FAM Technology Issue

Clarence Thomas Wants to Rethink Internet Speech. Be Afraid

While this week’s dominant Supreme Court drama was the kabuki questioning of nominee Amy Coney Barrett, something of immediate interest came from the actual Supremes. Appended to a denial of cert—that is, the court’s refusal to reconsider an appellate decision—was a 10- page comment from Associate Justice Clarence Thomas. The subject was a controversial provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act known as Section 230. It allows online platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Reddit, and 4Chan to post things from users without any vetting. Under the law, those companies can give voice to billions of people without taking legal responsibility for what those people say. It also gives the platforms the right to moderate content; they can get rid of not just illegal content but also stu that is nasty but legal, such as hate speech or intentional misinformation, without losing their immunity.

Though Thomas admitted that his comment had no bearing on the case under consideration, he used the opportunity to volunteer some thoughts on 230. Basically, he feels that lower-court judges have interpreted it too broadly, extending immunity beyond the intent of the lawmakers. He wants to change that. “We need not decide today the correct interpretation of 230,” he wrote. “But in an appropriate case, it behooves us to do so.” In other words, bring it on!

Justice Thomas seemingly poses some reasonable reservations. As Judd Legum writes in his newsletter Popular Information, Thomas rightfully points out that while the law protects platforms only when they operate “in good faith,” sometimes the courts have extended 230 to protect them when they continued to promote content that was harmful or even illegal. He cites a case where a judge used 230 to let the dating service Grindr o the hook despite its built-in aws that allowed ill-intentioned users to continually harass victims on the platform. Also bolstering Thomas’ views is the perception that platforms all too often rely on 230 immunity to inadequately police illegal behavior on their platforms. If they were given less slack to enforce the law once alerted to illegality, those platforms would undoubtedly be nimbler in removing such content.

But I suspect a dierent line of thinking inspired the Thomas comment. A Supreme Court justice’s public reservations about Section 230 do not come in a vacuum. For months now, politicians have been attacking 230. While both sides of the aisle have complaints (including from former Vice President Biden), the most virulent ones come from the right. So whether he intended it or not, Thomas’ words are a dog whistle to those who want to hobble social media’s ability to lter out lies that poison the culture, endanger our health, and generally make us hate each other.

Indeed, it didn’t take long for the justice’s comments to energize conservatives who despise Section 230. Only hours after the Thomas memo was posted, it found its way into the Amy Coney Barrett hearings. Senator Josh Hawley, who wants to strip Section 230 protections from platforms if they moderate misinformation in political speech, cited Thomas’ memo and asked Barrett her views about it. (She gave the same non-answer she had been repeating for days—it’s a hypothetical!) Clearly, Hawley sees Thomas’ words as supporting his views. “It’s quite signicant!” he said of the comment.

Then the president himself weighed in. He was unhappy that Twitter and Facebook were correctly withholding distribution of what was possibly a false accusation of Joe Biden’s son. Trump hates it that companies have the right to refuse distribution of destructive propaganda weeks before an election. He tweeted his remedy in upper case, with three bangers: REPEAL SECTION 230!!!

Finally, FCC chair Ajit Pai, again citing the Thomas memo, announced his own intention to reinterpret Section 230. Why him? Well, his general counsel told him it was OK if he took it upon himself to bypass Congress and the courts so that Section 230 will mean what Pai says it means. Pai gave us a hint of his thinking: “Social media companies have a First Amendment right to free speech,” he wrote. “But they do not have a First Amendment right to a special immunity denied to other media outlets, such as newspapers and broadcasters.”

Dude! Platforms might not have a First Amendment right to that “special immunity.” But Congress passed a law that specically gave them that immunity, because platforms are not like newspapers or broadcasters. If you don’t understand that, I shudder to think what your unilateral “rulemaking” will be.

Hawley, Pai, and Trump are not grappling with Thomas’ relatively nuanced arguments. But they are using his reservations to launch a broader attack on 230. They’re challenging the freedom of companies to interpret toxicity as they best see t—because they want to use the platforms to spread that toxicity.

Thomas’s subtly incendiary 10-page comment increases the chances that Section 230, and the right to speak freely on the internet, will soon be legislators, the FCC, or presidential edict. If this happens, the Supreme Court will almost certainly end up determining the outcome. Which is exactly what asking for. Feel better?

For as long as lmmaking has existed, there has been a need to build fantastic worlds in front of cameras. The earliest techniques borrowed from theatre: Painted curtains and wooden, two-dimensional backdrops. Then, we painted worlds onto glass, photographing them onto the lm itself to blend the real and the fake. At the same time, artists worked out how to project previously-shot lm onto a screen behind the actors. These days, we’ve ipped this story, dropping real actors into digital environments that only exist inside computers. But now we’re blending the very old and the very new: Digital backdrops in “virtual” studios could end the blight of green-screened cinema, and its myriad problems. That’s what’s being experimented on in a former newspaper press in Oxfordshire, UK, where the rst “all virtual” lm has just been shot.

Jason Kingsley OBE is the presenter of Modern History TV, a YouTube channel with short documentary clips explaining the history of the Middle Ages, which he loves.

But that is a side project to his day job, as co-founder and CEO of Rebellion Developments, the British studio behind Sniper Elite. Rebellion doesn’t just make games, however, and owns comics giant 2000AD, the name behind Judge Dredd and Rogue Trooper, as well as publishers Abaddon and Solaris. Now, the company is building its own studio to create TV series and movies based upon its vast library of IP.

Percival is a short lm, rst broadcast on Kingsley’s aforementioned YouTube channel, and marks a new chapter in Rebellion’s lmmaking ambitions. The ve-minute clip depicts a battle-scarred knight of the round table played by Kingsley, who is close to death in a forest. King Arthur is dying, the (Holy) grail is missing. The titular knight is left broken and bloodied when some unknown force gets involved. Suddenly, time speeds up, aiding his recovery, and transporting him to the eerie ruins of a church, where he receives a vision that inspires a new quest.

Rebellion says that it’s the world’s rst “all virtual” production, with all of the action playing out entirely in front of a halo of large at screen displays. These monitors are connected to PCs running Unreal Engine, where the virtual environments are produced. Essentially, the painted curtains and matte paintings of yesteryear have been replaced with LED TVs showing footage from a game engine.

You might have heard of the technique before. The rst high-prole instance of its use was Disney’s The Mandalorian, which shot the majority, but not all, of its scenes in these studios. In that instance, the action was lmed in a 270-degree horseshoe of LED displays 20 feet high.

Rebellion CEO Jason Kingsley OBE as 'Percival' Star Wars has long been a standard-bearer for titles that push the state of the art of lmmaking. The prequel movies, shot between 1997 and 2003, leaned heavily on shooting actors on green screens, with CGI backgrounds added in afterward. This process, of standing actors in front of blue or green curtains, is known as “Chroma-Key” or “Chroma-Keying.” And after Star Wars, Chroma-Key became ubiquitous for even modestly-budgeted lms with special eects. The mid-noughties saw a trend of lms almost exclusively using the technique, including Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Sin City and 300.

These days, green screen is everywhere: the battle of New York from Avengers Assemble, for instance, was mostly shot on a New Mexico green screen studio and then tinkered with for months by an army of CGI artists.

Virtual studios have the potential to make a big dierence to lm-making. Because the background and environments were already visible in the shot, there was no need to add them in afterward. It also gives actors a better handle on what they’re doing, since performing in an entirely green void can understandably hamper performances. It’s also a lot easier, and cheaper, to shoot than sending your crew across the globe to real-world jungles and deserts that even a lavishly-budgeted show like The Mandalorian could hardly aord.

He Sun is the head of Rebellion VFX. He has previously worked on The Lion King (2019), Malecent: Mistress of Evil and the aforementioned Mandalorian. He had originally planned to run a visual eects experiment with a rented LED wall, but: “Jason [Kingsley] said ‘let’s make a movie!” The studio would exist for just three days, but COVID-19 would mean that any production could only use a skeleton crew. With less than three weeks of preparation time, the shoot was run as a test to see if the virtual studio could deliver under some of the toughest conditions.

'Cathederal' virtual set for 'Percival' designed by Jack Eaves, Frederic Fitzpatrick, Elliot Staker. Eben Bolter BSC is the cinematographer behind Avenue 5, iBoy and The Feed, and was brought in to shoot and light Percival. Bolter explained that the lm was designed to show what a virtual studio could oer over Chroma-Key. The rst, but perhaps least obvious, benet was how virtual studios enabled better lighting compared to green or blue screen. “Jason wanted to wear his [own] suit of armor and I thought ‘great’,” said Bolter, “because straight away you’ve got this reective surface [...] blue and green screen would be a problem.” Any reected green or blue hues would be dicult to remove in post-production.

Another Chroma-Key drawback is that it dramatically reduces the options available to cinematographers about how they shoot lms. “Anamorphic lenses are old-fashioned, and in digital photography we love to use them because they give us that old-ness, to make it feel more tangible and grounded,” Bolter said. He cited Michael Mann’s Heat (1995), lled with oval bokeh, as an example of how these older lenses create “beautiful” images. VFX Crews, said Bolter, “hate anamorphic lenses because they have to articially emulate [oval bokeh] in post- production,” making eects-heavy shots look less real as a consequence. Percival is shot with a vintage anamorphic lens, with objects behind the subject that could fall away to blur and atmospheres like in-studio smoke -- all things that would be dicult, or expensive to do well, in post-production.

Shot from 'Percival' the world's rst all-virtual studio movie. Jason Kingsley OBE plays 'Percival.' Bolter added that if he wanted to shoot Percival on location, it would be a long process. “If I was in a moonlit forest, we’d [shoot] from 9pm to 7am, which is horrible, and a moonlit forest is interesting because it’s so fake,” he said.

“Woods at night are [pitch dark] like the Blair Witch Project. There’s no such thing as a ‘moonlit forest’. We have massive lights on cranes and we backlight it all,” Bolter said. He continued that if, on the day of the shoot, the crew needs the lights to be adjusted, it’s a long process to take down each crane and move it to change the setup.

In Percival, the knight is “pushed” through time with a faux-timelapse in which the days and nights y past. Since the studio has a screen covering the inside of the roof, the team could build a digital moon to move across the sky as it would in reality. But this didn’t “look and feel right” compared to the audience’s expectations of how cinematic moonlight works. In a matter of minutes, however, Bolter swapped the moon for a white, circular JPEG that rolled across the ceiling to create a more cinematic feel. Compared to the hours it would have taken in the real world, being able to make the change in mere minutes inside the Unreal engine was a revelation.

Traditional big-budget movies rely on pre-visualization; crudely-made clips that help creators get a better sense of their lm. So much of the VFX material won’t be nished for 18 months after shooting nishes, so these [clips] help them understand what the lm will look like. It also helps them plan the shoot, picking shot angles and lighting styles before set builders bust out the drills and hammers. With a virtual studio, “All of the VFX and set extension is done in-camera and on set,” said Sun. Rather than employ a legion of CGI artists, Percival’s environments were created in Unreal Engine by three artists in just two weeks. “Virtual production,” said Sun, “is a real-time technology, it’s rendered in real- time, and it’s interactive.”

Every knight of the round table needs a trusty steed... “We had this massive chain of emails and Dropboxes,” said Bolter, “with CGI renders of what [the artists] built, and we’d be able to say ‘okay, this is great, take that away, move that.’” The crew could even make last-minute changes to the set as he was traveling to the shoot, “then, suddenly, an hour later, it’s changed.” Compared to the setup of traditional lms, this was almost luxurious, especially in terms of the levels of control aorded to lmmakers.

It helps that, in the longer term, it should be far less expensive to shoot specic scenes than it would to travel to a location. Bolter suggested a hypothetical short scene featuring two people talking in a desert at sunset, which could take up to three weeks to shoot. “You’d have to y a crew to Morocco, go out into the desert, and you’d have about 15 minutes of lming per day.” By comparison, Bolter could y himself to Morocco, “shoot a [background] plate” which could then be played back on the virtual studio’s screens over and over again. Suddenly, that sequence takes a day, with all of the cost savings that brings.

It this part that excites the people who are bankrolling the production process, like Orlando Pedregosa. He’s Chief Production Ocer at Film.io, a company backing lm and TV projects, who said that LED screens can oer savings close to “99 percent of the construction and production design budget,” with background plate shots saving around “70 percent, thanks to a reduction in items like transport, insurance, hotels and cast/crew expenses.” In real terms, he said that’s a potential saving of up to €1.5 million ($1.7 million) on a single set-up for a movie. Given the eect the pandemic is having on cinema right now -- with major chains facing closure for the next few months as screenings become impractical -- cheaper is better.

Around the back of the virtual studio. Bolter believes that we’ve barely scratched the surface for what virtual studios can do. “If you wanted to build an oce block [for a movie], you can go crazy and have a thousand cubicles,” he said, “or an innitely ridiculous, Charlie Kaufman-esque environment and you just need to build one cubicle [as a real set] and block the edges of the physical set to hide the problems.” That’s one of the key downsides, too, since the virtual studio has a number of physical limitations to work around. “You’ve got the ceiling, you’ve got the oor, and those things don’t blend together [with the wall],” said Bolter. The freedom to shoot horizontal vistas is great, but you can’t pan up and down without risking people seeing the very obvious join.

“The ceiling is for lighting, really, unless you’re doing some sort of weird shot when you’re looking up someone’s nose,” said Bolter. It’s on lmmakers to work around these limits, which could be possible using virtual camera movements inside the computer. “The background itself can ‘conveyor’ around, to fake the sort of Michael Bay spinning steadicam shots,” said Bolter, so long as there are no props or scenery in the real studio, since “trees won’t spin.”

It’s worth saying that the technology is not at the point where you could dump every project in front of it and expect success. Bolter says that the current setup is “around 90 percent,” and looks “720p to the naked eye -- impressive, but only nearly good enough.” Percival isn’t aiming for photorealism, and leans into its stagey, ethereal quality, but you wouldn’t guess it was shot in front of a TV unless you already knew. And I have seen other, unpublished demos from Rebellion that looked a lot more realistic. A test sequence of a motorbike riding through (video) of central London is unbelievable. Footage of a person in a oaty dress standing on top of a hill (think: a perfume commercial) similarly looks like it was shot in the Welsh countryside. Give it a year or two, for the technology to mature even a little, and this could become a viable tool for any number of lms and TV shows.

It’s likely that Rebellion will want to use virtual studios as the best way to build its new multimedia empire. In 2018, it announced that it was working with Duncan Jones (Moon, Warcraft, Mute) on a Rogue Trooper movie. And it’s also got the long-in-the-works Judge Dredd: Mega City One project looming on the horizon. Making a TV series on that scale would surely cost a huge amount with traditional green screen techniques, but perhaps this technology will make projects like this nancially viable.

“Young, able-bodied workers, especially young men, untethered from car or house ownership, job or family are threats to political stability,” Xiaowei Wang writes.Credit...Ian Pearce When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an aliate commission.

BLOCKCHAIN CHICKEN FARM And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside By Xiaowei Wang

Raising free-range chickens isn’t easy, a Chinese farmer named Jiang tells Xiaowei Wang in a fascinating new book, “Blockchain Chicken Farm.” Why? “Chickens aren’t very smart,” he notes; if you leave lights on, they’ll cluster around “and they overcrowd each other, killing each other. A kind of chicken stampede.” Even if you get the chickens safely grown in their sunny, free-range yards, you have a new problem: You have to convince your nicky customers, in far-o cities, that you’re telling the truth about how the chickens were raised.

So Jiang turned to high-tech chicken surveillance. He outtted his chickens with wearable legbands that record their movements — “a chicken Fitbit of sorts” — and worked with a tech start-up to record the data on a blockchain. A blockchain is a type of software, most famously used to create Bitcoin, that can make nearly tamper-proof digital records. When customers buy the chicken, they don’t need to take Jiang’s word that his birds strolled around in the sunshine. They can trust the implacable math. Blockchain in this case is a clever tech solution that also happens to have a bleak libertarian philosophy behind it. As Wang notes, some blockchain coders are fond of citing Thomas Hobbes’s dismal view of human nature: Nobody can trust anyone else.

It’s a weird, delightful and unsettling tableau. In “Blockchain Chicken Farm,” Wang introduces us to dozens of such quixotic gures, hopscotching across the country on a mission: to document how technology is transforming the lives of China’s rural poor.

It’s good to turn on the klieg lights here. Rural China is a part of the world Americans likely ponder very little, despite being economically entwined with it. To the extent China looms in the American imagination, it’s mostly as an economic adversary, a land that has mercilessly stolen American manufacturing jobs by oering dirt-cheap labor in gleaming factories. (At least, that’s the message the White House has hammered for years now.) It’s certainly true that the country’s manufacturing explosion has helped create a much wealthier China. But it has also produced a rural-urban economic schism that neatly mirrors that of the United States itself. While the cities have gotten rich, the countryside has been left behind, with higher infant mortality, lower life expectancy and markedly lower educational attainment.

This divide worries China’s leaders deeply. Factories in urban China aren’t quite so competitive anymore, because the increasing wealth of cities has jacked up the price of factory labor. Meanwhile, dismal work opportunities in rural areas send young people eeing for cities, where they nd that the high cost of living — and lack of legal status, thanks to China’s “Hukou” registration system, which incentivizes people to stay in certain geographical areas — means that homeownership and even car ownership are out of reach.

This creates a powder keg. “Young, able-bodied workers, especially young men, untethered from car or house ownership, job or family are threats to political stability,” Wang writes, an observation that might give Americans, too, a shudder of recognition. But whereas our federal government has given up on any serious national policy for its countryside, the Chinese government and private sector are busily — even desperately — trying to engineer a technologically fueled “rural revitalization.”

Traveling the country to see what this looks like in practice, Wang has a keen eye for the steampunk-like details of ancient rural areas now shot through with internet opportunity. We visit Dinglou, a “Taobao village” — which is to say, a digital-age company town where residents make stu to sell on Taobao, the e-commerce platform of Alibaba, China’s high-tech behemoth. In Dinglou, the specialty is making costumes — like Snow White outts for Halloween, for example — that they ship worldwide, relying on Alipay (another Alibaba creation) for their banking needs.

“Nothing beats coming back to your hometown to run a Taobao business!” banners hung in the city declare, and families transform their houses into factories. Wang watches as a woman “in her kitten-heel shoes and red skirt” clambers onto a table to jigsaw expertly through layers of fabric for a set of costumes, while a chicken squawks nearby. Wang travels to Zhejiang Province, where pearl farmers patiently feed mussels pig and chicken feces, selling their prize pearls for top dollar and shipping the lousy ones halfway around the globe to American live-streamers, who sell them for $20 apiece via inuencer-style “Pearl Parties” online.

Wang hangs out with a 25-year-old man named Sun Wei, who — despite having only a high school degree — has built a career ying drones to do aerial reconnaissance for China’s small farmers. Wei radiates a bonhomie that reminds one of America’s postwar boom: “It’s a feeling that you have a right to the future, a right to imagination beyond the immediacy of the day,” as Wang puts it. The technological boom produces genuine moments of rural prosperity, when it works.

Though sometimes it doesn’t, quite. As a former software engineer in San Francisco, Wang has a grim appreciation for the dark side eects that technology can bring — the “breaking things” sux to the diktat of “moving fast.”

Consider the boom in the production of pork, a hot commodity among China’s increasingly prosperous diners. To increase the yield of pork farms, Alibaba trained a new articial intelligence, “ET Agricultural Brain,” on vast amounts of data from pork operations, the better to predict how to increase yield. (They set up entire “digital towns” where young rural workers sit all day long clicking on pictures of pigs, labeling them as sick or healthy, to feed the A.I.’s smarts.) In the short run, the A.I. does indeed help optimize soaring pork production. It’s a win for diners, for pork producers and for government, which yearns for China to achieve “food security.” (“The food bowl of the Chinese people must always remain rmly in their own hands,” as Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, has said.)

But nature does not always respond so obediently. One key strategy that emerges from all this high-eciency pork farming? Feeding the animals “industrial pig swill,” a goulash that, cannibalistically, includes ground-up pig parts. And this, in turn, creates dangerous new vectors for disease, spreading the dreaded African swine fever so badly that by 2019 it tore through China and destroyed nearly one-quarter of the world’s pigs.

Certainly, technology is good at “scaling” — making things grow big, run more eciently, move more speedily. With its hundreds of millions of rural poor clamoring to join the middle class, China craves scale. (“The West doesn’t understand our problems. We just have too many people,” Wang is told.) But eciency can cause problems of its own, leaving China caught in a dilemma: the need for scale, the peril scale brings.

Wang also nds that, for rural China, tech-propelled business models can produce the grim dynamics of the gig economy, where a far-o tech giant runs your life. The blockchain chicken software? It’s nifty, but the farmer neither understands the technology nor owns it; it’s provided by a tech rm that in the rst year of their collaboration ordered 6,000 chickens in advance to sell o to an online supermarket, and in the second year, nothing. Meanwhile, those Taobao villages also contain some embittered merchants who hate the e-commerce platform, because it allows buyers to demand refunds long after they’ve received their goods. One shoemaker has lost so much money this way that he’s forced to make lower- and lower-quality shoes to keep his prots up. “It’s all a scam,” he says.

Wang has written a nuanced and thought-provoking account, and it is not easy to tell, after you’re done reading it, how rural China will fare — whether its tiptoe toward prosperity and tech savviness is durable. Given that China’s economic fate is now so entwined with the world, one hopes it can thread the needle. Visiting the “Cloud Computing Museum” of Alibaba, Wang sees the rm’s rst homegrown server from years ago, adorned with a poem:

code line by line builds the foundation for eternity just like sand grain by grain calms the roaring sea.

We often see news and headlines about the dark side of AI, its weaponization, and “algorithmic warfare”. A plethora of AI-driven, dystopian paradigms await us in the future, but there is also a bright side!

Some companies are using AI to improve healthcare and renewable energy. Startup company Thingnario (pictured above) is using AI to crunch data at solar farms, and SYSCOM (pictured below) is building robots to assist hospital patients.

These AI companies and many more like them are coming together in the AI NEXT program, led by Taiwan’s Industrial Development Bureau.

The AI NEXT program is designed to help all kinds of businesses, people in tech, and investors enter the global AI ecosystem.

An important part of the program is the AI Tech Business Matchmaking Platform, which launched in September with a growing directory of AI companies. Like a speed-dating platform for the AI ecosystem, it makes matching with AI companies as easy as swiping right.

To demonstrate what it has to offer businesses, people in tech, and investors — here are 8 of the most innovative AI companies that have joined the platform so far:

Skeleton-print is Beseye’s patented AI computer vision technology, which analyzes human posture and behavior to improve image recognition. According to Beseye, it’s 30 percent more accurate than other AI facial recognition technologies on the market, and it isn’t limited by camera angles. Its various applications include security and protection, alerting emergency services about accidents, in smart retail where it can enhance consumer experience, and for smart management of factory production lines.

Coretronic oers an AGV solution for automated warehouses, featuring robotic forklifts and cleaning robots, all of which are equipped with the latest 3D SLAM technology, 2D and 3D LiDAR, 3D cameras, and IMU. Fleet management is controlled from a simple user interface, which can either be operated remotely from a central command station or by on-site personnel. Coretronic’s research and development in AGV has been ongoing since 2015, beginning with the objective of integrating robotics, AI, and IoT technologies.

A profound name for a company with a bold mission, Heroic-Faith is “Saving Lives Through Innovation”. Heroic-Faith developed its own algorithm for monitoring lung activity, which works by calculating respiratory rate during inhalation and exhalation, and analyzing the sound for airway obstructions or apnea. Their product, AirMod is an AI-powered device that monitors respiration during anesthesia, and assists the anesthesiologist in diagnosing problems, reducing the risks associated with anesthetics.

Huijia is pioneering the use of non-invasive ber optic physiological monitoring technology (nFOPT) to diagnose early symptoms of COVID-19. Their smart care system has already been in-use for over 10 years, serving more than 300 baby and elderly care centers with upwards of 100 thousand individual users. The nFOPT technology is built into a mat that’s just 2mm thick and ts under a patient’s pillow, harnessing AI to simultaneously monitor respiration, heart rate, coughs, sleep quality, and other vital signs.

Established in 1975, SYSCOM has been around for over 45 years, and the Ayuda smart robot is the company’s latest innovation for assisting hospital patients. Ayuda was recently upgraded for epidemic prevention, and equipped to measure body temperature and verify face mask compliance of everyone who enters the hospitals where it is stationed. Aside from hospitals, SYSCOM says that Ayuda can be customized for numerous applications for use at police stations, banks, hospitals, schools, retail spaces, and more.

Photon is a renewable energy monitoring solution that works behind the scenes at solar farms: crunching data, calibrating sensors, diagnosing problems, and boosting eciency. Researched and developed by startup company Thingnario, this enterprise solution is compatible with photovoltaic hardware produced by Siemens and other major suppliers. It combines deep learning based computer vision algorithms with an intelligent IoT platform, and transforms solar farms into valuable insights and alerts for technicians.

In the retail space, Viscovery is making leaps and bounds with its AI deep learning and computer vision technology, which has been specially tailored to help cashiers in brick-and-mortar stores. They boast over 99 percent accuracy in recognizing baked goods and other food items, while providing simple integration with retailers’ existing POS systems. Viscovery received recognition from Google in 2013 and has since gone on to partner with retailers worldwide, including 7-Eleven and Walmart China.

In medical lab testing, a number of clinical problems can result from inter-personal and inter-institutional inconsistencies. That’s where Wellgen comes in with its new microscopy scanner, which is designed to solve such discrepancies through a unied digital image process. The scanner is compatible with multiple AI diagnosis software types, and it is capable of scanning bone marrow as well as other smear types.