its progress some of the major sectors, product category, and the market created by it.
PRINT BOOKS
Amazon was founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos. A former Wall Street worker with electrical engineering and computer science degrees, Bezos decided with online bookselling to be his first move and the entry of his company into the market. He briefly considered naming his company Relentless.com, which still redirects to Amazon.com. And, today the company controls almost half of all print book sales in the US.
EBOOKS, E-READERS, AND DIGITAL PUBLISHING
Early investments in ebooks and e-readers gradually turned it into a digital publishing and book-selling powerhouse. Amazon began work on its first Kindle e-reader starting in 2004 and the first device was released in November of 2007 and sold for $399. Since then, it has released various models of its e-reader, Kindle. Amazon now oversees tens of millions of self-published works on its platform and nearly two dozen imprints. In 2017, Amazon had more than 83 percent of all US ebook sales.
AMAZON PRIME, PRIME VIDEO, AND AMAZON MUSIC
Amazon first entered the media industry as a major online retailer in the late ‘90s. The company began by selling CDs and DVDs in a market of online shoppers. It was in 2005, after the launch of Amazon Prime, that the company began laying the groundwork for a future digital media ecosystem. Prime started as a two-day shipping membership for devoted Amazon shoppers. Ever since Prime has grown into a subscription service with more than 100 million paid users worldwide. Perhaps the most prominent Prime perk, however, is access to Amazon Prime Video and Amazon Music.
AI IN SMART SPEAKERS: AMAZON ECHO
Amazon is known today as the creator of Alexa, one of the most pervasive digital voice assistants on the market today. The first Echo came out in late 2014 as a Prime member exclusive, but in the four short years since, Amazon has developed dozens of different smart home products that revolve around the speaker and voice assistant format. Today, thousands of products integrate with the company’s Alexa platform to make use of its voice search and query capabilities. All thanks to the futuristic vision of not limiting the virtual voice assistant facilities to smartphones but also embedding them into our homes.
Groceries, Household Supplies, Amazon Basics, Amazon Go, Warehouse Robotics and Drone Delivery are some of the other major sectors in which Amazon is reigning top the others. The empire of CEO Jeff Bezos has grown so vast that critics are all now wondering whether the company has become an unstoppable force.
As it stands today, Amazon is also the employer of more than half a million people, more so than any other technology company in the country and second only to Walmart in the US. It has already changed how we shop and hence how we live our lives. One can only anticipate its next steps in the field of digital healthcare!
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The Sun can also act as an air-conditioner! How cool is that? One of the major projects that is being worked upon and even being implemented in many parts of the world, is the development of passive daytime radiative cooling (PDRC) polymer paints. These are specially designed paint materials which when hit by energy sources like lasers, can be cooled up by 150°C. The mechanism behind this technology is that the molecules present inside the paint can absorb photons from external light sources but at the same time they can also emit out photons of much higher energy. Thereby drawing heat from the surface they are coated on and hence decreasing its temperature.
However, the downside of these paints is that they can be made to work like that only if photons having a certain amount of energy are incident on them. And, mounting energy sources like lasers on roofs are not always feasible. The Sun being a natural source of energy can prove to be a much more feasible alternative. However, the problem is that the Sun’s spectrum is much broader and hence can not always emit the required photons. The SolCold team, a leading company, hence came up with a paint made up of two layers: an outer layer that filters out some of the sun’s rays and an inner one that does the heat-to-light conversion, cooling itself below the ambient temperature.
Common cooling methods like air conditioning can be expensive and require a substantial amount of energy, ready access to electricity and coolants that can deplete the ozone or have a strong greenhouse effect. This is why adopting these paint method can be a huge relief when it comes to electricity bills. In fact, according to co-founder Yaron Shenhav, “It’s like putting a layer of ice on your rooftop which is thicker when there is more sun.”
Though researchers are constantly working on new PDRC designs, it goes without saying that adopting and implementing this paint technology is expensive. Also, their widespread use is limited due to limited applicability, susceptibility to degradation and being too costly or difficult to manufacture at larger scales.
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It’s the 21st century and the war of developing more and more powerful system-on-chip (SoC) is on the rise. Ranging from the latest A12 bionic chip by Apple to the Kirin 980 by Huawei and Snapdragon 845 by Qualcomm, there is a noticeable shift towards the integration of artificial intelligence in these processors. Let us look at the latest Kirin 980 and the Snapdragon 845 SoCs for a clearer insight!
PROCESSING SPEED
The Kirin 980, an upgrade to the previous Kirin 970, is a chipset for Android platforms which integrates 6.9 billion transistors in an area of less than 1 square centimeter which guarantees a better performance. It boasts the world’s first commercial use Mali-G76 GPU which guarantees to improve the overall performance by 46%. The SoC is also the first to feature a dual Neural Processing Units (NPUs) which gives it even more of the AI-driven performance.
The Snapdragon 845 on the other hand provides an immersive experience with the Qualcomm® Adreno™ 630 Visual Processing Subsystem and significantly improved graphics rendering and video processing compared to the previous generation Snapdragon 835. It supports a much more sophisticated on-device AI processing, delivering richer camera, voice, XR and gaming experiences.
CAMERA STABILITY
Kirin 980 boasts the fourth-generation image signal processor (ISP) which utilizes a multi-pass noise reduction to capture quality images and also preserves important details. This ISP also has a dedicated video pipeline to effectively improve video clarity and reduce shooting delays by 33%.
The Qualcomm Spectra™ 280 ISP, on the other hand, is designed to deliver a premium camera and XR experience, with high-performance capture up to 16 MP at 60 images per second. It boasts the cinema-like quality video, all thanks to ultra HD premium capture with richer color.
In conclusion, the improvement in the arena of performance and camera stability have witnessed major upgrades in recent times. Integration of AI and leveraging its benefits is the need of the hour and that is being well realized by these big companies!
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The current healthcare system is in need of a major upgrade. As of 2016, an amount close to $9,024 per capita is being spent by an average American citizen towards basic healthcare amenities. In the same respect, Switzerland stands second with individuals paying an average amount of $6,787 per capita. And, this is pretty much the case for any country. But only if it was that the outcomes were proportional to the investment, the scenario would have stood justified. In fact, according to a Los Angeles Timesarticle, the U.S. life expectancy is now shorter than 30 other countries’ and more people died in the U.S. from preventable diseases or complications than in 12 other high-income countries. This is where big tech companies like Amazon and Google step in.
AMAZON CLINIC: Its decision to partner with companies like Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase to create a new company to provide lower-cost, higher-quality healthcare for its employees can potentially serve as a model for future healthcare advancements, if successful. Moreover, the company aims at leveraging Alexa’s growing AI capabilities to address some of the most challenging healthcare problems. It includes helping patients manage their heart rate and diabetes. The company is also working towards minimalizing the interface to help the elderly take advantage of the same.
DR. GOOGLE: Google has created, funded and partnered on a variety of health-related projects with different degrees of success. One popular project was Google Glass. As part of this effort, in 2009 it launched Google Ventures, the venture capital arm of Alphabet, Inc. The fund currently has about $2.4 billion to spend and has made investments in at least 300 companies, frequently related to the areas of genomics, biotechnology and cell therapy.
The aim is clear and simple! To make the world’s health data useful so that people enjoy healthier lives. From sensors to health platforms to precision medicine, the companies are seeking to transform the way healthcare is delivered. However, the important question is that whether we’ll ever be able to accept these tech giants in the field of healthcare as well as we’ve in terms of technology and services.
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The way it worked was by assigning a certain number of stars to the candidate based on the quality of his/her application, ranging from 1 to 5 stars. But here was the problem, the recruitment system learnt to make these decisions after analyzing the data of all the resumes submitted to the company, over a period of 10 years. And since most of them came from male-candidates, the system self-taught itself to give priority to male candidates.
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