#alexa uribe

[poeticdrop]

Alexa.

[lucianatamas]

https://www.facebook.com/events/413707850403964/?ref=newsfeed

https://www.satmareanul.net/2021/12/01/bienala-jurnal-de-virus-la-muzeul-de-arta-din-satu-mare/

S-a calculat că, în unele zile din perioada de vârf a pandemiei, s-a pierdut un număr aproape la fel de mare de vieți ca în timpul Revoluției de la 1989. Războiul sanitar, deci, combinat cu tot felul de alte forme de război hibrid, a dus la răsturnări / mutații greu cuantificabile. Anul 1989 a determinat căderea unor ziduri și frontiere. Pandemia determină reapariția altor ziduri, garduri de sârmă ghimpată și limitări / distanțări de tot felul. După 32 de ani de la Revoluția Română, cu începere de vineri, 26 noiembrie 2021, de la orele 17:00, în incinta Muzeului de Artă din Satu Mare, sub titlul „Bienala Alb/Negru: Jurnal de virus”, ni se oferă posibilitatea de a „răsfoi” viziunea unor artiști, scriitori și curatori despre ceea ce este – și se pare că va mai rămâne, pentru o perioadă – „homo pandemicus”. Proiectul a fost conceput, dezvoltat și promovat de Dan Perjovschi, împreună cu artista și curatoarea Alina Andrei, fiind un work in progress publicat online pe rețelele de social media ale Galeriei White Cuib din Cluj-Napoca. Bazându-se pe bunele sale relații personale, artistul român Dan Perjovschi a invitat să participe la proiect creatori din România, Spania, Germania, SUA, Marea Britanie, Austria, Italia, Portugalia, Grecia, Cehia, Bulgaria, Uruguay, Indonezia, Columbia, Franța, Malaiezia, China, Japonia, Polonia, Republica Moldova, Ungaria și Muntenegru. În anul 2020, proiectul a mai fost expus de Galeria White Cuib din Cluj Napoca, apoi a putut fi vizitat în cadrul Romanian Design Week din București. Recent, a fost expus și în Madrid, la ABM Confecciones (curatoarea evenimentului fiind Gloria Luca). Artiştii implicaţi în proiect: Dan Perjovschi (RO) Ana Kun (RO) George Roşu (RO) Aldo Giannotti (AU) Olivier Hölzl (AU) Gloria Luca (SP) Tudor Pătraşcu (RO) David Böhm & Jiří Franta (CZ) Cosmin Haiaş (RO) Răzvan Cornici (RO) Cathy Burghi (UY) Benedek Levente (RO) Oana Lohan (FR) Cristian Răduţă (RO) Minitremu (RO) Bartha Sándor (HU) Restu Ratnaningtyas (IN) Marishka Soekarna (IN) Magdalena Pelmuş (RO) Luciana Tamas (GE) Zara Alexandrova (GE) Zoran Georgiev (GE) Roberto Uribe Castro (GE) Alina Andrei (RO) Invitații speciali: 3 137, Cristian Alexa, Sabina Aldea, Silvia Amancei & Bogdan Armanu, Daniel García Andújar, Florin Arhire, Isa Balog, Ion Barbu, Lucian Barbu, Beagles & Ramsay, Andra Beligan, Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan, Naomi Bildea, Brent Birnbaum, Alex Bodea, Daria Borsa, Răzvan Botiș, Luchezar Boyadijev, Vlad Brăteanu, Michele Bressan, Cosmin Bumbuț, Dan Burzo, Frank Bz, Radu Carnariu, Squeak Carnwath, Banu Cennetoğlu, Simion Cernica, Ramona Chirica, Ciprian Ciuclea, Eduard Constantin, Larisa Cont, Oana Coșug, Mihail Coşuleţu, Alicia Crasiuc, Lavinia Creţu, Ştefan Radu Cretu, Andra Cati, Dana Catona, Suzana Dan, Hans D. Christ, Megan Dominescu, Andrei Dosa, Latifa Echakhch, Farid Fairuz, Andrei Flocea, Alexandru Faur, Diana Filimon, Dora García, Cristina Gagiu, Cristi Gaspar, Bogdan Gârbovan, Bogdan Georgescu, Diana Grigorescu, Gergely Hory, Ovidiu Hrin, Andreea Harabagiu, Mihai Iepure-Gorski, Lucian Indrei, Susanna Inglada, Tadija Janičić, József Bartha, Quentin Jouret, Pravdoliub Ivanov, Rie Kawakami, Kispál Ágnes, Attila Kispál, Szabolcs Kisspál, Takehito Koganezawa, Jadranka Kosorcic, Eva Koťátková, Dana Koťátková, Levente Kozma, Ute Krafft, Mischa Kuball, Karolina Kubik, Raphaël Larre, Eirini Linardaki, Natalia Marc, Andreea Mare, Tincuța Marin, Alina Marinescu, Andreea Medar, Alex Mihăileanu, Hortensia Mi Kafchin, Milan Mikuláštík, Isola Milano, Alexandra Mocan, Bianca Mocan, Emilian Mocanu, Niță Mocanu, Eliodor Moldovan, Vlad Moraru, Ivan Moudov, Tudor Mureşan, Alexandru Munteanu, Simona Nastac, Cătălina Neculai, Mona Nicoară, Tuan Nini, Cătălina Nistor, Oberliht Association, Yuki Okumura, Miklós Onucsán, Andrei Pacea, Eugen Palagub, Daniela Palimariu, Vincent Parisot, Manuel Pelmuș, Gluklya, Mihai Plătică, Cristi Pogăcean, Delia Popa, Camelia Popescu, Caterina Preda, Ioana Preda, Silviu Preda, Andrei Pungovschi, Abel Rad, Lea Rasovszky, Saddo, Matei Rădulescu, Oliver Ressler, Cristian Rusu, Patrick Roussel, Șerban Savu, Dimitar Solakov, Nedko Solakov, Alexandru Solomon, Ada Stan, Raimar Stange, Iza Tarasewicz, Oana Tănase, Krassimir Terziev, Tudor Toader, Iulia Toma, Remus Țiplea, Tomáš Vaněk, Jaro Varga, Sorina Vazelina, Casandra Vidrighin, Dăruieşte Viaţă, Simona Vilău, Iuliana Vîlsan, Elena Vlădăreanu, Ioana Vreme Moser, Trevor Yeung, Laurenţiu Zbîrcea, Fani Zguro. Curatori: Alina Andrei Felicia Grigorescu Luciana Tămaș (Text de Luciana Tămaș)

[freenewstoday]

New Post has been published on https://freenews.today/2021/03/15/sherpa-raises-8-5m-to-expand-from-conversational-ai-to-b2b-privacy-first-federated-learning-services-techcrunch/

Sherpa raises $8.5M to expand from conversational AI to B2B privacy-first federated learning services – TechCrunch

Sherpa, a startup from Bilbao, Spain that was an early mover in building a voice-based digital assistant and predictive search for Spanish-speaking audiences, has raised some more funding to double down on a newer focus for the startup: building out privacy-first AI services for enterprise customers.

The company has closed $8.5 million, funding that Xabi Uribe-Etxebarria, Sherpa’s founder and CEO, said it will be using to continue building out a privacy-focused machine learning platform based on a federated learning model alongside its existing conversational AI and search services. Early users of the service have included the Spanish public health services, which were using the platform to analyse information about COVID-19 cases to predict demand and capacity in emergency rooms around the country.

The funding is coming from Marcelo Gigliani, a managing partner at Apax Digital; Alex Cruz, the chairman of British Airways; and Spanish investment firms Mundi Ventures and Ekarpen. The funding is an extension to the $15 million Sherpa has already raised in a Series A. From what I understand, Sherpa is currently also raising a larger Series B.

The turn to building and commercializing federated learning services comes at a time when the conversational AI business found itself stalling.

Sherpa saw some early traction for its Spanish voice assistant, which first emerged at a time when efforts from Apple in the form of Siri, Amazon in the form of Alexa, and others hadn’t really made strong advances to address markets outside of those where English is spoken.

The service passed 5 million users as of 2019 — customers using its conversational AI and predictive search services include the Spanish media company Prisa, Volkswagen, Porsche and Samsung.

But as Uribe-Etxebarria describes it, while that assistant business is still chugging along, he came up against a difficult truth: the biggest players in English voice assistants eventually did add Spanish, and the conversational AI investments they would make over time would make it impossible for Sherpa to keep up in that market longer-term on its own.

“Unless we did a big deal with a company, we wouldn’t be able to compete against Amazon, Apple and others,” he said.

That led the company to start exploring other ways of applying its AI engine.

It came on to federated privacy, Uribe-Etxebarria said, when it started to look at how it might expand its predictive search services into productivity applications.

“A perfect assistant would be able to read emails and know which actions to take, but there are privacy issues around how to make that work,” Uribe-Etxebarria said. Someone suggested to him to look at federated learning as one way to “teach” its assistant to work with email. “We thought, if we put 20 people to work, we could build something to read and respond to emails.”

The platform that Sherpa built, Uribe-Etxebarria said, worked better than they had anticipated, and so a year later, the team decided that it could use it for more than just triaging email: it could be productized and sold to others as an engine for training machine learning models with more sensitive data in a more privacy-compliant way.

It’s not the only company pursuing this approach: TensorFlow from Google also uses federated learning, as does Fate (which includes cloud computing security experts from Tencent contributing to it), and PySyft, a federated learning open-source library.

Sherpa is working with several companies under NDAs in areas like healthcare, and Uribe-Etxebarria said it plans to announce customers in other areas like telecoms, retail and insurance in the near future.

Source

[pautapolitica]

Governo abre parte de dados em sigilo e anuncia economia maior com PEC

Talita Fernandes, Gustavo - Uribe e Alexa Salomão – FOLHA - Ao refazer os cálculos do impacto da reforma da Previdência, a equipe econômica aumentou a estimativa de corte de despesas públicas em dez anos. 

A projeção passou de R$ 1,072 trilhão para R$ 1,236 trilhão. A mudança se deu, segundo o governo, porque a previsão anterior previa uma década a partir de 2019. 

Na atual, o governo estima impacto a partir de 2020, contemplando o tempo de tramitação do texto no Congresso. 

O governo estima que a retirada de itens considerados mais difíceis ainda permitiria uma economia de cerca de R$ 900 bilhões em dez anos com a PEC (Proposta de Emenda Constitucional). 

Os cálculos foram revelados após a Folha publicar, no domingo, reportagem em que mostrava que estudos que embasaram a reforma da Previdência estavam sendo mantidos sob sigilo pelo Ministério da Economia.

[themakersmovement]

Sherpa, a Spanish voice assistant, expands Series A to $15M as it passes 5M users When we think of the AI platforms that are shaping how we use voice to interact with phones, home devices and other services, we tend to think of Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google and Microsoft’s Cortana. But there are other players that may prove to have a compelling value proposition of their own. Sherpa.ai, a voice assistant out of Spain that also provides predictive recommendations with a focus on the Spanish language, today is announcing that it has expanded its Series A by $8.5 million to $15 million as it passes 5 million active users of its app. Investors include Mundi Ventures, a Spanish VC fund focused on AI, and Alex Cruz, the chairman and CEO of British Airways. In a still-heated tech climate where startups are raising tens and sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars in rounds that sometimes happen only months apart, Sherpa’s Series A has been a comparatively slow burn: the startup first announced a Series A of $6.5 million nearly three years ago. Apart from the fact that European startups do tend to raise and spend more conservatively, Xabi Uribe-Etxebarria, the startup’s founder and CEO, says that it chose to extend this Series A now while it’s still working on closing its Series B for later this year, which will be in the region of $20 million, which will include new investors and likely more detail on how it plans to evolve the business. “We’re announcing several agreements with big OEMs in the next few months,” he said. “I spoke with our investors and they thought it would be better to get a small amount of capital now to launch those deals to use the momentum to get a better valuation on our Series B.” The company is already working with Porsche to bring its assistant and recommendation service into its vehicles, and Uribe-Etxebarria said future partnerships, along a similar B2B2C model, will be with “other automakers, telcos and other device manufacturers of smart speakers and PCs.” From what I have heard, Sherpa has been approached by a number of others that have been building voice assistants, as well as the companies building the hardware and other objects that will be housing them. Uribe-Etxebarria would not comment, except to say that he is under NDA with several companies. “Sherpa.ai has experienced tremendous growth and is poised to become the most advanced conversational and predictive AI OS in the industry,” said Rajeev Singh-Molares, partner at Mundi Ventures and former president of Alcatel-Lucent Asia-Pacific, in a statement. “Sherpa has shown phenomenal potential and amazing growth since the first close of the Series A. By increasing our investment in this company, we are able to accelerate Sherpa.ai on its journey.” Scale isn’t everything At a time when Amazon’s Alexa alone has passed the 100 million-mark in terms of devices that have been sold that are powered by its voice assistant, and Google, Microsoft and Apple appear to be quickly playing catch-up by integrating into a number of third-party and their own devices themselves, Uribe-Etxebarria says he believes Sherpa stands apart from these for a couple of reasons. One is the spectre of competition, and possibly the history of how things played out in mobile, where carriers really lost their way with users and value-added services with the rise of apps. “The companies we are working with don’t always want agreements with companies that also compete with them,” he said. “Take the telco we’re working with. It has its own video and music offerings, its own retail operation. At the end, they would be competing with the likes of Apple or Amazon, so they don’t want to give them access to their users. Car manufacturers might feel the same way.” The second reason, he says, has to do with Sherpa’s technology. When the company launched several years ago, voice-based personal assistants were still relatively new, and all the biggies were launching in English. These days, they all have Spanish versions, so this is no longer a unique selling point. (Of the company’s 5 million users, between 80-90 percent of those are using Sherpa’s Spanish content.) And even if it were, Sherpa’s basic speech recognition and text-to-speech are powered by third-party technology, which Uribe-Etxebarria calls “commodities.” What is more unique, he says, is the company’s predictive recommendations, which is built in-house by his team of natural language and other AI specialists. It covers more than 30 different specialist categories, spanning areas like automotive, entertainment, news, travel and so on, and analyzes 100,000 parameters per user to be able to predict what information a user needs before a question is even asked, whether it’s news or whatever it is that you first do with your phone when you wake up, which emails you will need to see first or what you might want to know when you arrive at a particular location. “This is…

Sherpa, a Spanish voice assistant, expands Series A to $15M as it passes 5M users – TechCrunch

[toomanysinks]

Sherpa, a Spanish voice assistant, expands Series A to $15M as it passes 5M users

When we think of the AI platforms that are shaping how we use voice to interact with phones, home devices and other services, we tend to think of Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google and Microsoft’s Cortana. But there are other players that may prove to have a compelling value proposition of their own. Sherpa.ai, a voice assistant out of Spain that also provides predictive recommendations with a focus on the Spanish language, today is announcing that it has expanded its Series A by $8.5 million to $15 million as it passes 5 million active users of its app.

Investors include Mundi Ventures, a Spanish VC fund focused on AI, and Alex Cruz, the chairman and CEO of British Airways.

In a still-heated tech climate where were startups are raising tens and sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars in rounds that sometimes happen only months apart, Sherpa’s Series A has been a comparatively slow burn: the startup first announced a Series A of $6.5 million nearly three years ago.

Apart from the fact that European startups do tend to raise and spend more conservatively, Xabi Uribe-Etxebarria, the startup’s founder and CEO, says that it chose to extend this Series A now while it’s still working on closing its Series B for later this year, which will be in the region of $20 million, which will include new investors and likely more detail on how it plans to evolve the business.

“We’re announcing several agreements with big OEMs in the next few months,” he said. “I spoke with our investors and they thought it would be better to get a small amount of capital now to launch those deals to use the momentum to get a better valuation on our Series B.”

The company is already working with Porsche to bring its assistant and recommendation service into its vehicles, and Uribe-Etxebarria said future partnerships, along a similar B2B2C model, will be with “other automakers, telcos and other device manufacturers of smart speakers and PCs.” From what I have heard, Sherpa has been approached by a number of others that have been building voice assistants, as well as the companies building the hardware and other objects that will be housing them. Uribe-Etxebarria would not comment except to say that he is under NDA with several companies.

“Sherpa.ai has experienced tremendous growth and is poised to become the most advanced conversational and predictive AI OS in the industry,” said Rajeev Singh-Molares, partner at Mundi Ventures and former President of Alcatel-Lucent Asia-Pacific, in a statement. “Sherpa has shown phenomonal potential and amazing growth since the first close of the Series A. By increasing our investment in this company, we are able to accelerate Sherpa.ai on its journey.”

Scale isn���t everything

At a time when Amazon’s Alexa alone has passed the 100 million-mark in terms of devices that have been sold that are powered by its voice assistant, and Google, Microsoft and Apple appear to be quickly playing catch-up by integrating into a number of third-party and their own devices themselves,  Uribe-Etxebarria says he believes Sherpa stands apart from these for a couple of reasons.

One is the spectre of competition, and possibly the history of how things played out in mobile, where carriers really lost their way with users and value-added services with the rise of apps.

“The companies we are working with don’t always want agreements with companies that also compete with them,” he said. “Take the telco we’re working with. It has its own video and music offerings, its own retail operation. At the end, they would be competing with the likes of Apple or Amazon, so they don’t want to give them access to their users. Car manufacturers might feel the same way.”

The second reason, he says, has to do with Sherpa’s technology.

When the company launched several years ago, voice-based personal assistants were still relatively new and all the biggies were launching in English. These days, they all have Spanish versions, so this is no longer a unique selling point. (Of the company’s 5 million users, between 80-90 percent of those are using Sherpa’s Spanish content.) And even if it were, Sherpa’s basic speech recognition and text-to-speech are powered by third-party technology, which Uribe-Etxebarria calls “commodities.”

What is more unique, he says, is the company’s predictive recommentations, which is built in-house by his team of natural language and other AI specialists. It covers over 30 different specialist categories spanning areas like automotive, entertainment, news, travel and so on, and analyzes 100,000 parameters per user to be able to predict what information a user needs before a question is even asked, whether it’s news or whatever it is that you first do with your phone when you wake up, which emails you will need to see first, or what you might want to know when you arrive at a particular location.

“This is what our competitors are very interested in,” he said. “We are at least two or three years ahead of others on this front.”

Sherpa had a significant boost across the Spanish-speaking world when Samsung hooked up with the company to preload the app on all of its devices sold across those countries. That changed after Samsung launched Bixby, its own assistant, but Uribe-Etxebarria said that their partnership is not quite over yet.

“We are still speaking because Bixby can be improved a lot,” he said.

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/23/sherpa-a-spanish-voice-assistant-expands-series-a-to-15m-as-it-passes-5m-users/

[fmservers]

Sherpa, a Spanish voice assistant, expands Series A to $15M as it passes 5M users

When we think of the AI platforms that are shaping how we use voice to interact with phones, home devices and other services, we tend to think of Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google and Microsoft’s Cortana. But there are other players that may prove to have a compelling value proposition of their own. Sherpa.ai, a voice assistant out of Spain that also provides predictive recommendations with a focus on the Spanish language, today is announcing that it has expanded its Series A by $8.5 million to $15 million as it passes 5 million active users of its app.

Investors include Mundi Ventures, a Spanish VC fund focused on AI, and Alex Cruz, the chairman and CEO of British Airways.

In a still-heated tech climate where were startups are raising tens and sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars in rounds that sometimes happen only months apart, Sherpa’s Series A has been a comparatively slow burn: the startup first announced a Series A of $6.5 million nearly three years ago.

Apart from the fact that European startups do tend to raise and spend more conservatively, Xabi Uribe-Etxebarria, the startup’s founder and CEO, says that it chose to extend this Series A now while it’s still working on closing its Series B for later this year, which will be in the region of $20 million, which will include new investors and likely more detail on how it plans to evolve the business.

“We’re announcing several agreements with big OEMs in the next few months,” he said. “I spoke with our investors and they thought it would be better to get a small amount of capital now to launch those deals to use the momentum to get a better valuation on our Series B.”

The company is already working with Porsche to bring its assistant and recommendation service into its vehicles, and Uribe-Etxebarria said future partnerships, along a similar B2B2C model, will be with “other automakers, telcos and other device manufacturers of smart speakers and PCs.” From what I have heard, Sherpa has been approached by a number of others that have been building voice assistants, as well as the companies building the hardware and other objects that will be housing them. Uribe-Etxebarria would not comment except to say that he is under NDA with several companies.

“Sherpa.ai has experienced tremendous growth and is poised to become the most advanced conversational and predictive AI OS in the industry,” said Rajeev Singh-Molares, partner at Mundi Ventures and former President of Alcatel-Lucent Asia-Pacific, in a statement. “Sherpa has shown phenomonal potential and amazing growth since the first close of the Series A. By increasing our investment in this company, we are able to accelerate Sherpa.ai on its journey.”

Scale isn’t everything

At a time when Amazon’s Alexa alone has passed the 100 million-mark in terms of devices that have been sold that are powered by its voice assistant, and Google, Microsoft and Apple appear to be quickly playing catch-up by integrating into a number of third-party and their own devices themselves,  Uribe-Etxebarria says he believes Sherpa stands apart from these for a couple of reasons.

One is the spectre of competition, and possibly the history of how things played out in mobile, where carriers really lost their way with users and value-added services with the rise of apps.

“The companies we are working with don’t always want agreements with companies that also compete with them,” he said. “Take the telco we’re working with. It has its own video and music offerings, its own retail operation. At the end, they would be competing with the likes of Apple or Amazon, so they don’t want to give them access to their users. Car manufacturers might feel the same way.”

The second reason, he says, has to do with Sherpa’s technology.

When the company launched several years ago, voice-based personal assistants were still relatively new and all the biggies were launching in English. These days, they all have Spanish versions, so this is no longer a unique selling point. (Of the company’s 5 million users, between 80-90 percent of those are using Sherpa’s Spanish content.) And even if it were, Sherpa’s basic speech recognition and text-to-speech are powered by third-party technology, which Uribe-Etxebarria calls “commodities.”

What is more unique, he says, is the company’s predictive recommentations, which is built in-house by his team of natural language and other AI specialists. It covers over 30 different specialist categories spanning areas like automotive, entertainment, news, travel and so on, and analyzes 100,000 parameters per user to be able to predict what information a user needs before a question is even asked, whether it’s news or whatever it is that you first do with your phone when you wake up, which emails you will need to see first, or what you might want to know when you arrive at a particular location.

“This is what our competitors are very interested in,” he said. “We are at least two or three years ahead of others on this front.”

Sherpa had a significant boost across the Spanish-speaking world when Samsung hooked up with the company to preload the app on all of its devices sold across those countries. That changed after Samsung launched Bixby, its own assistant, but Uribe-Etxebarria said that their partnership is not quite over yet.

“We are still speaking because Bixby can be improved a lot,” he said.

Via Ingrid Lunden https://techcrunch.com

[succeedly]

Aprender Ciencia de Datos ¿Elección Competitiva o Mandato Ético?

Blog escrito por: José Hernández Orallo, profesor de la Universidad Politécnica de Valencia y especialista en ciencia de los datos.

¿Crees que Big Data es una milonga y que el volumen, la velocidad y la variabilidad de los datos siempre han estado al límite de lo que permite la tecnología del momento? ¿Piensas que de noche tu vecina está haciendo un curso de ciencia de datos y aprendizaje automático online simplemente porque lo hace todo el mundo? Si crees todo esto, enhorabuena porque estás en lo cierto.

Y estás en lo cierto precisamente porque con la información y el conocimiento se desequilibran batallas, se levantan empresas y se desmoronan patrañas. En todos estos juegos sociales, vence la estrategia. Si tu “adversario” —y permíteme usar este término— utiliza técnicas de aprendizaje automático para analizar la información que le rodea y tú no, estás en desventaja. Esto lo entienden los gigantes tecnológicos: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, y sus semejantes en China.

Así pues, ¿por qué es importante conocer aprendizaje automático y ciencia de datos en el siglo XXI? Simplemente porque, si no lo haces, no comprenderás el mundo. No entenderás cómo se ganan elecciones, cómo se diseñan nuevos fármacos, cuánto sabe tu asistente digital, cómo se ganan y pierden clientes, cómo se crece en una red social, cuánto tarda en llegar tu taxi o cómo funciona el mercado de alquiler. Y, en definitiva, si no entiendes este mundo basado en datos, serás un ciudadano de segunda.

Ciertamente, las organizaciones, para ser competitivas, necesitarán algo más que entender los fundamentos de la ciencia de datos. En un entorno de inteligencia y aprendizaje “adversarios”, las soluciones generan datos sobre los cuales los competidores pueden aprender nuevos patrones, con los que inducir un cambio de dinámica. Pero tan pronto se genera evidencia sobre la nueva situación, puede ser explotada nuevamente y así sucesivamente. Por tanto, el volumen, la velocidad y la variabilidad se refieren al cambio; un cambio acelerado por el análisis adversario de los datos. Una organización, sin un equipo que extraiga conocimiento a partir de los datos que la rodean, fracasará al verse superada (“outsmarted”, diríamos en inglés) por otras que sí saquen partido de la ciencia de datos. Lo del Big Data es la manera que algunos tienen de decir que están a la última en este juego social, al límite de lo que la tecnología y la lógica de su rendimiento marquen en cada momento.

Disponer de un equipo de ciencia de datos o delegar esta tarea a otros puede permitir a una organización ser competitiva, pero no exime a los individuos de la responsabilidad principal de entender el mundo. En un reciente post, Francisco Mejía Uribe recuperaba al filósofo victoriano William Clifford para asegurar que es “una obligación moral el pensar responsablemente, es decir, creer sólo aquello de lo que tenemos suficiente evidencia, y lo que hemos investigado diligentemente”. Para Clifford, no hacerlo sería inmoral por tres razones: porque tomar decisiones erróneas tiene consecuencias negativas sobre uno mismo y sobre los demás; porque convertirnos en unos crédulos sin el necesario espíritu crítico nos reduce a bestias tragaderas; y porque no filtrar la información convenientemente contribuye a contaminar más el pozo del entendimiento colectivo, abarrotado ya de conocimiento mediocre, si no directamente falso. Y Mejía argumentaba que estas razones (y por tanto esta obligación moral) eran todavía más relevantes hoy en día, en un mundo rodeado de big data y fake news.

En total sintonía, hace unos días el Profesor Philip Howard, del Oxford Internet Institute y experto en propaganda computacional, nos daba su definición de lo que es la política: “elegir representantes para que tomen decisiones usando la evidencia”. Se refería a la buena política, porque la otra —que bien conocemos — suele hacer lo contrario: tergiversar la evidencia para que se ajuste a las decisiones políticas.

Tomar decisiones usando la evidencia es precisamente para lo que sirve la ciencia de datos que, al fin y al cabo, nace del método científico. Esta nueva ilustración del siglo XXI de la que habla Steven Pinker necesita de la ciencia de datos, y necesita democratizarla. La nueva ilustración no puede limitarse a que todos tengamos una educación crítica y que podamos acceder a Wikipedia gratuitamente. Requiere que el poder computacional y los datos de los gigantes tecnológicos sean accesibles a la población. Requiere que todos, colaborativamente, podamos descubrir nuestro conocimiento, escrutar diligentemente el de otros y así defendernos de aquellos que intentan superarnos, provocarnos y engatusarnos en todo momento por Alexa, Web y Twitter.

Así que intenta aprender más ciencia de datos, conocer qué es eso del aprendizaje automático y descubrir otras posibilidades de la inteligencia artificial. Si con ello puedes investigar la evidencia que te rodea diligentemente, no sólo harás lo oportuno; harás lo correcto. Pero más aún, preocúpate también de que tus representantes políticos, tus empleados, tus vecinos, tus familiares, tus amigos y tus hijos conozcan un poco sobre ciencia de datos. No es sólo una elección competitiva: es un mandato ético.

Aprende más sobre la ciencia de los datos en:

Aprendizaje automático y ciencia de datos

UPValenciaX (El curso está abierto para inscripción)

Inscríbete

The post Aprender Ciencia de Datos ¿Elección Competitiva o Mandato Ético? appeared first on edX Blog.

Aprender Ciencia de Datos ¿Elección Competitiva o Mandato Ético? published first on https://getnewcourse.tumblr.com/

[poeticdrop]

Date night @plursims4

[bisoroblog]

Aprender Ciencia de Datos ¿Elección Competitiva o Mandato Ético?

Blog escrito por: José Hernández Orallo, profesor de la Universidad Politécnica de Valencia y especialista en ciencia de los datos.

¿Crees que Big Data es una milonga y que el volumen, la velocidad y la variabilidad de los datos siempre han estado al límite de lo que permite la tecnología del momento? ¿Piensas que de noche tu vecina está haciendo un curso de ciencia de datos y aprendizaje automático online simplemente porque lo hace todo el mundo? Si crees todo esto, enhorabuena porque estás en lo cierto.

Y estás en lo cierto precisamente porque con la información y el conocimiento se desequilibran batallas, se levantan empresas y se desmoronan patrañas. En todos estos juegos sociales, vence la estrategia. Si tu “adversario” —y permíteme usar este término— utiliza técnicas de aprendizaje automático para analizar la información que le rodea y tú no, estás en desventaja. Esto lo entienden los gigantes tecnológicos: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, y sus semejantes en China.

Así pues, ¿por qué es importante conocer aprendizaje automático y ciencia de datos en el siglo XXI? Simplemente porque, si no lo haces, no comprenderás el mundo. No entenderás cómo se ganan elecciones, cómo se diseñan nuevos fármacos, cuánto sabe tu asistente digital, cómo se ganan y pierden clientes, cómo se crece en una red social, cuánto tarda en llegar tu taxi o cómo funciona el mercado de alquiler. Y, en definitiva, si no entiendes este mundo basado en datos, serás un ciudadano de segunda.

Ciertamente, las organizaciones, para ser competitivas, necesitarán algo más que entender los fundamentos de la ciencia de datos. En un entorno de inteligencia y aprendizaje “adversarios”, las soluciones generan datos sobre los cuales los competidores pueden aprender nuevos patrones, con los que inducir un cambio de dinámica. Pero tan pronto se genera evidencia sobre la nueva situación, puede ser explotada nuevamente y así sucesivamente. Por tanto, el volumen, la velocidad y la variabilidad se refieren al cambio; un cambio acelerado por el análisis adversario de los datos. Una organización, sin un equipo que extraiga conocimiento a partir de los datos que la rodean, fracasará al verse superada (“outsmarted”, diríamos en inglés) por otras que sí saquen partido de la ciencia de datos. Lo del Big Data es la manera que algunos tienen de decir que están a la última en este juego social, al límite de lo que la tecnología y la lógica de su rendimiento marquen en cada momento.

Disponer de un equipo de ciencia de datos o delegar esta tarea a otros puede permitir a una organización ser competitiva, pero no exime a los individuos de la responsabilidad principal de entender el mundo. En un reciente post, Francisco Mejía Uribe recuperaba al filósofo victoriano William Clifford para asegurar que es “una obligación moral el pensar responsablemente, es decir, creer sólo aquello de lo que tenemos suficiente evidencia, y lo que hemos investigado diligentemente”. Para Clifford, no hacerlo sería inmoral por tres razones: porque tomar decisiones erróneas tiene consecuencias negativas sobre uno mismo y sobre los demás; porque convertirnos en unos crédulos sin el necesario espíritu crítico nos reduce a bestias tragaderas; y porque no filtrar la información convenientemente contribuye a contaminar más el pozo del entendimiento colectivo, abarrotado ya de conocimiento mediocre, si no directamente falso. Y Mejía argumentaba que estas razones (y por tanto esta obligación moral) eran todavía más relevantes hoy en día, en un mundo rodeado de big data y fake news.

En total sintonía, hace unos días el Profesor Philip Howard, del Oxford Internet Institute y experto en propaganda computacional, nos daba su definición de lo que es la política: “elegir representantes para que tomen decisiones usando la evidencia”. Se refería a la buena política, porque la otra —que bien conocemos — suele hacer lo contrario: tergiversar la evidencia para que se ajuste a las decisiones políticas.

Tomar decisiones usando la evidencia es precisamente para lo que sirve la ciencia de datos que, al fin y al cabo, nace del método científico. Esta nueva ilustración del siglo XXI de la que habla Steven Pinker necesita de la ciencia de datos, y necesita democratizarla. La nueva ilustración no puede limitarse a que todos tengamos una educación crítica y que podamos acceder a Wikipedia gratuitamente. Requiere que el poder computacional y los datos de los gigantes tecnológicos sean accesibles a la población. Requiere que todos, colaborativamente, podamos descubrir nuestro conocimiento, escrutar diligentemente el de otros y así defendernos de aquellos que intentan superarnos, provocarnos y engatusarnos en todo momento por Alexa, Web y Twitter.

Así que intenta aprender más ciencia de datos, conocer qué es eso del aprendizaje automático y descubrir otras posibilidades de la inteligencia artificial. Si con ello puedes investigar la evidencia que te rodea diligentemente, no sólo harás lo oportuno; harás lo correcto. Pero más aún, preocúpate también de que tus representantes políticos, tus empleados, tus vecinos, tus familiares, tus amigos y tus hijos conozcan un poco sobre ciencia de datos. No es sólo una elección competitiva: es un mandato ético.

Aprende más sobre la ciencia de los datos en:

Aprendizaje automático y ciencia de datos

UPValenciaX (El curso está abierto para inscripción)

Inscríbete

The post Aprender Ciencia de Datos ¿Elección Competitiva o Mandato Ético? appeared first on edX Blog.

Aprender Ciencia de Datos ¿Elección Competitiva o Mandato Ético? published first on https://dlbusinessnow.tumblr.com/

[perfectzablog]

Aprender Ciencia de Datos ¿Elección Competitiva o Mandato Ético?

Blog escrito por: José Hernández Orallo, profesor de la Universidad Politécnica de Valencia y especialista en ciencia de los datos.

¿Crees que Big Data es una milonga y que el volumen, la velocidad y la variabilidad de los datos siempre han estado al límite de lo que permite la tecnología del momento? ¿Piensas que de noche tu vecina está haciendo un curso de ciencia de datos y aprendizaje automático online simplemente porque lo hace todo el mundo? Si crees todo esto, enhorabuena porque estás en lo cierto.

Y estás en lo cierto precisamente porque con la información y el conocimiento se desequilibran batallas, se levantan empresas y se desmoronan patrañas. En todos estos juegos sociales, vence la estrategia. Si tu “adversario” —y permíteme usar este término— utiliza técnicas de aprendizaje automático para analizar la información que le rodea y tú no, estás en desventaja. Esto lo entienden los gigantes tecnológicos: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, y sus semejantes en China.

Así pues, ¿por qué es importante conocer aprendizaje automático y ciencia de datos en el siglo XXI? Simplemente porque, si no lo haces, no comprenderás el mundo. No entenderás cómo se ganan elecciones, cómo se diseñan nuevos fármacos, cuánto sabe tu asistente digital, cómo se ganan y pierden clientes, cómo se crece en una red social, cuánto tarda en llegar tu taxi o cómo funciona el mercado de alquiler. Y, en definitiva, si no entiendes este mundo basado en datos, serás un ciudadano de segunda.

Ciertamente, las organizaciones, para ser competitivas, necesitarán algo más que entender los fundamentos de la ciencia de datos. En un entorno de inteligencia y aprendizaje “adversarios”, las soluciones generan datos sobre los cuales los competidores pueden aprender nuevos patrones, con los que inducir un cambio de dinámica. Pero tan pronto se genera evidencia sobre la nueva situación, puede ser explotada nuevamente y así sucesivamente. Por tanto, el volumen, la velocidad y la variabilidad se refieren al cambio; un cambio acelerado por el análisis adversario de los datos. Una organización, sin un equipo que extraiga conocimiento a partir de los datos que la rodean, fracasará al verse superada (“outsmarted”, diríamos en inglés) por otras que sí saquen partido de la ciencia de datos. Lo del Big Data es la manera que algunos tienen de decir que están a la última en este juego social, al límite de lo que la tecnología y la lógica de su rendimiento marquen en cada momento.

Disponer de un equipo de ciencia de datos o delegar esta tarea a otros puede permitir a una organización ser competitiva, pero no exime a los individuos de la responsabilidad principal de entender el mundo. En un reciente post, Francisco Mejía Uribe recuperaba al filósofo victoriano William Clifford para asegurar que es “una obligación moral el pensar responsablemente, es decir, creer sólo aquello de lo que tenemos suficiente evidencia, y lo que hemos investigado diligentemente”. Para Clifford, no hacerlo sería inmoral por tres razones: porque tomar decisiones erróneas tiene consecuencias negativas sobre uno mismo y sobre los demás; porque convertirnos en unos crédulos sin el necesario espíritu crítico nos reduce a bestias tragaderas; y porque no filtrar la información convenientemente contribuye a contaminar más el pozo del entendimiento colectivo, abarrotado ya de conocimiento mediocre, si no directamente falso. Y Mejía argumentaba que estas razones (y por tanto esta obligación moral) eran todavía más relevantes hoy en día, en un mundo rodeado de big data y fake news.

En total sintonía, hace unos días el Profesor Philip Howard, del Oxford Internet Institute y experto en propaganda computacional, nos daba su definición de lo que es la política: “elegir representantes para que tomen decisiones usando la evidencia”. Se refería a la buena política, porque la otra —que bien conocemos — suele hacer lo contrario: tergiversar la evidencia para que se ajuste a las decisiones políticas.

Tomar decisiones usando la evidencia es precisamente para lo que sirve la ciencia de datos que, al fin y al cabo, nace del método científico. Esta nueva ilustración del siglo XXI de la que habla Steven Pinker necesita de la ciencia de datos, y necesita democratizarla. La nueva ilustración no puede limitarse a que todos tengamos una educación crítica y que podamos acceder a Wikipedia gratuitamente. Requiere que el poder computacional y los datos de los gigantes tecnológicos sean accesibles a la población. Requiere que todos, colaborativamente, podamos descubrir nuestro conocimiento, escrutar diligentemente el de otros y así defendernos de aquellos que intentan superarnos, provocarnos y engatusarnos en todo momento por Alexa, Web y Twitter.

Así que intenta aprender más ciencia de datos, conocer qué es eso del aprendizaje automático y descubrir otras posibilidades de la inteligencia artificial. Si con ello puedes investigar la evidencia que te rodea diligentemente, no sólo harás lo oportuno; harás lo correcto. Pero más aún, preocúpate también de que tus representantes políticos, tus empleados, tus vecinos, tus familiares, tus amigos y tus hijos conozcan un poco sobre ciencia de datos. No es sólo una elección competitiva: es un mandato ético.

Aprende más sobre la ciencia de los datos en:

Aprendizaje automático y ciencia de datos

UPValenciaX (El curso está abierto para inscripción)

Inscríbete

The post Aprender Ciencia de Datos ¿Elección Competitiva o Mandato Ético? appeared first on edX Blog.

Aprender Ciencia de Datos ¿Elección Competitiva o Mandato Ético? published first on https://greatpricecourse.tumblr.com/

[mauriciojaramil]

¿Cómo puede la tecnología transformar el sector de la salud? Ya lo hace, y de maneras que para algunos aún parecen sacadas de una película de ciencia ficción. Pero a diferencia de otras áreas, esta es una de las que promete salvar más vidas gracias al impacto precisamente del uso de  tecnologías emergentes.

Para aterrizar el tema al entorno actual, de Colombia y el mundo, se realizó el foro Transformación Exponencial: un reto para el sector salud, organizado por Foros Semana y Coosalud, en asociación con la Fundación Santa Fe de Bogotá.

El foro fue el espacio propicio para reunir representantes del sector público, como el Ministerio de Salud y Protección Social, en cabeza del ministro Juan Pablo Uribe, médico y cirujano, así como emprendedores, empresas privadas, líderes mundiales de transformación, empresas de tecnología, el sector bancario y al editor jefe y líder editorial global para el sector salud en The Economist Intelligence Unit, Martin Koehring.

“El sector salud no lo transformamos solos. Debemos hacer alianzas”: Hugo Villegas, @MDTLATAM. Y esto va a todos los sectores. #TransformaciónExponencial @FSFB_Salud @CoosaludEPSS pic.twitter.com/9l6P2lieyA

— Impacto TIC (@ImpactoTIC) 9 de octubre de 2018

Lo que ya sabemos y no nos cansaremos de repetir

A pesar del pánico generado, muchas veces cazando un titular llamativo, los robots, la automatización y la tecnología en general no van a dejar sin empleo a los médicos. Sí, van a realizar trabajos que aún hoy se hacen, pero para permitirles explotar precisamente lo mejor de ellos, y así la tecnología se convierte en aliada tanto de pacientes como profesionales de la salud.

“Los robots estarán en salud, denlo por seguro. Pero NO reemplazarán al humano”: @EconomistMartin #TransformaciónExponencial pic.twitter.com/zOA2OBIGmB

— Impacto TIC (@ImpactoTIC) 9 de octubre de 2018

De igual manera, se insiste en que hay que poner al cliente, en este caso al paciente, en el centro de todo a la hora de diseñar soluciones.

Otra verdad evidente es que la conectividad es esencial, por lo que los retos de infraestructura siguen vigentes, pues será necesario poder tener conectados a pacientes y médicos 24/7, especialmente en el escenario que viene, el de sociedades de personas mayores, porque esa es una de las tendencias que no tienen reversa.

Y, por otro lado, el llamado al cambio de mentalidad se hace urgente. Porque si bien se sabe que la tecnología está cambiando las cosas, no se alcanza a divisar el impacto que esta trae, y aún hay quienes piensan que o no necesitan cambiar, o que eventualmente lo harán –a su debido momento–, pero el momento es ya.

“La tecnología está forzando cambios, pero nuestras sociedades aún no están listas”: @salimismail. Ese es el reto y nuestra contribución es, en gran medida, educar. #TransformaciónExponencial pic.twitter.com/iJNNjbJmx9

— Mauricio Jaramillo M (@MauricioJaramil) 9 de octubre de 2018

Disrupción de la tecnología en la salud

Salim Ismail, director ejecutivo de Singularity University y autor del concepto de ‘organizaciones exponenciales’, destacó casos como el de Universal DX, una compañía que se dedica a la detección temprana del cáncer, antes de que la enfermedad se manifieste, por medio de software. También mencionó el caso de los drones ambulancias.



Por su parte, Hugo Villegas, presidente de Medtronic para América Latina,  una empresa de tecnología, servicios y soluciones médicas, señaló cómo la telemedicina permite llegar a más pacientes en zonas distantes, monitoreando su estado de salud y optimizando los tiempos de atención.

La logística también hace parte de la disrupción, y un ejemplo es lo que sucede con Amazon, o Rappi en Colombia, que hacen entregas de medicamentos. En el caso de Amazon, Alexa, su asistente de voz con Inteligencia Artificial es un dispositivo que juega un papel crucial para el cuidado de la salud.

Martin Koehring enfatizó en la importancia de la educación, enfocada en el autocuidado para que, por ejemplo, ni paciente ni médico pierdan tiempo en una cita que podría evitarse precisamente gracias al autocuidado.

Aquí todos los procesos educativos apalancados en la tecnología son poderosos, en Colombia un ejemplo de prevención por medio de educación virtual es el Centro de Diagnóstico y Prevención de Cáncer, del Instituto Nacional de Cancerología.

En cuanto a tecnología disruptivas del sector salud, Koehring destacó la nanotecnología, que permitirá llevar dispositivos dentro del cuerpo, la impresión de órganos en 3D, el diseño de bebés, la telemedicina, el rediseño de los hospitales, la investigación enfocada en el envejecimiento y cerebros con interfaces, conectados directamente a la Inteligencia Artificial, entre otras.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Vean el foro Transformación Exponencial:



¿Evolución de la salud? No: Transformación Exponencial ¿Cómo puede la tecnología transformar el sector de la salud? Ya lo hace, y de maneras que para algunos aún parecen sacadas de una película de ciencia ficción.

[theinvinciblenoob]

Sherpa, a personal assistant startup that has carved out a niche for itself by focusing on the Spanish-language market (alongside English) and predictive suggestions, is expanding. The company is launching a set of APIs called the Sherpa Platform, which will let other businesses tap into its predictive recommendations and use them in their own consumer-facing services. Sherpa — based out of Bilbao, Spain and Palo Alto — is also announcing its a customer for the service: Porsche, which plans to use the service in its connected car services in its luxury vehicles.

In addition to the automotive sector, Sherpa plans to target the home and mobile segments with its Platform APIs, and it has some deals specifically with other automotive companies and telecoms carriers in the works.

The expansion comes at the same time that Sherpa has passed three million downloads of its app, which currently has 800,000 active users, with 80-90 percent of those Spanish. Founder and CEO Xabi Uribe-Etxebarria said that growth has been largely word-of-mouth, and that the primary aim up to now has been not scaling out — the app has been free and not trying to monetise — but gathering enough users to help train its systems as it continued to build out its product.

“There were two reasons for launching Sherpa Platform: one to start monetising since we hadn’t before,” said Uribe-Etxebarria, “and two because we saw that we had a lot of interest from telcos and car manufacturers for a B2B2C product.”

It’s also in the process of raising money. Sherpa has so far grown up on a very modest $6.5 million of funding, from Alma Mundi Innvierte Fund, FCRE, and unnamed private investors (“celebrities” says Uribe-Extebarria). The company is close to completing a bridge round for later this year of around $8 million, ahead of a larger Series B. Uribe-Extebarria says he has spoken to “all the usual names” in the US — he splits his time between Spain and California — and also a number of investors in Europe.

There have been a number of companies doubling down on using machine learning and natural language processing to develop personal AI systems that respond to voice commands to either provide information or carry out simple digital tasks, either on their own devices or on those of third party hardware makers: Amazon has its Echo speakers and Alexa; Apple has Siri and a range of hardware that runs it; Google’s Assistant goes everwhere that Android does; Microsoft has Cortana; and even Samsung (once a close partner of Sherpa’s) has rolled out its own Bixby assistant.

Sherpa has, in that context, worked to differentiate itself in a few ways.

The first of these was being an early mover — Sherpa was founded in 2012 — in building out a system for Spanish speakers, covering a number of different regional dialects in what is considered to be the world’s second-most popular language after Chinese. Several of the large tech companies that have built personal assistants, such as Google, Apple and Microsoft, all now also support Spanish, although Alexa does not; but none have as extensive support as Sherpa, which currently has seven types of Spanish dialects, and four for English. “We are focusing more on quality than quantity of languages,” he said. That said, the company does have plans to add more languages next year — an effort that it will be raising money to target 

The second of these has been a focus on predictive technology, not just answering questions dictated into the app, or carrying out small tasks, but also providing a voice-based interface that talks to the user in the same way that a human personal assistant might do: it learns what kinds of things you might want to know about, and then it proceeds to tell you about these, before you ask. This could be notifications about new incoming emails from specific people that are then read out to you — a handsfree experience that comes in handy in situations like driving — or news about subjects that you follow.

Uribe-Etxebarria says that the predictive engine is currently the crux of the company’s technical development: it actually uses third-party technology for automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech capabilities. “What we focus on is using natural language processing for predictive recommendations and conversation,” he said. “For us, the other tools are now commodities, since there are other companies that do these well, and their are cheap. That’s why we want to focus on things that others do not do, and providing recommendations, and cross-domain recommendations, is what we are good at.”

The third way that Sherpa has differentiated itself to date is that it doesn’t have any skin in the game in the way that the other businesses that have launched personal assistants do.

“We only focus on personal assistants that provide predictive capabilities,” he said. “And I’m sure that the others will do this better and better, so even this isn’t our complete advantage. Ours is that we are an independent platform. It means that companies like Porsche or others do not see us as a potential competitor, but a partner.” This is especially notable, considering that the larger tech companies have long been seen as competitors among carriers, and now more recently automotive makers, who may need to rely on them for some connected car capabilities but do not want to fully relinquish ownership of their customers in the process.

      via TechCrunch

[un-enfant-immature]

Sherpa, a Spanish voice assistant, expands Series A to $15M as it passes 5M users

When we think of the AI platforms that are shaping how we use voice to interact with phones, home devices and other services, we tend to think of Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google and Microsoft’s Cortana. But there are other players that may prove to have a compelling value proposition of their own. Sherpa.ai, a voice assistant out of Spain that also provides predictive recommendations with a focus on the Spanish language, today is announcing that it has expanded its Series A by $8.5 million to $15 million as it passes 5 million active users of its app.

Investors include Mundi Ventures, a Spanish VC fund focused on AI, and Alex Cruz, the chairman and CEO of British Airways.

In a still-heated tech climate where were startups are raising tens and sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars in rounds that sometimes happen only months apart, Sherpa’s Series A has been a comparatively slow burn: the startup first announced a Series A of $6.5 million nearly three years ago.

Apart from the fact that European startups do tend to raise and spend more conservatively, Xabi Uribe-Etxebarria, the startup’s founder and CEO, says that it chose to extend this Series A now while it’s still working on closing its Series B for later this year, which will be in the region of $20 million, which will include new investors and likely more detail on how it plans to evolve the business.

“We’re announcing several agreements with big OEMs in the next few months,” he said. “I spoke with our investors and they thought it would be better to get a small amount of capital now to launch those deals to use the momentum to get a better valuation on our Series B.”

The company is already working with Porsche to bring its assistant and recommendation service into its vehicles, and Uribe-Etxebarria said future partnerships, along a similar B2B2C model, will be with “other automakers, telcos and other device manufacturers of smart speakers and PCs.” From what I have heard, Sherpa has been approached by a number of others that have been building voice assistants, as well as the companies building the hardware and other objects that will be housing them. Uribe-Etxebarria would not comment except to say that he is under NDA with several companies.

“Sherpa.ai has experienced tremendous growth and is poised to become the most advanced conversational and predictive AI OS in the industry,” said Rajeev Singh-Molares, partner at Mundi Ventures and former President of Alcatel-Lucent Asia-Pacific, in a statement. “Sherpa has shown phenomonal potential and amazing growth since the first close of the Series A. By increasing our investment in this company, we are able to accelerate Sherpa.ai on its journey.”

Scale isn’t everything

At a time when Amazon’s Alexa alone has passed the 100 million-mark in terms of devices that have been sold that are powered by its voice assistant, and Google, Microsoft and Apple appear to be quickly playing catch-up by integrating into a number of third-party and their own devices themselves,  Uribe-Etxebarria says he believes Sherpa stands apart from these for a couple of reasons.

One is the spectre of competition, and possibly the history of how things played out in mobile, where carriers really lost their way with users and value-added services with the rise of apps.

“The companies we are working with don’t always want agreements with companies that also compete with them,” he said. “Take the telco we’re working with. It has its own video and music offerings, its own retail operation. At the end, they would be competing with the likes of Apple or Amazon, so they don’t want to give them access to their users. Car manufacturers might feel the same way.”

The second reason, he says, has to do with Sherpa’s technology.

When the company launched several years ago, voice-based personal assistants were still relatively new and all the biggies were launching in English. These days, they all have Spanish versions, so this is no longer a unique selling point. (Of the company’s 5 million users, between 80-90 percent of those are using Sherpa’s Spanish content.) And even if it were, Sherpa’s basic speech recognition and text-to-speech are powered by third-party technology, which Uribe-Etxebarria calls “commodities.”

What is more unique, he says, is the company’s predictive recommentations, which is built in-house by his team of natural language and other AI specialists. It covers over 30 different specialist categories spanning areas like automotive, entertainment, news, travel and so on, and analyzes 100,000 parameters per user to be able to predict what information a user needs before a question is even asked, whether it’s news or whatever it is that you first do with your phone when you wake up, which emails you will need to see first, or what you might want to know when you arrive at a particular location.

“This is what our competitors are very interested in,” he said. “We are at least two or three years ahead of others on this front.”

Sherpa had a significant boost across the Spanish-speaking world when Samsung hooked up with the company to preload the app on all of its devices sold across those countries. That changed after Samsung launched Bixby, its own assistant, but Uribe-Etxebarria said that their partnership is not quite over yet.

“We are still speaking because Bixby can be improved a lot,” he said.

[juditmiltz]

One Sotheby’s opens new HQ in the Miami Design District

From left: Raymond Bolduc, Dennis Carvajal, Marisela Cisneros, Mirce Curkoski, Gabriela Dajer, Guillermo de la Paz, Mayi de la Vega, Claudia Fernandez, Barbara Lamar, Maria Melendez, Vanessa Stabile, Jorge Uribe

One Sotheby’s International Realty opened its new headquarters in the Miami Design District.

The brokerage announced the new office at its 10th annual summit, where president Daniel de la Vega also released the firm’s top producers for 2017. At the top of the list was Jo-Ann Forster, Susan Rindley, Saddy Delgado, Rafael Arias and Jill Penman. The top teams were the Alex Miranda and Joseph Padula team, and Mirce Curkoski, Albert Justo, Alexa Iacovelli, Mikhael Porter and George Burns’ The Waterfront team.

The company moved its headquarters from Coral Gables to a 4,000-square-foot space on the second floor of 4100 North Miami Avenue, according to a spokesperson. It’s in the same building as TSG and Minotti Kitchen. The open workspace features Herman Miller furniture and Keith Haring wallpaper.

The firm’s sales volume last year totaled $2.73 billion, including new development sales, the spokesperson said.

In 2017, One Sotheby’s was among the most active brokerages in South Florida in terms of acquisitions. It closed on the acquisitions of Turnberry Realty, Crescendo Real Estate, OMG Realty and Coastal Sotheby’s. The brokerage, led by CEO Mayi de la Vega, has 14 offices in South Florida and is handling sales of 19 developments.

from The Real Deal Miami https://therealdeal.com/miami/2018/03/08/one-sothebys-opens-new-hq-in-the-miami-design-district/ via IFTTT

[helpersofindie]

can someone help me find a face claim that could play Alexa Penavega's sister? preferably someone in their early to mid twenties. thanks in advance.

sorry, but i couldn’t find any under 26 ! hopefully there’s enough on this list to make up for it, though ! ;-;

alexa vega (29)

diane guerrero (29)

daniela ramos (29)

katherine medina (26)

jery sandoval (31)

sara corrales (31)

catalina denis (32)

carolina gaitan (33)

sonia uribe (34)

vanessa mendoza (36)

catalina sandino moreno (36)