Tag Archives: machine learning

Weekly output: digital divides, copyright meets AI, COVID-19 tracing

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This was my first Easter spent in the D.C. area since… sometime in the mid 1990s? I would like to know a more exact date, but those years passed when I still used paper calendars that I lost in a prior millennium.

4/6/2020: Gaps in Internet access, Al Jazeera

The Arabic-language news channel had me on to talk about inconsistent Internet access–some the fault of dysfunctional economies, some the fault of governments deciding that cutting off the Internet will help them manage domestic dissent. The next day, an e-mail from the advocacy group AccessNow scolded Qatar and its neighboring Gulf states for blocking WhatsApp, FaceTime and other Internet-calling apps.

4/9/2020: Who Wrote That Hit Song? It Depends on How Human They Are., Glimmer

My second post for the Web-creativity shop Glitch’s equivalent of an inflight mag covered how copyright law should treat works created by artificial intelligence. I haven’t had a chance to get into the weeds about intellectual-property policy like this since I was last writing for the Disruptive Competition Project seven years ago; I’m glad there’s still a market for that sort of wonky work.

4/12/2020: Using apps to trace COVID-19, Al Jazeera

AJ had me on a second time this week to talk about the potential of smartphone apps to help trace patterns of novel-coronavirus transmission–without giving your location history up to Google or the government or even sharing your name with the people you might have occupied some personal space with after catching this virus.

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Weekly output: video surveillance, privacy vs. security, Facebook listening, universal basic income, intelligent assistants, convenience economy, UberAir, privacy fears

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Once again, I’m at an airport. I got back from Web Summit on Friday, and now I’m headed to San Francisco for the Internet Association’s Virtuous Circle conference. This trip, however, will be a lot shorter than the last one: I fly back Wednesday.

11/6/2017: ‘Smart’ surveillance cameras should set off privacy alarms, Yahoo Finance

The advances in machine vision I saw demonstrated at the Nvidia GPU Tech Conference in D.C. last week both impressed and alarmed me–especially when I heard some of the responses of executives at companies bringing these artificial-intelligence technologies to the market.

11/7/2017: Debate: We should be prepared to give up our privacy for security, Web Summit

My first Web Summit panel was a debate between Threatscape managing director Dermot Williams and Federal Trade Commission commissioner Terrell McSweeny. I expected a one-sided audience vote at the end in favor of privacy, but Williams changed a few minds. There should be video of this somewhere, but I’ve yet to find it on Web Summit’s Facebook page.

11/8/2017: Why so many people still think Facebook is listening to them, Yahoo Finance

I’d had this post in the works for a while, and then CNN’s Laurie Segall asked Facebook’s Messenger head Stan Chudnovsky in a Summit panel about the persistent rumor that Facebook’s apps listen surreptitiously to your conversations. Hello, news peg.

11/8/2017: Double focus: IPO’s & the future of games, Web Summit

My contribution to Web Summit’s Wednesday programming was this interview of Rovio CEO Kati Levoranta. As you can probably guess from watching the video below, I exhausted my questions early on and had to improv a bunch of it.

11/9/2017: Why would you oppose Universal Basic Income?, Web Summit

This panel, held at one of the small stages in Web Summit’s speakers lounge, featured Basic Income Earth Network co-president Guy Standing, Kela change management director Marjukka Turunen, GiveDirectly CEO Michael Faye, and Portuguese foreign minister Augusto Santos Silva. Not having taken part in any extended debate on this topic before, I learned a few things from this conversation.

11/9/2017: The next evolution of intelligent assistants, Web Summit

I quizzed Sherpa founder Xabi Uribe-Etxebarria about what he thinks the likes of Amazon, Apple and Google miss in the AI-personal-assistant market and how he hopes to carve out a niche with his own app.

11/9/2017: Demand more: Driving the convenience economy, Web Summit

The last of Thursday’s three panels had me interviewing Trivago co-founder and CEO Rolf Schromgens and Casper co-founder Luke Sherwin about how each is trying to challenge long-established competitors. This panel featured an unexpected technical difficulty: The acoustics made it hard for Schromgens, seated farther away from me on the stage, to hear me.

11/9/2017: Uber’s grand plan for flying cars faces a major obstacle, Yahoo Finance

One of first thoughts about “UberAir” was something along the lines of “you’re really going to get the FAA to open up the national air system to flocks of new electric-powered air taxis?” A conversation over e-mail with aviation-safety expert Bob Mann led me to believe Uber is being predictably optimistic about the odds of it bending government regulators to its will.

11/12/2017: Web companies should make it easier to make your data portable: FTC’s McSweeny. USA Today

This column about the privacy discussions that carried on all week long in Lisbon benefited from a little luck: My debate partner from day one was on both of my flights back from Lisbon and even sat a row behind me on the EWR-DCA hop, so we had a quick chat after arriving at National Airport before she headed to the parking garage and I got on Metro.

Updated 11/27/2017 to add an embed of video of my first Web Summit panel.

Weekly output: 5G, broadcast TV on online video, wireless broadband, machine-learning platforms

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Having our kid come down with strep throat put a serious dent in my productivity on this week. (She’s fine now.) The next five days, meanwhile, have a much more crowded schedule that includes an overnight trip to Cleveland. You’ll find out why Tuesday.

9/18/2017: 5 things to know about what’s next for wireless internet, Yahoo Finance

Too-soon hype about 5G wireless is already getting customers confused–as I realized anew when a reader asked how it couldn’t be coming until 2020 if she already had a 5G router. (Answer: It was a 5 GHz router.)

9/18/2017: Broadcasters aren’t going OTT ASAP, FierceBroadcasting

The latest in a steady series of features I’ve written for Fierce’s monthly (registration required) bundles, this one looks at the tangled availability of local channels on “over the top” online-video services. I missed it when it first came out because, I guess, I didn’t see the download link in Fierce’s daily newsletter at the time.

9/20/2017: Why you might trade your wired internet connection for your phone, Yahoo Finance

This headline overstates the story a little. My answer to the question–newly raised by an FCC proceeding–of whether we should count the wireless carriers’ mobile broadband as competition for wired cable, fiber and DSL is that a mobile-only strategy doesn’t work as long as you still need to use a desktop or laptop computer.

9/22/2017: Machine-learning cloud platforms get to work, Ars Technica

This piece focuses on a much wonkier subject than my usual consumer-tech coverage, but I carved some time out of my schedule to write it anyway. On one hand, it allowed me to get into the weeds on the workings of some technologies that I do write about all the time. On the other hand, the story was for a site at which I hadn’t written in way too long (my last Ars byline happened over four years ago) and involved a great per-word rate.

That rate, in turn, was a product of this post being part of a set of stories sponsored by Siemens. I didn’t know the sponsor going in and, as I wrote in a comment below the piece, my editor neither told me which companies to feature nor instructed me on any conclusions the article should reach.

Updated 10/3/2017 to add a link to the broadcasters story.