Month: May 2020

Categories
General

Google Evaluating page experience for a better web

Internal studies and industry research show that users prefer sites that provide an excellent page experience. In recent years, research has added various user experience criteria, such as page loading speed and mobile phone usability, as factors in the ranking of results. Earlier this month, the Chrome team announced Core Web Vitals, a set of metrics related to speed, responsiveness, and visual stability to help site owners measure user experience on the web.

Today, we build on this work and present the first glimpse of an upcoming change in search rankings that incorporates these page experience measures. We will introduce a new signal that combines the “Core Web Vitals” with our existing page experience signals to provide a holistic picture of the quality of a user’s experience on a web page.

As part of this update, we will also integrate page experience metrics into our ranking criteria for the Top Stories feature in Search on mobile, and we will remove the MPA requirement for Top Storie’s eligibility. Google continues to support the MPA program and will continue to provide links to MPA pages when they become available. We have also updated our development tools to help site owners optimize the experience of their pages.

A note on timing: We recognize that many site owners are rightly focused on responding to the effects of COVID-19. The ranking changes described in this article will not occur until next year, and we will give you at least six months notice before they are implemented. We are providing you with the tools to help you get started now (and because site owners have always asked to be notified of changes in rankings as soon as possible), but there is no need to act immediately.

About the page experience

The page experience signal measures aspects of how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page. Optimizing these factors makes the web more enjoyable for users, regardless of their browser or surface, and allows sites to evolve towards the expectations of mobile users. We believe this will contribute to the success of businesses on the web, as users will be more engaged and will be able to conduct transactions with less friction.

Core Web Vitals” are a set of concrete, user-centric metrics that quantify key aspects of the user experience. They measure dimensions of web usability such as loading time, interactivity and stability of content as it loads (so you don’t accidentally tap that button when it passes under your finger – how annoying!).

Categories
Featured

Microsoft Builds Supercomputer for AI


This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Microsofts-Supercomputer-for-AI-1024x652.jpgWhile Microsoft is not what it could have been for consumer-AI, the intersection of quantum computing and supercomputers with AI is fascinating. Microsoft is among the leaders in enterprise AI.Subscribe to the Last Futurist, for more articles like this (enter Email top right).With Cloud adoption and Azure’s incredible success, Microsoft has entered another golden age.

While Amazon, Apple and Google race to tame AI for the healthcare sector, Microsoft needs to position itself in other domains.Now on May 20, 2020, Microsoft has built one of the top five publicly disclosed supercomputers in the world. Think of the scale here, the Azure machine has 285,000 processor cores and 10,000 GPUs to tackle a new class of artificial intelligence tasks.

No alt text provided for this imageMicrosoft needs to position itself to acquire OpenAI. Why are supercomputers relevant to the future of artificial intelligence? Well Supercomputers, the most powerful computing machines on the planet, are typically used for the most taxing problems. These powerful brains can think about jobs like simulating nuclear weapons explosions, predicting the Earth’s future climate and more recently, seeking drugs to fight the coronavirus. Microsoft needs to lead the AI for good movement.

Because China won’t do it. Google hasn’t done it. It has to be Microsoft!Microsoft’s stock is approaching all-time highs and is a defensive and a growth stock in troubling times. Microsoft has pooled together an incredible ecosystem of developers and B2B partners. AI ethics and innovation must be high on Microsoft’s list at it approaches its zenith of global influence in its lifecycle as a company.While making new infrastructure available in Azure to train extremely large artificial intelligence models, the company is doing a lot of little things right in the AI enterprise space. At some point in the future, Microsoft and OpenAI believe their massive computer will bring new sophistication to AI.

This is debatable.Large-scale AI models are beginning to learn in new ways across text, images and video, but for the U.S. to have a chance to keep up with China in the next few decades in AI, Microsoft needs a team like Google has with DeepMind. Microsoft’s collaboration with OpenAI is good, but it’s not enough to contribute largely to the future of AI.Microsoft’s Build 2020 developer conference reminds us that Microsoft is connected, but it’s still not an AI-focused company that it could be. OpenAI’s goal is not just to pursue research breakthroughs but also to engineer and develop powerful AI technologies that other people can use, however all that remains to be seen.

Chinese AI startups show a lot more potential in impacting the world in the short-term.Microsoft won’t always be great, so what will it use its legacy for? Microsoft is a 45-year old company, and while it’s on an interesting track, what would it take for it to be not just a Cloud and enterprise giant, but truly an artificial intelligence company? Is has to take more risks.The mission of OpenAI is closely aligned with Microsoft’s mission of democratizing AI so that every individual and business in the world can achieve more, an especially relevant thing in a Pandemic world where there is a reset in several sectors and massive unemployment.

Microsoft needs a nexus of AI talent and that nexus is OpenAI.It cannot just be about propping up Azure, whose growth is slowing. Azure Machine Learning and DeepSeed are great, but Microsoft needs to make bigger moves in AI to attract the top talent. In the future of self-supervised learning, Microsoft needs to be a leader. It takes more than just a supercomputer, it takes a more cohesive and rigorous AI business strategy.Subscribe to the Last Futurist, for more articles like this (enter Email top right).

Artificial Intelligence Report By Michael Spencer

Microsoft’s Supercomputer for AI, itportal.org
Categories
Content Marketing

Write For Us – Submit Your Post

Here is a brief guide for those who want to write for us. Our goal is to help the authors understand our requirements. Please note that we prefer; technology, IT and blogging related content or any content about Silicon Valley.

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Categories
Business

Nexar’s $52 million Series C and a new data product to help fight COVID-19

My co-founder Bruno and I started Nexar on a mission to eliminate road collisions worldwide by using vision-based technology to alert drivers to dangers ahead in real time. When people pair a Nexar-powered smart dash cam with the Nexar app, they join our connected network, where every vehicle is learning in real time about what’s happening thanks to the other vehicles around it. Hard brakes, collisions, oncoming traffic — it’s a virtuous circle of information sharing.

Our weekly coverage

Nearly five years after we launched, Nexar’s safe-driving network now extends to more than 1,000 U.S. cities. The data generated from this user growth — which covers more than 90 percent of freeways and more than 50 percent of non-residential U.S. roads every week — has allowed us to not only deliver on our promise to those drivers, but to build a robust portfolio of vision-based data services for cities and the private sector.

CityStream Road Work Zones

We launched Nexar CityStream, our smart cities data platform, which takes anonymous insights from our network — like construction zone mapping and road inventory tracking — and shares them with cities and states in near real-time. We developed Nexar LiveMap, a free, interactive digital map populated with the most current frames and information of any mapping tool available today.

CityStream Road Inventory

Now, amid this rapid user and product growth, Nexar has closed a $52 million round of funding led by Corner Ventures with participation from Samsung NEXT Ventures, La Maison, Micron Ventures, Sompo, Atreides Management, and previous investors Aleph, Mosaic Ventures, Ibex Ventures, and Nationwide. This cash infusion will fuel the development of new data services and power Nexar’s global expansion. Both of those things start today.

See up to date and historical images from locations of interest with Virtual Camera

To support public officials monitoring the impact of COVID-19, Nexar is today launching a new data product called Nexar Virtual Camera, which pulls a feed of frames from any location on the Nexar network. This allows users to get on-demand visual insights into what’s happening with key areas of interest, including how park spaces are being used, and which neighborhoods could use some extra pedestrian space to let us all enjoy the spring at a safe distance. Although we see this platform being useful for both public and private sector partners, we are launching it now with our public servants in mind: we want them to have as many real-time insights at their fingertips as possible. And we are making this platform available for free for government officials for the duration of the crisis.

An array of Virtual Cameras in Las Vegas

Nexar’s new funding will support the growth and development of data services like these, as well as fuel our global expansion. Today we are announcing a partnership with Japanese insurance giant Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Co. (MSI) to put Nexar tech into hundreds of thousands of vehicles in Japan. In the coming months, I’m excited to say that Nexar is rolling out a curbside mapping pilot in Europe with one of the world’s largest automotive manufacturers.

All of Nexar’s data services are built on a foundation of trust with our drivers. We observe robust data privacy standards, which we’ve documented here. We automatically anonymize and aggregate all information so that neither the driver nor any person or vehicle on the road can be identified. We are proud to abide by the EU’s strict GDPR standards for all of our users, regardless of lesser local legal requirements.

At all times, but especially in times like these, it’s important for there to be a free flow of accurate, real-time information on what’s happening out there, in the real world. Nexar will continue to break new ground to make this possible everywhere.

Thanks to Team Nexar!

Source: Nexar Official Website