Tag: artificial intelligence

Labour productivity figures create call for AI

Posted on October 8, 2018 by - News

Forwarders-set-to-see-growthAccording to the latest labour figures productivity in the UK is still growing but still hasn’t reached the two percent growth rate the country was seeing before 2008, despite Britons’ long office hours and intense work ethic.

However Digitial sales tranformation outfit  Altify said that it is because employees spend too much of their workday focused on admin hygiene tasks, instead of investing their time in those that bring actual value to the company and the economy.

So says Altify, the digital sales transformation company, which claims that the use of the right AI tool will help employees focus on high-value tasks and reverse the toxic lifecycle of hard work, long hours, and little of the productivity that results from genuine job satisfaction.

Altify CEO Anthony Reynolds believes that AI is the key to the productivity puzzle and said that augmented Intelligence will not signify the end of human work, but rather the beginning of it.

“Once freed from mindless tasks which uphold administrative hygiene but bring little else, in the way of value to their customers, closed sales or job satisfaction. Sales teams all too often find themselves spending their time swamped in banal administrative tasks. This is perhaps why sales has not yet fulfilled its full strategic potential for organisations and points to the same conclusion for the UK’s corporate landscape as a whole.”

Darktrace worth $1.65 billion

Posted on October 1, 2018 by - News

banner_220x220UK cyber security vendor Darktrace is now valued at $1.65 billion after raising $50 million in a Series E funding round.

The AI firm claimed to have seen its revenue increased 100 per cent year on year in July.

The extra cash will be used to fuel an international expansion which has seen it open offices in Los Angeles, Mexico City and Sao Paolo.

Darktrace claims to have increased its headcount by 60 percent over the last year, giving it an employee base of 750 staff.

This latest investment round was led by Vitruvian Partners and included existing investors KKR and 1011 Ventures.

 

Ignition to bring security vendors, dealers and disties together

Posted on March 6, 2018 by - News

Screen Shot 2018-03-06 at 21.08.08An event on Thursday at the Shard in the City of London [pictured, left] will bring 160 resellers and their “favourite” distributor, Ignition Technology together with vendors to explore sales opportunities.

Ignition specialises in security. There’s a lot of money in security, especially considering the failures large corporations have suffered for a while.

The show will have McMafia star Misha Glenny, the author of a popular but a rather scary TV show – to kick off the event.

One of the vendors will be represented by JASK’s Greg Fitzgerald, a member of the firm’s advisory board who personally has a long history of security startups and for established companies too. He told ChannelEye today that the firm’s offering uses artificial intelligence (AI) – which he defined as a combination of mathematics and other algorithms – to pick up problems at medium to large corporations more or less immediately.

Corporations, he said, were picking up the pieces after security alerts and those alerts demanded many human beings to decide which were real threats that needed acting on now rather than later. JASK’s answer, he said was to pick up threats in real time, picking up and doing menial tasks, leaving it to “SWAT” squads to concentrate on the deeper aspects of a case.

Fitzgerald said that just as soon corporations recruited and trained humans to pick up the problems, the demand for security advisors was so great in government, in health and in other sectors that problems piled up. Storage is a problem too.

Corporations and security specialists within those firms were suffering from “alert fatigue” because there is an overload of such alerts from data sources, multiple devices, users, and networks.

[Image of the Shard courtesy of Colin on Wikipedia Commons.]

Microsoft migrates tech to competitors

Posted on March 13, 2015 by - News

windows-10-technical-preview-turquoiseThe artificial intelligence project called Einstein and used in its so called personal assistant Cortana is set to be ported to Android and to Apple’s iOS.

That’s according to a report from Reuters, which said in an exclusive interview that Cortana will eventually become a stand alone application.

But in the interim and widely flagged, Cortana will be rolled out as part of its Windows 10 desktop, not due until the autumn of 2015.

Microsoft has been boasting about Cortana’s abilities and a few weeks ago the company managed to predict a large number of Oscar winners.

Microsoft wants to get away from being considered a proprietary company and the new CEO broom at the company, Satya Nadella, wants to sprained the appeal of the company’s tech.

Certain differs from Google Siri because that trawls the web and its own server for information that it believes people want.

Certain is being projected as super duper artificial intelligence (AI). But although AI has been touted now for many decades it still faces many challenges.

What’s certain is that in the quest for the perfect AI agent, Microsoft faces many challenges from its competition – in particular Google – which has fairly deep pockets too.

Scientists teach computer legerdemain

Posted on November 17, 2014 by - News

levitationArtificial intelligence reached its zenith today after researchers at Queen Mary University of London taught a computer to create magic tricks.

The computer’s even been clever enough to create a card trick called Phoney which is available in the Google Play Store.

According to the scientists, they wrote a computer program to show how magic jigsaw puzzles and mind reading card trick works, along with a database showing how humans understand magic tricks.

But, the researchers point out, the magic trick created by the computer doesn’t use prestidigitation but rather uses mathematic techniques, which are, apparently, a core part of many conjurors’ stage acts.

Howard Williams, who co-created the project, said that AI can use psychological and mathematical principles to “create lots of different versions and keep audiences guessing”.  Its stage presence might need a little tweaking.

Professor Peter McOwan, a member of the team, said: “Using AI to create magic tricks is a great way to demonstrate the possibilities of computer intelligence and it also forms a part of our research into the psychology of being a spectator.”

At press time we searched the Google Play Store for Phoney but only found Phoney Girlfriend from Baller Industries.  We suspect this isn’t the app QMUL means…