XPRIZE, the non-profit organization developing and managing competitions to find solutions to social challenges, has named two grand prize winners in the Elon Musk-backed Global Learning XPRIZE .

The companies, KitKit School out of South Korea and the U.S., and onebillion, operating in Kenya and the U.K., were announced at an awards ceremony hosted at the Google Spruce Goose Hangar in Playa Vista, Calif.

XPRIZE set each of the competing teams the task of developing scalable services that could enable children to teach themselves basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills within 15 months.

Musk himself was on hand to award $5 million checks to each of the winning teams.

Five finalists including: New York-based CCI, which developed lesson plans and a development language so non-coders could create lessons; Chimple, a Bangalore-based, learning platform enabling children to learn reading, writing and math on a tablet; RobotTutor, a Pittsburgh-based company which used Carnegie Mellon research to develop an app for Android tablets that would teach lessons in reading and writing with speech recognition, machine learning, and human computer interactions, and the two grand prize winners all received $1 million to continue developing their projects.

The tests required each product to be field tested in Swahili, reaching nearly 3,000 children in 170 villages across Tanzania.

All of the final solutions from each of the five teams that made it to the final round of competition have been open-sourced so anyone can improve on and develop local solutions using the toolkits developed by each team in competition.

Kitkit School, with a team from Berkeley, Calif. and Seoul, developed a program with a game-based core and flexible learning architecture to help kids learn independently, while onebillion, merged numeracy content with literacy material to provide directed learning and activities alongside monitoring to personalize responses to children’s needs.

Both teams are going home with $5 million to continue their work.

The problem of access to basic education affects more than 250 million children around the world, who can’t read or write and one-in-five children around the world aren’t in school, according to data from UNESCO.

The problem of access is compounded by a shortage of teachers at the primary ad secondary school level. Some research, cited by XPRIZE, indicates that the world needs to recruit another 68.8 million teachers to provide every child with a primary and secondary education by 2040.

Before the Global Learning XPRIZE field test, 74% of the children who participated were reported as never having attended school; 80% were never read to at home; and 90% couldn’t read a single word of Swahili.

After the 15 month program working on donated Google Pixel C tablets and pre-loaded with software, the number was cut in half.

“Education is a fundamental human right, and we are so proud of all the teams and their dedication and hard work to ensure every single child has the opportunity to take learning into their own hands,” said Anousheh Ansari, CEO of XPRIZE, in a statement. “Learning how to read, write and demonstrate basic math are essential building blocks for those who want to live free from poverty and its limitations, and we believe that this competition clearly demonstrated the accelerated learning made possible through the educational applications developed by our teams, and ultimately hope that this movement spurs a revolution in education, worldwide.”

After the grand prize announcement, XPRIZE said it will work to secure and load the software onto tablets; localize the software; and deliver preloaded hardware and charging stations to remote locations so all finalist teams can scale their learning software across the world.

If your requests to Alexa are being met with answers like “I’m having some trouble, please try again later,” you are not alone. Multiple users are reporting connection issues with Amazon’s voice assistant. According to Down Detector’s outage tracker and live outage map, issues are currently being detected around the world, with user reports starting around 7PM EST.

@amazon Hey, alexa is down. what’s going on?

— Jordan McCrea (@ShiningArmoire) May 15, 2019

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

@amazon Hey, alexa is down. what’s going on?

— Jordan McCrea (@ShiningArmoire) May 15, 2019

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Also down over here she says “I’m having some trouble, please try again later” multiple devices in my house doing the same thing

— Jefferson James (@Jeffjames696969) May 16, 2019

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

We’ve reached out to Amazon and will update this post when more information is available.

Forget all those whiskey brands from musicians and celebs — there’s A.I. whiskey now. Microsoft this week announced it has teamed up with Finnish tech company Fourkind and Sweden-based distillery Mackmyra Whisky to create the “world’s first whisky developed with artificial intelligence.”

Oh no!

Here’s how it will work.

As part of the distillation process, whiskey first spends time — typically years — sitting in charred wooden casks. This turns the clear liquor a darker color, and gives it a unique flavor. How long it stays in the casks, and what the casks held before — like bourbon, wine, sherry, etc. — helps create a specific recipe. Master distillers tweak all these variables along with the different ingredients used to create the whiskey in the first place to come up with a variety of blends.

Until now, this entire process is done by humans with a specialized set of skills. For the A.I. blend, Mackmyra is turning part of the job over to the machines.

The distillery is feeding its existing recipes, sales data and customer preferences to machine learning models, so the A.I. can suggest what recipes it should make next.

The A.I., Mackmyra says, is capable of generating over 70 million different recipes. And it will highlight those it predicts will be most popular and of the highest quality, based on the cask types that are currently on hand.

These models are powered by Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and Azure cognitive services. Fourkind developed the A.I. algorithms involved, explains Microsoft in its announcement.

However, the distillery notes it’s not actually replacing its Master Blenders with A.I. Instead, it’s using the A.I. to create the recipes which are then curated by the (still human) experts.

“The work of a Master Blender is not at risk,” insists Angela D’Orazio, Mackmyra’s Master Blender. “While the whiskey recipe is created by A.I., we still benefit from a person’s expertise and knowledge, especially the human sensory part, that can never be replaced by any program. We believe that the whiskey is A.I.-generated, but human-curated. Ultimately, the decision is made by a person.”

Microsoft says this is the first time A.I. has been used to augment the process of making whiskey. The finished product will be available in Autumn 2019.

Despite not knowing how the juice turns out, Fourkind wants to turn its algorithms to other industries where complex recipes are involved — including those for other beverages, and also things like perfumes, sweets, or sneaker designs.

This would not be the first time that A.I. has been put to work in a more artistic field.

For example, at Google’s I/O developer conference this month, the company showed off how A.I. could be used in artistic endeavors — including music, visual art, and even fashion.

Of course, when A.I. is tasked with making art, the end results tend to be strange, unworldly and sometimes a little frightening.

Which begs the question: how the hell will an A.I. whiskey taste?

(via TNW) 

 

About a year ago, Valve announced that it was building an application called Steam Link. It’d let you stream Steam games to your iOS or Android device, with a computer on your local network doing all of the heavy computation.

Then Valve submitted it to the iOS App Store and… Apple rejected it. At the time, Valve said that Apple pinned the rejection on “business conflicts”.

A year later, it seems said conflicts have finally been resolved. Steam Link for iOS just hit the App Store.

Because there’s no way most PC games would be fun on a touchscreen, you’ll probably want a controller — Valve says that Made for iPhone-certified controllers should work, as will its own Steam-branded controller. The company also notes that for best performance, the computer doing the streaming should be hardwired to your router, and your iOS device should be running on your WiFi network’s 5Ghz band.

SpaceX’s launch tonight is being performed for a very important client: itself. Yes, the Falcon 9 that will lift off at 7:30 PM Pacific time is loaded not with government or commercial payloads, but the first of SpaceX’s own Starlink orbital communications satellites. You can watch this first-of-its-kind launch here.

In the launch press kit (PDF), SpaceX provided new details of the launch, deployment process, and the Starlink satellites themselves, which have only been described in roundabout fashion via regulatory filings and such.

Weighing 500 pounds each, the 60 Starlink satellites add up to around 30,000 lbs of payload, considerably less than the Falcon 9’s upper limit of over 50,000 lbs. I wouldn’t have guessed they were quite as heavy as that — some communications satellites are small enough you could easily lift them with one hand, though others, like OneWeb’s and of course geosynchronous ones, are much larger.

Although that leaves plenty of unused lift capacity, the satellites and their deployment platform take up practically every cubic inch of the Falcon 9’s usable interior. This launch is limited by volume, not mass.

The satellites have a “flat-panel design featuring multiple high-throughput antennas and a single solar array.” They use krypton-fueled Hall thrusters to get around, which will come in handy during the last part of the deployment, as we shall see. In addition, as SpaceX explains:

Each spacecraft is equipped with a Startracker navigation system that allows SpaceX to point the satellites with precision. Importantly, Starlink satellites are capable of tracking on-orbit debris and autonomously avoiding collision. Additionally, 95 percent of all components of this design will quickly burn in Earth’s atmosphere at the end of each satellite’s lifecycle—exceeding all current safety standards—with future iterative designs moving to complete disintegration.

This should help assuage concerns that SpaceX and others aiming for thousand-strong constellations are going to end up filling orbit with junk.

The launch window opens at 7:30 PM Pacific time, 10:30 local time in Florida, and lasts for an hour and a half. There’s currently an 80 percent chance of fair weather, so unless there’s mechanical trouble, a delay is not particularly likely.

After liftoff, the Falcon 9 (previously flown in September of last year and January of this one) will take the Starlink stack to 440 kilometers, at which point (at about T+1 hour) they will begin to deploy, like kernels popping off a giant space corncob. They’ll then use their onboard thrusters to ascend to their operational altitude of 550 kilometers.

This is quite a low orbit; OneWeb’s satellites, which are aiming to fulfill a similar purpose, are about twice as high. Anything at or below 1,000 kilometers, however, makes for fast and easy de-orbiting as well as easier tracking from the ground.

While everyone hopes for 100 percent success on this mission, the simple fact is that it’s the first of its kind — there have been plenty of launches with dozens of payloads to deploy, but this is the first time these satellites and this method have been used. “Much will likely go wrong,” CEO Elon Musk stated bluntly on Twitter.

Here’s hoping as little goes wrong as possible. You can follow along minute by minute in the live video SpaceX always provides. Here it is below; expect it to go live about 15 minutes before takeoff.

Dave Arnold, Tesla’s senior director of communications, is leaving the company after two-and-half years years, according to sources familiar with the move.

Tesla confirmed to TechCrunch that Arnold was leaving in June.

“We’d like to thank Dave for his work in support of Tesla’s mission, and we wish him well,” a Tesla spokesperson said in a company-issued statement. “Dave will remain with the company for the next month to help transition his responsibilities to Keely Sulprizio, Tesla’s Director of Global Communications.”

Arnold became senior director of communications Tesla in July after the departure of Sarah O’Brien. O’Brien, who was previously at Apple, held the position at Tesla for two years. She later took a position at Facebook.

The top communications job at Tesla is a high-profile and critical role for the company, which unlike other automakers, doesn’t have a traditional advertising strategy. And thanks to the near-frenetic amount of attention that Tesla and CEO Elon Musk receives from investors and the press, it can also be a challenging and exhausting one. 

The typical stint for the role has been about two years.

Musk reaches his fervent fan base — and critics — via Twitter. His account now has some 26.5 million followers. Musk’s tweets, along with other announcements and controversies, translate to constant news coverage of the company.

That coverage has been largely responsible for driving sales. Tesla’s relationship with the media might be rocky at times. However, the attention by the press has also helped drive sales. The company has said in previous regulatory filings that “media coverage and word of mouth have been the primary drivers of our sales leads and have helped us achieve sales without traditional advertising and at relatively low marketing costs.”

On the heels of Romanian-founded enterprise startup UiPath raising at a $7 billion valuation, the startup’s biggest investor is announcing a new fund to double down on making more investments in Europe. VC firm Accel has closed a $575 million fund — money that it plans to use to back startups in Europe and Israel, investing primarily at the Series A stage in a range of between $5 million and $15 million.

At $575 million, this makes the fund one of the largest in the region, and it brings the total managed by Accel in Europe to $3 billion.

Accel has been behind some of the biggest startups to have come of age in Europe in recent years, including Avito, BlaBlaCar, Celonis, Check24, Deliveroo, Doctolib, DocuSign, Funding Circle, Spotify and Supercell, alongside UiPath. Some — like Spotify — have become leaders in their respective segments (in Spotify’s case, music streaming), and so Accel has, by association, played a strong part in helping grow the wider tech ecosystem in Europe.

That ecosystem still lags behind the US in terms of value. According to figures from KPMG, $136 billion was invested in startups in the US and Americas in 2018, while Europe saw only $24.4 billion invested in the same period. However, even with dramatic drops in activity in the UK and France — thanks respectively  to Brexit and domestic economic tensions — that was up by more than $2 billion on 2017, with median deal sizes also going up.

Philippe Botteri, a partner at Accel (who works alongside 6 other partners and principles based out of London), said that in addition to the average size of a Series A creeping up in value and proximity (essentially, the A round is raised sooner after Seed than it used to be), another noticeable difference is the fact that the European opportunity has become more decentralised.

“Fifteen years back, a lot of the market was in uk and Israel,” he said, “but in the last five years, we have invested across 22 different cities. Who would have thought that UiPath, one of the  most successful startups currently in enterprise software, would come out of Bucharest? We are seeing ambitious founders and great companies emerging from everywhere now in the region.”

Indeed, the drop in investments being made in the UK and France also speaks to that trend, and also underscores that right now still seems to be  a buyers’ market in terms of strong investors getting more of a look in, rather than startups turning backers away because of overdemand.

It will be interesting to see how that plays out in later stages, where firms like Softbank have recently started stepping up their funding activity in the region especially in late-stage deals. We have yet to see a strong run of IPOs come out of Europe (although some that made their debuts last year, like Farfetch and Adyen, have performed well), and having backers willing to invest in those late stages could push the biggest startups to stay private for a little longer.

Some of Accel’s biggest booms have been in consumer-facing services — just in the small list of wins I detailed here, more than have are services with consumer, not business user, endpoints. But Botteri said this is a  consequence of the natural swing of the “pendulum.”

“You have a pendulum rocking between consumer and B2B,” he said. “Between 2009 and 2013/14 it was consumer-driven, with more than two thirds of investments being made on these kinds of companies.”

But things slowly started to change in 2014 with a shift to more B2B investments. “Europe has become a hub for enterprise startups,” he noted.

Just as geographies have become more decentralised, so too have areas of interest, with automation (not just robotic process automation), fintech and health all figuring in Accel’s sights.

It’s no secret that the Trump administration has been at war with social media. In the past year, the President has accused several online giants of censoring conservative voices, in particular giants like Twitter, Google and Facebook.

Today, the White House launched a Typeform site aimed at collecting personal reports of social media censorship relating to political bias.

“SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS should advance FREEDOM OF SPEECH,” the minimalistic site reads. “Yet too many Americans have seen their accounts suspended, banned, or fraudulently reported for unclear ‘violations’ of user policies.”

For those who feel they’ve been wronged in some way by one of the major platforms, the 16 part questionnaire lets you chose from a list including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube, while inquiring about specific tweets that were censored or accounts that were targeted. Users can submit screenshots and other supporting evidence and opt in for “President Trump’s fight for free speech” after entering a name, email address, phone number and proving they’re not real by answering a trivia question about the Declaration of Independence (take that, robots).

Trump has made a “shadow banning” and other perceived slights against conservatives voices a key cause in recent months. Last summer, he took to Twitter to address issues with the platform, writing, “Twitter ‘SHADOW BANNING’ prominent Republicans. Not good. We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once! Many complaints.”

Late last month, the President met with Jack Dorsey for 30 minutes in the Oval Office, to discuss making Twitter “healthier and more civil,” according to the tech exec. No word on what the White House plans to do with the evidence it compiles.

Remember when the idea of having a terabyte of storage was just mind-blowing?

Now they’re packing a terabyte onto a card the size of your pinky nail.

In news that would have made teenage me’s head pop, SanDisk is now selling a 1 terabyte version of its Extreme microSD line for $450. The company first talked up these cards at Mobile World Congress back in February, but now they’re actually hitting the shelves. As Tom’s Guide spotted, it’s available on SanDisk’s site as of this morning.

Read speeds cap out at 90MB/s, while write speeds are capped at 60MB/s. SanDisk has a product page indicating that a faster ExtremePro card (170MB/s read, 90MB/s write) is on the way, but they don’t give any indication as to when.

Once upon a time, the idea of having (much less needing) a terabyte on something that fits in a tiny slot on a device in your pocket seemed funny. Then came 4K video, portable devices that can record in 4K, and an ever-growing library of games with absolutely massive textures. Filling up a terabyte isn’t quite the challenge it used to be.

To anyone reading this in 2099 and laughing at our amazement at cramming a terabyte of storage onto a card this size while you’ve got a copy of every movie ever recorded stored in a strand of hair or something: you and your personal rocket ship can scram. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go have a nightmare about losing a dime-sized card with a terabyte of data on it.

President Donald Trump has declared a national emergency to “deal with the threat posed by the unrestricted acquisition or use in the United States of information and communications technology… supplied by persons owned by, controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction or direction of foreign adversaries.”

Reports that the President would sign the executive order were circulating last night, and, as reported, it’s clear that China is the main target for U.S. concerns — even as the two nations continue to escalate their trade war.

While the U.S. has already restricted government contractors and federal agencies from using technology supplied by Huawei or its subsidiaries, this new Executive Order gives Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and other federal agencies broad powers of oversight and approval over private company transactions.

The President had been considering using the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which gives the President broad powers to regulate commerce during a national emergency, since at least last May, when The Wall Street Journal first reported the potential for executive action.

The U.S. Justice Department has issued an unprecedented string of indictments against Chinese hackers since last September in addition to specifically targeting companies like ZTE and Huawei, which the U.S. has also accused of spying for the Chinese government.

As my colleague Catherine Shu wrote:

House committee first labeled Huawei and ZTE as national security threats in 2012, accusations they have repeatedly denied. U.S. government agencies and contractors have been banned from using Huawei equipment since last year.

Huawei has come under even more scrutiny during the trade war, with Chinese officials accusing the U.S. of using Huawei as a bargaining chip. Chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou, the daughter of Huawei founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei, was arrested last year in Canada at the behest of the U.S. government and faces up to 30 years in prison on accusations of fraud. U.S. federal prosecutors have also charged Huawei with stealing trade secrets from T-Mobile.

The Secretary of Commerce has 150 days to come up with an enforcement regime and name the technologies or companies that could be barred from the U.S. under the Executive Order.

Republican appointees at the Federal Communications Commission applauded the measure. “President Trump’s decision sends a clear message that the U.S. will do what it takes to secure our communications networks,” wrote FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr in a statement. “The Executive Order will help ensure that our foreign adversaries do not compromise the security of our networks or undermine our core values, including our freedom from unlawful surveillance and respect for intellectual property.”

Meanwhile, it’s likely that rural communities whose cable operators rely on low cost Chinese equipment to build and maintain high speed internet networks will be the hardest hit by the decision to ban foreign products from telecommunications networks.

Responding to an FCC proposal that would ban subsidies to carriers that use Huawei equipment, a group of telecommunications associations said that carriers would “have to spend millions of dollars — and in some cases, more than $100 million — on just the immediate costs of ripping up and replacing equipment.”

Those associations, including the Competitive Carriers Association, rural broadband association NTCA, the Computer & Communications Industry Association, and broadband providers association ITTA went on to add that “carriers that chose ‘the most cost-effective option’ available to them at the time of purchase will be forced to rebuild their networks at a cost substantially greater than they spent to build the networks in the first place.”