“I was fortunate enough to meet Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently. Seeing a young, exciting Prime Minister and his colleagues in action was a breath of fresh air. At Davos, where too many people focus on the negatives, he was optimistic on topics ranging from drug policy to climate change to diversity.”
Another Quantum Breakthrough through ultra- low temp nanoelectronics- Sub-millikelvin nanoelectronic circuits and is another step on the way to develop new quantum technologies including quantum computers and sensors.
The first ever measurement of the temperature of electrons in a nanoelectronic device a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero was demonstrated in a joint research project performed by Lancaster University, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd, and Aivon Ltd.
The team managed to make the electrons in a circuit on a silicon chip colder than had previously been achieved.
Dr Rich Haley, Head of Ultra Low Temperature Physics at Lancaster, said: “This is a notable achievement in that the team has finally broken through the 4 millikelvin barrier, which has been the record in such structures for over 15 years.”
And, another breakthrough for Quantum by Russian Scientists. Russian scientists have developed a new way to solve a key problem with cooling plasmonic components, which makes optical chips and super-fast light-based computers a definite possibility. https://lnkd.in/b9kuiSa
Russian scientists discover how to cool plasmonic components to make light-based transistors possible.
Wise Autoresponse for your Customer Support Call Center needs — I do know that one of the large financial institutions in NYC announced in Dec. that they were replacing their tier 1 & tier 2 support with AI this summer.
BERKELEY, CA — (Marketwired) — 01/27/16 — Wise.io, which delivers machine learning applications to help enterprises provide a better customer experience, today announced the availability of Wise Auto Response, the first intelligent auto reply functionality for customer support organizations. Using machine learning to understand the intent of an incoming ticket and determine the best available response, Wise Auto Response automatically selects and applies the appropriate reply to address the customer issue without ever involving an agent. By helping customer service teams answer common questions faster, Wise Auto Response removes a high percentage of tickets from the queue, freeing up agents’ time to focus on more complex tickets and drive higher levels of customer satisfaction.
“Wise Auto Response has dramatically eased the burden on our support agents, allowing us to reply to half of all tickets automatically,” said Francesca Noli, VP of Marketing at Product Madness. “Now we are able to focus agent attention on more complex, customer-facing issues like payment problems, which have a direct impact on our bottom line. Wise gives us the best of both worlds: it has the power of an artificial intelligence system like Watson, along with the lightweight integration we need to successfully apply machine learning to our service operations quickly, easily and cost effectively.”
Wise Auto Response identifies common customer inquiries that can be responded to with a high level of confidence — such as password resets and basic product functionality, or standard “thank you” email templates that don’t require hands-on follow up — and automatically responds without the need for any manually written business rules. The new functionality complements the current suite of predictive applications offered by Wise.io, including Wise Routing, which automates the support ticket triage process, and Wise Recommended Response, which provides a ranked shortlist of appropriate macros and templates for each new customer inquiry.
Virtual Healthcare & IMSHealth is a major player in this service offering. Healthcare and clinic in your own home.
The University of Southern California Center for Body Computing has teamed with 8 partners to launch a Virtual Care Clinic. The idea with VCC is to create an integrated approach to the use of mobile apps, “virtual” doctors, artificial intelligence, data collection and analysis, as well as diagnostics and wearable sensors to create truly on-demand healthcare.
The partners involved in this effort are peer-reviewed clinical trial database startup Doctor Evidence, drug data resource IMS Health ($IMS), consumer design firm Karten Design, HIPAA-compliant cloud platform Medable, video creator Planet Grande, sensor-enabled pill startup Proteus Digital Health and vision player VSP Global.
VSP’s next-gen sensor-embedded eyewear prototype, dubbed Project Genesis, will be refined and tested at the VCC in consultation with USC CBC, which is the digital health innovation accelerator at Keck School of Medicine. The VCC will also involve USC’s Institute of Creative Technologies (ICT).
A cheaper way for VR wear for consumers; are consumers potentially being ripped off?
The Oculus Rift finally went on sale, but that $600 price tag is a bit too steep for some to justify. Fortunately, VR doesn’t have to be expensive. Take this virtual reality cycling rig that someone created for $40.
It’s the work of Paul Yan, who’s the animation director at Toys for Bob — the studio that developed Skylanders and kicked off the toys-to-life revolution. He previously figured out how to build an “Arduino thing” that could talk to a smartphone via Bluetooth LE and he wanted to put his contraption to good use.
He whipped up a cityscape in Unity, set his mountain bike up on an indoor trainer, and marked the rear tire with a small piece of paper. The Arduino tracks pedaling speed by keeping tabs on how long it takes the paper to make a revolution, and it relays that information back to the phone, which is then clipped into a VR headset. The phone tells the virtual bike to keep pace: pedal faster, and the street scene moves by more quickly. If you’d rather cruise around the neighborhood, pedal more slowly.
VR membership HUB (YouTube for VR) ; loading & sharing your own 3D content with others.
BEIJING, Jan. 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ — Ku6 Media Co., Ltd. (“Ku6 Media” or the “Company,” NASDAQ: KUTV), a leading internet video company focused on User Generated Content (“UGC”) in China via its website www.ku6.com, today announced that the Company has entered into a strategic cooperation agreement (the “Agreement”) with 720Yun.com to enhance the Company’s virtual reality (“VR”) strategy previous announced. The company recently launched a cooperative VR community at the following website: http://www.ku6.com/c2015/720yun/.
Ku6 Media and 720Yun.com’s cooperative VR community currently features eight categories, including aerial photography, SLR (single lens reflex) photography, virtual effects, quick mode (RICOH THETA), cities, campuses, fun and business projects. The Company expects to add additional categories to the VR community in the future.
Pursuant to the Agreement, 720Yun.com will provide three-dimensional panorama technology and contents to Ku6 Media in the form of video and picture, and serve as technical support for the Company’s new VR products. The two companies will work together in exploring and developing potential business models relating to three-dimensional panorama contents.
I can now see it; Nov. I go into my local Verizon store; and Pepper the robot greets me and takes my name and helps me get in line for the next service tech or takes me to show me the latest devices.
Pepper, the lovable humanoid robot, is preparing to take a step into entrepreneurship and staff its own smartphone shop in Japan.
Creator company SoftBank said it planned to open the pop-up mobile store employing only Pepper robots by the end of March, according to Engadget.
The four foot-tall robots will be on hand to answer questions, provide directions and guide customers in taking out phone contracts until early April. It’s currently unknown what brands of phone Pepper will be selling.
Interesting approach.
A group of scientists has created a neural network based on polymeric memristors — devices that can potentially be used to build fundamentally new computers. These developments will primarily help in creating technologies for machine vision, hearing, and other machine sensory systems, and also for intelligent control systems in various fields of applications, including autonomous robots.
Google’s machine learning group is licensing new chip technology to make the devices in our pockets more intelligent and autonomous.
