This content was sent on feb, 19th via our Tech Watch Newsletter

Happy new year 🥳

Ok, we are a little bit late, but still, we wish you all the best for the new year to every one of you 😀. That’s the first issue of 2019 and we start the year with some fresh news about machine learning, cryptocurrencies, smart devices, voice assistant, autonomous transportation and regulation. All the trends that will follow you and your clients in 2019, for sure.

This is Smile’s Innovation Watch.

Innovation • /ˌɪnəˈveɪʃən/

This person does not exist

Pushing forward the #machinelearningpossibilities here’s a model plugged to a website that you can use to generate pictures of people that does not exist. That’s right. 100% guarantee that the people you are seeing right next to that text does not exist.

OpenAI deny publication of their latest research

The new trained model in their text generation research is too powerful and could lead to severe misusage. Think about fake news on steroïd thanks to #machinelearning. Too bad, I could have used such kind of algorithm to write my review of all those links … or have I?

JP Morgan launched the first US banked-backed cryptocurrency

Creating the “JPM Coin”, a #digitaltoken that you’ll use to instantly settle transaction between clients of its wholesale payment business. That’s an interesting turnover of a #Big4 that was the most aggressively against any form of #cryptocurrency in the past. That’s not the first backed by an institution coin either but the first of its kind by US bank. Maybe owning the bank that supports it has helped …

ABN Amro, the first bank to offer using a connected object as payment support

(reads in 🇫🇷) The Dutch #bank ABN Amro with 6.8 million clients offer a new way to pay every day: with a ring, a watch or a quantify self bracelet. Deploying it widely after testing it for a year with 500 clients, more than 80% of the users prefer that kind of new way of payment to their traditional credit/debit card. Sadly, Garmin watch & Fitbit bracelets require the user to input a code on their device every 24h to keep the device “enabled”. But they are not the only brands offering this kind of services and the bank have already 6 different manufacturers enrolled in their program.

Aquisition • /ˌakwɪˈzɪʃ(ə)n/

Apple acquires the startup behind talking Barbie

Apple just bought some talent they need to bring Siri at the same level than Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. In that plan, they acquire some leading company that may have been too advanced in their time (like Apple so many time in their own history). PullString was known as ToyTalk, the first company that created toys with voice interface but at a time where the public opinion was … let’s say people were way more suspicious about recording children voice while they were playing with toys.

Privacy • /ˈpɹaɪ.və.si/

Dozens of cities have secretly tried predictive policing software

It seems that #artificialintelligence is still a big fantasy for a lot of people. And the people behind PredPol got that very loud and clear. PredPol claims to use an algorithm to predict crime in an area of 150 x 150 m. So the police know where they have to be to spot crime. A lot of Californian cities such as Mountain View, Atlanta, Palo Alto, even Berkley is using it on campus every day, and way more have already experienced with the tool in the early 2014’s.

Video Privacy issues for Amazon-own smart doorbell company Ring

Back in 2016, the company moved some of its R&D operations to Ukraine and it seems someone forgot to restrict access to that new team to an S3 folder with all the videos of all the ring camera made. Since the beginning of time. And since it wasn’t enough, this team had access to a database which let them search for the unencrypted videos of a specific user. The goal was to be able to train a model on all the videos and let a team tag every object or person on the video … but included videos of the outside AND inside of the houses.

Openness • /ˈəʊ.pən/ + /nəs/

EU Tax Link and upload filter are moving to a final vote

All the effort to remove or affect the articles 11 & 13 of the EU Copyright Directive have failed following a last-minute deal between France and Germany. The Pirate MEP Julia Reda share the summary of it on her blog but long story short, platform like YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr will have to proactively scan user-generated content for copyright infringement (art. 13) and publisher will be able to charge anyone who reproduce more than single words or very short extract of their content (art. 11).

Fun • /fʌn/

The hotel room of tomorrow: on wheels and autonomous

(reads in 🇫🇷) That’s an insane project which just won the title of “radical Innovation”: the ATS (Autonomous Travel Suite). This crazy idea isn’t new, Ikea already thought about it with their Space10 project but the idea of being able to sleep, work a bit and even have a meal while being transported to your client meeting is just something really appealing to us (who travels a lot all across Europe to help you with your clients projects 😅).

DeepMind kicks humans ass playing StarCraft

(reads in 🇫🇷) Deepmind, the company own by Alphabet (Google mother’s company) and which create also AlphaGo had won over 2 professional players in real-time strategy game Starcraft. AlphaStar, the model trained for that case, beat Dario TLO Wünsch 5–0 before beating Grzegorz MaNa Komincz with the same score. Where’s the trick? Maybe because AlphaStar isn’t limited to screen size but see and knows the entire game at every moment.

That’s all folks!

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