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As Mark Hamill humorously shared the behind-the-scenes of “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” with a packed SXSW audience, two floors below on the exhibit floor Universal Robots recreated General Grievous’ famed light saber battles. The battling machines were steps away from a twelve foot dancing Kuka robot and an automated coffee dispensary. Somehow the famed interactive festival known for its late night drinking, dancing and concerts had a very mechanical feel this year. Everywhere debates ensued between utopian tech visionaries and dystopia-fearing humanists.

Even my panel on “Investing In The Autonomy Economy” took a very social turn when discussing the opportunities of utilizing robots for the growing aging population. Eric Daimler (formerly of the Obama White House) raised concerns about AI bias affecting the well being of seniors. Agreeing, Dan Burstein (partner at Millennium Tech Value Partners) nervously expressed that ‘AI is everywhere, in everything, and the USA has no other way to care for this exploding demographic except with machines.’ Daimler explained that “AI is very good at perception, just not context;” until this is solved it could be a very dangerous problem worldwide.

Last year at a Google conference on the relationship between humans and AI, the company’s senior vice president of engineering, John Giannandrea, warned, “The real safety question, if you want to call it that, is that if we give these systems biased data, they will be biased. It’s important that we be transparent about the training data that we are using, and are looking for hidden biases in it, otherwise we are building biased systems.” Similar to Daimler’s anxiety about AI and healthcare, Giannandrea exclaimed that “If someone is trying to sell you a black box system for medical decision support, and you don’t know how it works or what data was used to train it, then I wouldn’t trust it.”

One of the most famous illustrations of how quickly human bias influences computer actions is Tay, the Microsoft customer service chatbot on Twitter. It took only twenty-four hours for Tay to develop a Nazi persona leading to more than ninety thousand hate-filled tweets. Tay swiftly calculated that hate on social media equals popularity. In explaining its failed experiment to Business Insider Microsoft stated via email: “The AI chatbot Tay is a machine learning project, designed for human engagement. As it learns, some of its responses are inappropriate and indicative of the types of interactions some people are having with it. We’re making some adjustments to Tay.”

While Tay’s real impact was benign, it raises serious questions of the implications of embedding AI into machines and society. In its Pulitzer Prize-winning article, ProPublica.org uncovered that a widely distributed US criminal justice software called Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS) was racially biased in scoring the risk levels of convicted felons to recommit crimes. ProPublica discovered that black defendants in Florida, “were far more likely than white defendants to be incorrectly judged to be at a higher rate of recidivism” by the AI. Northpointe, the company that created COMPAS, released its own report that disputed ProPublica’s findings but it refused to pull back the curtain on its training data, keeping the algorithms hidden in a “black box.” In a statement released to the New York Times, Northpointe’s spokesperson argued, “The key to our product is the algorithms, and they’re proprietary. We’ve created them, and we don’t release them because it’s certainly a core piece of our business.” 

The dispute between Northpointe and ProPublica raises the question of transparency and the auditing of data by an independent arbitrator to protect against bias. Cathy O’Neil, a former Barnard professor and analyst at D.E. Shaw, thinks a lot about safeguarding ordinary Americans from biased AI. In her book, Weapons of Math Destruction, she cautions that big corporate America is too willing to hand over the wheel to the algorithms without fully assessing the risks or implementing any oversight monitoring. “[Algorithms] replace human processes, but they’re not held to the same standards. People trust them too much,” declares O’Neil. Understanding the high stakes and lack of regulatory oversight by the current federal government, O’Neil left her high-paying Wall Street job to start a software auditing firm, O’Neil Risk Consulting & Algorithmic Auditing. In an interview with MIT Technology Review last summer, O’Neil frustratingly expressed that companies are more interested in the bottom line than protecting their employees, customers, and families from bias, “I’ll be honest with you. I have no clients right now.”

Most of the success of deconstructing “black boxes” is happening today at the US Department of Defense. DARPA has been funding the research of Dr. David Gunning to develop Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). Understanding its own AI and that of foreign governments could be a huge advantage for America’s cyber military units. At the same time, like many DARPA-funded projects, civilian opportunities could offer societal benefits. According to Gunning’s statement, online XAI aims to “produce more explainable models, while maintaining a high level of learning performance (prediction accuracy); and enable human users to understand, appropriately trust, and effectively manage the emerging generation of artificially intelligent partners.” XAI plans to work with developers and user interfaces designers to foster “useful explanation dialogues for the end user,” to know when to trust or question the AI-generated data. 

Besides DARPA, many large technology companies and universities are starting to create think tanks, conferences and policy groups to develop standards that test AI bias. The results have been startling – ranging from computer vision sensors that negatively identify people of color to gender bias in employment management software to blatant racism of natural language processing systems to security robots that run over kids identified mistakenly as threats. As an example of how training data affects outcomes, when Google first released its image processing software, the AI identified photos of African Americans as “gorillas,” because the engineers failed to provide enough minority examples into the neural network.

Ultimately artificial intelligence reflects the people that program it, as every human being brings with him his own experiences that shape personal biases. According to Kathleen Walch, host of AI Today podcast, “If the researchers and developers developing our AI systems are themselves lacking diversity, then the problems that AI systems solve and training data used both become biased based on what these data scientists feed into AI training data,” Walch advocates that hiring diversity can bring “about different ways of thinking, different ethics and different mindsets. Together, this creates more diverse and less biased AI systems. This will result in more representative data models, diverse and different problems for AI solutions to solve, and different use cases feed to these systems if there is a more diverse group feeding that information.”

Before leaving SXSW, I attended a panel hosted by the IEEE on “Algorithms, Unconscious Bias & AI,” amazingly all led by female panelists including one person of color. Hiring basis became a big theme of their discussion. Following the talk, I hopped into my Uber and pleasantly rode to the airport reflecting on a statement made earlier in the day by John Krafcik, Cheif Executive, of Waymo. Krafcik boasted that Waymo’s mission is to build “the world’s most experienced driver,” I just hope that the training data is not from New York City cabbies.

Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu and JD.com from China are in a global competition with Google/Alphabet, Apple, Facebook, Walmart and Amazon from the USA and SoftBank from Japan. All are agressively searching for talent, intellectual property, market share, logistics and supply chain technology, and presence all around the world.

These leading tech-savvy companies have many things in common. Foremost, they are all in pursuit of global growth and the funding, technology and talent to propel that growth. And they all are investing in voice assistance and other forms of AI and robotics.

Although Amazon is leading the way with its ecosystem surrounding its AI assistant Alexa, each of the others either has or are developing competing systems of equal or greater capability… think OK Google, Siri and Apple’s new Homepod and Cortana or, in China, Alibaba’s Tmall Genie, Baidu’s Little Fish and JD’s DingDong.

Also, they are all moving toward providing AI as a service.

• Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) is China’s primary search source and also provides Internet-related services and products as well as targeted advertising, transaction services and a video platform. Baidu is heavily investing in researching deep learning, computer vision, speech recognition and synthesis, natural language understanding, data mining and knowledge discovery, business intelligence, artificial general intelligence, high performance computing, robotics and autonomous driving (at their new self-driving lab in Silicon Valley).
• Alibaba (NYSE:BABA) is a multi-national China-based e-commerce retailer, payment and technology conglomerate, cloud provider, whose two shopping malls (Tmall and Taobao) have over 1 billion combined active users and are supported by a budding logistics network. Alibaba’s AI-powered platform (which it uses internally for its shopping malls and logistics processing) was recently rolled out in Kuala Lumpur to support smart cities in their digital transformation. It analyzes large data volumes extracted from various sources in an urban environment, through video, image, and speech recognition. The system then uses machine learning to provide insights for city administrators to improve operational efficiencies and monitor security risks.
• Tencent (HKG:0700) is a Chinese provider of Internet and cloud-related services and products, entertainment, music services, AI, real estate and social media including WeChat (which recently hit 1 billion users). More than 35% of WeChat users spend over four hours a day on the service compared to the little more than an hour a day spent on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter combined. Tencent has set up AI labs in Shenzhen and Seattle and is researching voice and image recognition systems and transforming what they’ve learned into apps and algorithms to keep their users informed and attentive.

NOTE: Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent make up B A T, the acronym given to the trio of main competitors in China’s quantum computer and machine learning research. In addition to labs in China, each has a Silicon Valley research center. Funding and incentives are provided by the Chinese government. The three BAT companies already collect and analyze huge amounts of data from their e-commerce transactions, mobile gaming, online search and payments to social media, video streaming and on-demand services such as ride-sharing and food deliveries. With quantum computing, they will be able to sift through massive data streams faster and better than with existing supercomputers.

• JD.Com (NASDAQ:JD) is a Chinese e-commerce competitor with about half the user base of Alibaba yet with very progressive logistics and infrastructure programs. JD (Jingdong) is testing robotic delivery services, operating driverless delivery trucks and building drone delivery ports. JD operates 7 fulfillment centers and 405 warehouses in China. Last month it raised $2.5 billion for its JD Logistics subsidiary to build out and expand their logistics network.
• SoftBank (TYO:9984) is a Japanese telecom conglomerate. Softbank is also the instigator of the SoftBank Vision Fund which is investing massive amounts ($98 bn) in technologies and entrepreneurs pioneering the future through a wide range of sectors: IoT, AI, robotics, mobile applications and computing, and infrastructure, cloud technologies and software. SoftBank, with it’s funding partners Apple, Qualcomm and various sovereign wealth funds, wants to invest another $900 billion in 1,000 AI and robotics companies in the next decade. SoftBank is also a partner with Alibaba and Foxconn to produce and market Pepper and Nao robots.
• Google/Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) is a Silicon Valley search engine and Internet products company with a stable of forthcoming AI ventures such as Waymo, Verb Surgical and Nest along with consumer products like Google Home, Android phones and Chromebook computers. Google is leveraging their data, processing power, and talent into an array of AI-based apps, processes and products. Their foray into robotics hardware has resulted in much valuable research but all of the units have either been sold off or closed (except for Boston Dynamics and Shaft which are held up from sale by government regulators). Although still a leader in machine learning, Google is finding much competition from their Chinese competitors.
• Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is Apple, a Silicon Valley designer, manufacturer and marketer of phones, media and hardware devices and provider of software, services and digital content. Apple is the world’s largest information technology company by revenue and the world’s second-largest mobile phone manufacturer after Samsung with annual revenue of $229 billion. Building out Siri from the virtual world into the consumer product world with their new Homepod is off to a late start.
• Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) is also a Silicon Valley-based Internet phenomena with products that include Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp and Oculus. Facebook has over 2.2 billion active users. Their investments in AI appear to be focused on developing a virtual (or physical) assistant. Their acquisition of Ozlo to help Messenger build out a more elaborate virtual assistant for users is an example.
• Walmart (NYSE:WMT) is a global retailer with wholesale facilities, logistics and distribution centers all around the world. Walmart operates over 11,000 stores under 59 names in 28 countries and e-commerce sites in 11 countries. It grosses over $480 billion annually and employs over 2.3 million workers. As Walmart increases its online e-commerce market share while simultaneously changing practices to provide better product transparency (particularly in and faster material handling at its stores and distribution centers, it too is on a talent hunt for roboticists and AI/machine learning people and providers.
• Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) Amazon is the leading e-commerce seller of products, supply chain services, AI, and cloud services that is copied and competed with around the world. Amazon accounts for ~4% of all retail and ~44% of all e-commerce spending in the US. Amazon’s supply chain and logistics facilities use more than 60,000 robots in its various warehouses and distribution centers, and its cloud services, which not only services Amazon, provides on-demand cloud computing platforms to companies and governments on a subscription basis. Amazon’s Echo/Alexa home assistant has started to include capabilities like a display, camera and alarm clock, security cameras, and even a fashion advisor. It is combining all these different incremental parts to build a smart home robot as they become viable and front-ended by the Alexa voice assistant.

Amazon is the company to watch in terms of early innovation. Others follow and emulate; Amazon quietly goes forward and China is on its horizon. CBInsights had two interesting comments on the subject as can be seen in these two charts:

CBInsights looked at which peers companies were talked about in financial reports and calls and found that Amazon doesn’t mention competitors. But Amazon mentions of China are up 57% over 2016.

NOTE: There are no Europeans in this list nor in the Top 15 Alexa Sites. Large robotics firms in Germany and Italy have been sold to China. ARM, the British chip-maker, was sold to SoftBank and DeepMind, the UK AI wonder, was picked up by Google. Many fear that Europe may excel at manufacturing but don’t have protectionist impulses to fend off (and keep up with) America or China and to know that smart manufacturing and smart cars – in fact smart everything – is the new game. Recently European leadership has shown fear in the use of and connection to cloud and analytics platforms in the age of IoT – even though Europeans pioneered the term Industry 4.0.

A major talent-hunting event is the big NVIDIA GPU tech conference being held in San Jose March 26-29. Over 8,000 industry professionals of all types are planning to attend this job fair and place to learn about AI, machine learning and deep learning.

Infrastructure

Common to all is e-commerce and the systems that pick, pack, ship and deliver all the goods. Thus, in addition to investments and interest in cloud platforms, super computing and AI, there is a global explosion in warehouse construction and reconfiguration for automation. According to Cushman & Wakefield, U.S. developers added almost 1 billion square feet of warehouse space from 2013 to 2017, a 2X increase over the previous 5 years. It’s harder to get information for China but news stories indicate similar if not greater growth, new forms of automation and labor shortages.

The constant lament heard in the U.S. is captured (and presumed to be relevant worldwide) is this quote from a fulfillment executive:

“A big part of our strategy is how do we make the current employees we have more productive and to reduce the requirement for more labor at peak times.”

Providing warehouse labor is a big business because workers are hard to find and turnover is more than 10% per month. Hence the simultaneous investment in robotics and smart warehousing systems to maximize human effort and reduce costly errors and turnover.

Warehousing has always been as automated as possible, particularly in pallet and box handling, but as labor has become more scarce and costly, as robotic systems have improved and costs been reduced, and as the number of shipments has increased exponentially due to e-commerce, the nature of material handling and fulfillment has radically changed. Hence the need for mechanical assistance.

But this is fodder for another article to follow shortly on the global inroads being made in fulfillment and material handling. Stay tuned.

The Airframe is designed like a backpack and can be adjusted to almost any body size with an adjustable frame and straps. It supports the upper extremities of professionals and skilled trade workers who are exposed to repetitive arm motions and/or stationary arm elevation.

As we see more widespread acceptance for robots in general, we'll likely see even more automation in health care — but some of it is already here.

Assistive devices may soon allow people to perform virtually superhuman feats. According to Robert Riener, however, there are more pressing goals than developing superhumans.

Known mostly for their smart warfare systems - Milrem Robotics - is entering the commercial market with its firefighting and search and rescue unmanned ground vehicle being developed together with rescue services.

A pair of autonomous robots developed by Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute will soon be driving through miles of pipes at the U.S. Department of Energy's former uranium enrichment plant in Piketon, Ohio, to identify uranium deposits on pipe walls.

Are we bumping up against the "Robocalypse," when automation sweeps industry and replaces human workers with machines? BU economist Pascual Restrepo says that interpretation is too gloomy, although his recent research, posted online by the National Bureau of Economic Research, reveals that the adoption of just one industrial robot eliminates nearly six jobs in a community.

As a teenager working for his dad's construction business, Noah Ready-Campbell dreamed that robots could take over the dirty, tedious parts of his job, such as digging and leveling soil for building projects.

In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks with Maja Matarić, a professor at the University of Southern California and the Chief Scientific Officer of Embodied, about socially assistive robotics. Socially assistive robotics aims to endow robots with the ability to help people through individual non-contact assistance in convalescence, rehabilitation, training, and education. For example, a robot could help a child on the autism spectrum to connect to more neurotypical children and could help to motivate a stroke victim to follow their exercise routine for rehabilitation (see the videos below). In this interview, Matarić discusses the care gap in health care, how her work leverages research in psychology to make robots engaging, and opportunities in socially assistive robotics for entrepreneurship.

A short video about how personalized robots might act as a “social bridge” between a child on the autism spectrum and a more neurotypical child.

 

A short video about how a robot could assist stroke victims in their recovery.

 

Maja Matarić

Maja Matarić is professor and Chan Soon-Shiong chair in Computer Science Department, Neuroscience Program, and the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Southern California, founding director of the USC Robotics and Autonomous Systems Center (RASC), co-director of the USC Robotics Research Lab and Vice Dean for Research in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. She received her PhD in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from MIT, MS in Computer Science from MIT, and BS in Computer Science from the University of Kansas. 

 

 

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At South by Southwest, as entrepreneurs and celebrities mingle to discuss the future of tech, a lot of the hype focuses on attention-grabbing projects such as flying cars. But there also are ideas on display with a more practical bent—projects that could get into consumers' hands sooner.

The mission of my lab is to discover new types of materials that will allow machines, robots, and electronics to be more compatible with our everyday environment.