Profile: Kira Radinsky, the Prophet of the Web

Using machine intelligence and data mining, this entrepreneur can make predictions about future events

Photo: Kira Radinsky

Kira Radinsky is a rising star in predictive analytics. She combines the use of artificial intelligence and online data mining to predict likely futures for individuals, societies, and businesses. Radinsky made headlines two years ago for developing a series of algorithms that dissect words and phrases in traditional and social media, Web activity, and search trends to warn of possible disasters, geopolitical events, and disease outbreaks. Her system predicted Cuba’s first cholera epidemic in decades and early Arab Spring riots.

The algorithm—which grew out of Radinsky’s Ph.D. work at Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa—looks for clues and historical patterns inferred from online behavior and news articles. “During an event, people search [for related topics] much more than usual,” she says. “The system looks for other times we saw a spike in that same topic and analyzes what was going on in the places that had this same spike.”

With the 2012 Cuba cholera outbreak, for example, the system “learned,” by perusing news items, that cholera outbreaks occurred after droughts in Angola in 2006 and large storms in Africa in 2007. The algorithm also noted other factors, such as location, water coverage, population density, and economy. When Cuba presented similar conditions, the system warned of an outbreak, and a few weeks later, cholera was reported.

Radinsky has parlayed her research into a 3-year-old startup, SalesPredict, with 20 people on staff and offices near Tel Aviv and in San Francisco. SalesPredict focuses on helping businesses, including several Fortune 100 companies, find new opportunities for sales or retain existing customers and clients. The company has raised US $4 million from venture funding and has been doubling its revenue every quarter—except the first quarter of 2015, when it tripled.

“It’s big data meets game theory,” Radinsky says. “There was so much data at each company about their historical sales, but very few actions were taken to scientifically analyze it.”

As a youth, Radinsky wanted to be a scientist. But the summer before high school, she botched a research project at a science camp. “It was biology and computers together. I was in charge of feeding the cells. I was not good at that, and I killed those cells by mistake. After that, they had me process the data instead—and it turned out to be something I enjoyed.”

Radinsky enrolled at Technion in 2002 at just 15, earning extra cash by programming websites on the side. At 18, she did her mandatory Israel Defense Forces duty as a computer scientist in its intelligence division. She completed bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science in 2009, and a Ph.D. in machine learning and artificial intelligence in 2012, at 26.

Since graduating, she’s served full-time as SalesPredict’s chief technical officer. “Getting into predictive analytics usually requires master’s and Ph.D. degrees in data mining and machine learning. Data scientists have strong math and statistical backgrounds. It’s a very academically oriented field,” she says. “For my company, it helps if you’ve worked for a company like Google or have strong engineering skills on how to scale machine learning systems.”

Radinsky believes in developing this technology to benefit not only business but also society. “Mining patterns in data can lead humanity to a new era of faster scientific discoveries. We are working on several pro bono activities in the medical domain to apply learning machine algorithms to predict cancers and find the driving causes of diseases.”

This article originally appeared in print as “Kira Radinsky.”

ORIGINAL: IEEE Spectrum

By Susan Karlin

21 May 2015

Web founder Berners-Lee calls for online 'Magna Carta' to protect users

World Wide Web founder Tim Berners-Lee delivers a speech at the Bilbao Web Summit in the Palacio Euskalduna May 17, 2011. CREDIT: REUTERS/VINCENT WEST

(Reuters) - The inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, called on Wednesday for bill of rights to protect freedom of speech on the Internet and users' rights after leaks about government surveillance of online activity.

Exactly 25 years since the London-born computer scientist invented the web, Berners-Lee said there was a need for a charter like England's historic Magna Carta to help guarantee fundamental principles online.

Web privacy and freedom have come under scrutiny since former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden last year leaked a raft of secret documents revealing a vast U.S. government system for monitoring phone and Internet data.

Accusations that NSA was mining personal data of users of Google, Facebook, Skype and other U.S. companies prompted President Barack Obama to announce reforms in January to scale back the NSA programme and ban eavesdropping on the leaders of close friends and allies of the United States.

Berners-Lee said it was time for a communal decision as he warned that growing surveillance and censorship, in countries such as China, threatened the future of democracy.

"Are we going to continue on the road and just allow the governments to do more and more and more control - more and more surveillance?" he told BBC Radio on Wednesday.

"Or are we going to set up something like a Magna Carta for the world wide web and say, actually, now it's so important, so much part of our lives, that it becomes on a level with human rights?" he said, referring to the 1215 English charter.

While acknowledging the state needed the power to tackle criminals using the Internet, he has called for greater oversight over spy agencies such Britain's GCHQ and the NSA, and over any organizations collecting data on private individuals.

He has previously spoken in support of Snowden, saying his actions were "in the public interest".

Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web Consortium, a global community with a mission to lead the web to its full potential, have launched a year of action for a campaign called the Web We Want, urging people to push for an Internet "bill of rights" for every country.

"Our rights are being infringed more and more on every side, and the danger is that we get used to it. So I want to use the 25th anniversary for us all to do that, to take the web back into our own hands and define the web we want for the next 25 years," he told the Guardian newspaper.

(Reporting by Costas Pitas Editing by Belinda Goldsmith and Alison Williams)

ORIGINAL: Reuters

Mar 12, 2014

Google+ Hangouts goes HD as it switches from H.264 to VP8. Next up, WebRTC.

ORIGINAL: GigaOm

by Janko Roettgers

Oct 28, 2013

SUMMARY:

Google is adding HD video quality to its video chats. But the upgrade isn’t just about looks: It’s part of a bigger move towards open standards and a plugin-free video chat experience.

Noticed any differences when using Google’s Hangouts video chat lately? If you did, then you may be one of the lucky users who has already received an upgrade to 720p HD video. The company quietly started to roll out HD for Hangouts to a subset of its users in the last few weeks and hopes to complete the rollout soon. But the change isn’t just a quality upgrade – it’s part of a bigger move towards open standards that will eventually bring us video chat in the browser without the need for any plugins.

To enable HD, and prepare for this plugin-free future, Google quietly started to transition Hangouts from the H.264 video codec to VP8, an open and royalty-free video codec the company released back in 2010. Google’s Vice President of Engineering Chee Chew told me during a recent interview that the switchover from H.264 to VP8 should be more or less invisible to consumers, with some possibly noticing a little less choppiness. “It will be cleaner, better video,” Chew said.

One of the key advantages of VP8 is that it will enable Hangouts in HD, something that Chew said simply wasn’t possible with H.264, because handling HD streams from 10 participants would have required too much processing power. The new video format also makes it possible for Google to serve up better-looking streams at low bit rates, which is especially important when it comes to mobile video chats.

What birthday hats have to do with the future of video chat

But the move to VP8 isn’t just about looks. It’s also a first step towards letting users video chat in the browser without the need for any plugins, thanks to an emerging standard for real-time audio and video communication called WebRTC. Google has been a big proponent of WebRTC, and integrated it into the desktop and Android versions of its Chrome browser.

The company hinted at plans to utilize WebRTC for Hangouts when it launched the video chat platform two years ago. So what took Google so long? Chew told me that the Hangouts team first concentrated on optimizing the experience for end users, and that the standard had to mature. But there were also less obvious problems that have so far prevented Google from fully embracing WebRTC for Hangouts. Yes, we are talking about birthday hats, scuba glasses and cat whiskers.

Hangouts have for some time offered users the ability to apply silly effects to their video chats. These effects, which use facial recognition to make sure that the cartoon birthday hat is actually on top of your head, are rendered on the sender’s client side, and there’s currently no easy way to do this with WebRTC. “We will eventually move over to WebRTC,” said Chew, but this process may take several more months.

However, eventually, WebRTC could actually provide an even more immersive video chat experience, explained Chew. That’s because when the video becomes a native HTML element, it will be even easier to add overlays and other, more subtle improvements.

No more third-party code to run Hangouts chats

One of the more immediate consequences of the switch-over to VP8 is that Google is phasing out the use of third-party code provided by the video conferencing technology vendor Vidyo. Google started licensing technology from Vidyo back in 2008 when it first brought video chat to Google Talk, and the companies continued to cooperate when Google launched Hangouts and eventually absorbed Talk and other messaging clients in that platform.

Talk and Hangouts relied on Vidyo’s implementation of the H.264 codec as well as the company’s scalable video coding technology, which essentially allowed Google to seamlessly switch to a lower bitrate in the case of network congestion.

With the move to VP8, all of that is being replaced – but Vidyo CEO Ofer Shapiro actually seemed understanding of Google’s motives when I talked to him about the switch this week. “The need to install something is somewhat of a barrier” to the use of video chat, he acknowledged, adding that a royalty-free codec like VP8 was promising as well.

That’s why, moving forward, Vidyo actually wants to support WebRTC and open video codecs. The company is announcing Wednesday that it will contribute client-side scalable video coding technology to VP9, the next generation of Google’s open video codec. Vidyo will also cooperate with Google to incorporate some of its technology into enterprise versions of Hangouts. Both companies haven’t said yet what exactly they’re working on, but it’s possible that Google would want to make more inroads in the corporate world to take on traditional video conferencing vendors.

Codecs, browsers, standards: welcome to a hybrid world

Google wants to switch over all of its users to VP8 by the end of next week and add the ability to do HD Hangouts soon after. However, the complete switch-over to VP8 may take a bit longer. Mobile clients can’t be forced to upgrade, so there will be some time in which VP8 and H.264 coexist — what Chew called a “hybrid world.”

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That pattern will likely repeat once Google moves Hangouts to WebRTC in a few months. Chrome, Firefox and Opera support WebRTC natively, but Microsoft has actually been trying to push for a different take on the standard that isn’t based on the VP8 video codec, and Apple has given no indication that Safari will ever support WebRTC. “Some browsers will have the plugin to fall back on,” acknowledged Chew, but others will be able to run Hangouts completely without a plugin.

Eventually, he hopes that all users will be able to start their video chats in their web browsers without the need to download any additional software. “The role of the plugin will diminish,” he said.

Updated at 7:40am with additional details on the timeline for the HD and VP8 rollout.

WebRTC logo image courtesy of Flickr user Tsahi Levent-Levi.

Nueva máquina para horticultura doméstica en interiores iniciará pruebas en Japón

ORIGINAL: AsahiAJW

YOSHIHIRO YASUKAWA/ Staff Writer

June 01, 2012 (JP)

Un prototipo de la máquina para cultivar plantas está siendo desarrollado por Panasonic Corp. (Foto proporcionada por Panasonic Corp.)

Panasonic Corp. dijo que se unirá a la Universidad de Chiba y otros grupos para probar una máquina de horticultura que incluso las personas sin habilidad "verde" puede manejar.

La prueba comenzará en pleno en septiembre en una zona de Kashiwa, en la prefectura de Chiba, que ha sido designada una "ciudad inteligente" en virtud de un programa de gobierno.

Cada una de cerca de 10 familias que participan en la prueba recibirán una máquina de cultivo de plantas, de 85 centímetros de alto, 38 cm de largo y 60 cm.

Las máquinas en forma de caja requieren poca mano de obra para cultivar hortalizas y otras plantas, ya que se conectan a un servidor en la universidad para controlar automáticamente la temperatura y la humedad.

Cuando se necesitan riego y otras tareas, la información será facilitada por correo electrónico. Utiliza iluminación LED para el cultivo de las plantas.

Panasonic dijo que la gente puede plantar lechugas, albahaca, fresas y otras plantas, independientemente de las condiciones meteorológicas.