Headlines

Will AI Level the Recommendation Engine Market for Small Businesses?

Freedomist Curator April 13, 2022

Rather than paying millions to conduct study groups and acquire vast reams of inside market data, small businesses of the near future might be able to score high with their customers by using AI to predict the potential future actions of customers. In other words, AI could help you sell products to people on your site for pennies to the dollar compared to the ways large corporations currently find out what next to sell and how to sell it.

AI Democratizes the Recommendation Engine

From www.pymnts.com
2022-04-12 08:02:23

Excerpt:

….35% of Amazon’s sales result from product recommendations, but few (if any) competing eCommerce players have recommendation technology to rival them.

Speaking with PYMNTS’ Karen Webster, Edholm explained that the “related products” widgets served up by Amazon “use some form of artificial intelligence, and AI today needs a lot of data to function properly. Most eCommerce merchants don’t have as much data as Amazon,” he said.

“The ‘related product’ widgets you see on Amazon we democratize, [providing the ability for] great recommendations for all eCommerce stores.”

Depict.ai’s disruptive innovation is creating a recommendation engine with which any eCommerce site can integrate “to provide recommendations without as much data, and through that to create really high-quality recommendations and provide much better value.”

Absent a pond of data on a given shopper or group persona, recommendations are using AI to gain an understanding of consumers as they shop based on real-time observations.

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Synthetic Bacteria Could Protect Your Gut from All Bad Bacteria

Parker Davis April 13, 2022

Researchers at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) have been working on developing lab-designed and created bacteria that could conquer the bad bacteria that is immune to antibiotic therapies. The discovery could pave the way for alternative therapies to antibiotics, allowing humans to rely significantly less on antibiotics than they do now. This would also lead to much slower antibiotic resistance development by these same offending bacteria.

Engineering armour for good gut bacteria against all-conquering antibiotics

From cosmosmagazine.com

Excerpt:

Researchers of synthetic biology based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US have devised a system to protect the gut microbiome from the effects of antibiotics.

The new study, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, reports on the successful use in mice of a “live biotherapeutic” – a genetically engineered bacterium that produces an enzyme which breaks down antibiotics in the gut.

“This work shows that synthetic biology can be harnessed to create a new class of engineered therapeutics for reducing the adverse effects of antibiotics,” says MIT professor James Collins, the paper’s senior author.

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Synthetic Data is Future of Machine Learning

Ivo Fysic April 13, 2022

Rather than requiring real-world direct, voluminous data sets for Machines to learn the tasks they are designed to perform, a new type of data set promises to lower the cost and production time of machine learning, in addition to providing privacy protections, by creating ‘seed data,’ core principles, that the machines can extrapolate more detailed instruction from.

When It Comes to AI, Can We Ditch the Datasets? Using Synthetic Data for Training Machine-Learning Models
From scitechdaily.com
2022-04-12 11:23:02
Adam Zewe, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Excerpt:

A machine-learning model for image classification that’s trained using synthetic data can rival one trained on the real thing, a study shows.

Huge amounts of data are needed to train machine-learning models to perform image classification tasks, such as identifying damage in satellite photos following a natural disaster. However, these data are not always easy to come by. Datasets may cost millions of dollars to generate, if usable data exist in the first place, and even the best datasets often contain biases that negatively impact a model’s performance.

To circumvent some of the problems presented by datasets, MIT researchers developed a method for training a machine learning model that, rather than using a dataset, uses a special type of machine-learning model to generate extremely realistic synthetic data that can train another model for downstream vision tasks.

Their results show that a contrastive representation learning model trained using only these synthetic data is able to learn visual representations that rival or even outperform those learned from real data.

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French Election sees Wokeness Become Central Issue in Campaign

Parker Davis April 13, 2022

‘Woke culture’ has made its way into the French presidential election – WUNC

From www.wunc.org
2022-04-12 09:14:00

Excerpt:

French President Emmanuel Macron is set to face far-right leader Marine Le Pen in a runoff later this month. That’s the result of a vote over the weekend. The presidential campaign has been dominated in part by a battle against woke culture that’s seen as an import from the United States. Candidates of all stripes have shared a rare consensus in denouncing le wokism. And I asked French journalist, commentator and filmmaker Rokhaya Diallo what that says about race, identity and extremism in France.

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Europe Still Using Rubles to Pay for Russian Gas

Ivo Fysic April 13, 2022

Europe to Pay for Russian Gas in Rubles—Has Anything Really Changed? | Morgan Lewis

From www.jdsupra.com
2022-04-12 22:55:04

Excerpt:

Following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s pronouncement that buyers from “unfriendly states” pay for Russian gas in rubles, it has been largely unclear, until recently, what this demand would imply in practice.

Decree No. 172, “On Special Procedure for Discharge of Obligations of Foreign Buyers to Russian Suppliers of Natural Gas” (Decree), effective as of March 31, 2022, provides that from April 1, 2022, payments for Russian gas shall be made in rubles and establishes a new procedure for gas supply payments. The March 31 Decree applies to “payment for supplies of natural gas in a gaseous state” and does not seem to apply to payment for liquefied natural gas (LNG) deliveries.

Arguably, the new payment procedure contemplated by the Decree, in principle, does not change key payment terms for existing foreign buyers of Russian gas. They are allowed to continue to pay in the currency established by their gas supply contracts with Russian suppliers, while the principal novelty is that all payments are now required to be made through special accounts that foreign buyers must open with Gazprombank in Russia, which then makes the conversion into rubles. However, as done on a unilateral basis (i.e., outside of contractual arrangements), Russia’s enforcement of the new payment requirements, arguably, can trigger claims for breach of contract.

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Google to Use Lawsuits to Target Scammers Using Their Tools

Ivo Fysic April 13, 2022

Google files lawsuit against “puppy scammer” for using its services to sell non-existent dogs

From www.techspot.com
2022-04-12 12:33:00

Excerpt:

According to a new blog post published by Google’s safety & security team, aptly titled “Hounding scammers with litigation,” the company seeks to address instances of puppy fraud using the legal system. According to Google, there’s been an uptick in online scams over the past few years (likely thanks to the ongoing pandemic), some of which cannot be tackled just by raising awareness.

In more extreme cases, Google says lawsuits are an “effective tool” for establishing legal precedent and raising the stakes for anyone caught scamming innocent victims.

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Obama to Return as President Thanks to 22nd Amendment Loophole?

Ivo Fysic April 13, 2022

The Brew: Obama Eye-Balling a Constitutional Loophole to Take Over Biden’s Last Two Years?

From stream.org
2022-04-12 11:01:45

Excerpt:

Yes, it’s Holy Week. But it’s also 202 days to Halloween. Close enough to conjour up a fright, courtesy of Andrea Widburg over at American Thinker. (Here’s the link. Children may want to cover their eyes.)

Widburg saw all that fawning over Barack Obama last week. How he brushed aside Joe Biden like a piece of lint on his fancy suit. How he called Biden “Vice President” … lamely passing it off as a joke.

Former President @BarackObama: “Thank you. Vice President Biden. Vice President – that was a joke.” pic.twitter.com/dm0sBnM7P2

— CSPAN (@cspan) April 5, 2022

Widburg posed “an admittedly wild theory about how Obama may intend to fix things: Obama’s aiming to get back into the Oval Office.” Crazy?

Not so crazy. The 22nd Amendment says a person cannot be “elected more than twice.” And cannot serve more than two years of another’s term. So in…

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French Election sees Wokeness Become Central Issue in Campaign

Parker Davis April 13, 2022

‘Woke culture’ has made its way into the French presidential election – WUNC

From www.wunc.org
2022-04-12 09:14:00

Excerpt:

French President Emmanuel Macron is set to face far-right leader Marine Le Pen in a runoff later this month. That’s the result of a vote over the weekend. The presidential campaign has been dominated in part by a battle against woke culture that’s seen as an import from the United States. Candidates of all stripes have shared a rare consensus in denouncing le wokism. And I asked French journalist, commentator and filmmaker Rokhaya Diallo what that says about race, identity and extremism in France.

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Airlines Push to End Mask Mandates

Ivo Fysic April 13, 2022

US airlines seek end to Covid mask mandate despite passenger wariness

From www.ft.com
2022-04-12 04:00:55

Excerpt:

Airline executives and politicians are piling on pressure for the US to let Covid-19 mask rules expire on schedule next week, even as a majority of the public wants to keep them.

Forced mask-wearing has caused friction in aircraft cabins. Last year, 72 per cent of a record 5,981 reports of unruly passengers were mask-related, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, which proposed a total of $5mn in fines for such behaviour.

A diverse group of advocates wants to see the mask requirement disappear as it has within other indoor spaces. Next Monday the federal government’s order for travellers on public transport is set to lapse unless officials issue another extension.

Domestic airlines have led the call to end the mandate, with chief executives of seven carriers including American Airlines, United Airlines, and Delta Air Lines telling President Joe Biden in a letter last month that it was “no longer aligned with the realities of the current epidemiological environment.”

“It makes no sense that people are still required to wear masks on aeroplanes, yet are allowed to congregate in crowded restaurants, schools and at sporting events without masks,” especially when considering the quality of on-board air-filtration systems, the executives wrote.

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