Searching for "china"
Sweden launches ‘Psychological Defence Agency’ to counter propaganda from Russia, China and Iran
The new agency is tasked with countering disinformation and boosting the population’s resilience in the face of possible influence operation
https://www.mpf.se/en/
The agency’s main mission is the coordination and development of agencies’ and other actors’ activities within Sweden’s psychological defence.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/3383c0a2-6d94-11ec-a1b8-3009dadbed4f
https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2022/01/05/sweden-launches-psychological-defense-agency-to-counter-disinformation/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/01/04/sweden-launches-psychological-defence-agency-counter-complex/
Today’s College Students Care About Privacy — Despite Some of Their Online Actions
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2021-11-02-today-s-college-students-care-about-privacy-despite-some-of-their-online-actions
a new report from the nonprofit Future of Privacy Forum, which analyzed recent research about young adults from the U.S., China, Germany and Japan.
a study from Indiana University detailed the fears college students have about and the ways they adapt to the fact that they may be photographed at any moment by friends, classmates or even strangers.
Another worry described in the Future of Privacy Forum report is about a type of digital harassment known as “doxxing,”
Many students are loath to share biometric information with colleges and are wary about tools like facial recognition software.
WHY TECHNOLOGY FAVORS TYRANNY
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/yuval-noah-harari-technology-tyranny/568330/
Artificial intelligence could erase many practical advantages of democracy, and erode the ideals of liberty and equality. It will further concentrate power among a small elite if we don’t take steps to stop it.
liberal democracy and free-market economics might become obsolete.
The Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions were made by people who were vital to the economy but lacked political power; in 2016, Trump and Brexit were supported by many people who still enjoyed political power but feared they were losing their economic worth.
artificial intelligence is different from the old machines. In the past, machines competed with humans mainly in manual skills. Now they are beginning to compete with us in cognitive skills. And we don’t know of any third kind of skill—beyond the manual and the cognitive—in which humans will always have an edge.
Israel is a leader in the field of surveillance technology, and has created in the occupied West Bank a working prototype for a total-surveillance regime.
The conflict between democracy and dictatorship is actually a conflict between two different data-processing systems. AI may swing the advantage toward the latter.
As we rely more on Google for answers, our ability to locate information independently diminishes. Already today, “truth” is defined by the top results of a Google search.
The race to accumulate data is already on, and is currently headed by giants such as Google and Facebook and, in China, Baidu and Tencent. So far, many of these companies have acted as “attention merchants”—they capture our attention by providing us with free information, services, and entertainment, and then they resell our attention to advertisers.
We aren’t their customers—we are their product.
Nationalization of data by governments could offer one solution; it would certainly curb the power of big corporations. But history suggests that we are not necessarily better off in the hands of overmighty governments.
U.S. Ed Tech Spending to Reach $27.6 Billion in 2021
https://campustechnology.com/articles/2021/10/07/report-u.s-ed-tech-spending-to-reach-27.6-billion-in-2021.aspx
The report forecast China’s growth in ed tech spending to be 15.6 percent over the same period, reaching $34.2 billion by 2026. Japan, Canada and Germany are all expected to see double-digit growht in ed tech spending over the report period as well: Japan at 14.5 percent, Canada at 14 percent and Germany at 11.9 percent CAGR.
+++++++++++++++++++
More on educational technology in this blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=Educational+technology
A peer-reviewed journal published hundreds of them. Why?
https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-did-a-peer-reviewed-journal-publish-hundreds-of-nonsense-papers
One clue is that the overwhelming majority of the papers were ostensibly written by authors who claim to be affiliated with Chinese institutions. Universities in China often reward researchers for publishing in notable journals listed on the Science Citation Index, in some cases paying them cash bonuses, though China’s science and education ministries have recently tried to crack down on the practice. It’s also long been a requirement that doctoral students at many Chinese universities publish a paper before they graduate.
+++++++++++++++++++++++
China’s Plagiarism Problem
https://www.forbes.com/2010/05/26/china-cheating-innovation-markets-economy-plagiarism.html
Plagiarism and the lack of academic integrity it engenders are intricately connected to the larger debate about intellectual property rights (IPR) in China and the government’s promoted idea of a harmonious society to support stability.
The Next Wave of Edtech Will Be Very, Very Big — and Global
https://www-edsurge-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.edsurge.com/amp/news/2021-07-30-the-next-wave-of-edtech-will-be-very-very-big-and-global
India’s Byju’s
Few companies have tackled the full range of learners since the days when Pearson was touted as the world’s largest learning company. Those that do, however, are increasingly huge (like PowerSchool, which had an IPO this week) and work across international borders.
Chinese education giants, including TAL and New Oriental.
The meteoric rise of Chinese edtech companies has dimmed recently as the Chinese government shifted regulations around online tutoring, in an effort to “protect students’ right to rest, improve the quality of school education and reduce the burden on parents.”
Acquisitions and partnerships are a cornerstone of Byju’s early learning programs: It bought Palo Alto-based Osmo in 2019, which combines digital learning with manipulatives, an approach the companies call “phygital.” For instance: Using a tablet’s camera and Osmo’s artificial intelligence software, the system tracks what a child is doing on a (physical) worksheet and responds accordingly to right and wrong answers. “It’s almost like having a teacher looking over you,
My note: this can be come disastrous when combined with the China’s “social credit” system.
By contrast, Byju’s FutureSchool (launched in the U.S. this past spring) aims to offer one-to-one tutoring sessions starting with coding (based in part on WhiteHat Jr., which it acquired in August 2020) and eventually including music, fine arts and English to students in the U.S., Brazil, the U.K., Indonesia and others. The company has recruited 11,000 teachers in India to staff the sessions
In mid-July, Byju’s bought California-based reading platform Epic for $500 million. That product opens up a path for Byju’s to schools. Epic offers a digital library of more than 40,000 books for students ages 12 and under. Consumers pay about $80 a year for the library. It’s free to schools. Epic says that more than 1 million teachers in 90 percent of U.S. elementary schools have signed up for accounts.
That raises provocative questions for U.S. educators. Among them:
- How will products originally developed for the consumer market fit the needs of schools, particularly those that serve disadvantaged students?
- Will there be more development dollars poured into products that appeal to consumers—and less into products that consumers typically skip (say, middle school civics or history curriculum?)
- How much of an investment will giants such as Byju’s put into researching the effectiveness of its products? In the past most consumers have been less concerned than professional educators about the “research” behind the learning products they buy. Currently Gokulnath says the company most closely tracks metrics such as “engagement” (how much time students spend on the product) and “renewals” (how many customers reup after a year’s use of the product.)
- How will products designed for home users influence parents considering whether to continue to school at home in the wake of viral pandemics?
What is AI? Here’s everything you need to know about artificial intelligence
An executive guide to artificial intelligence, from machine learning and general AI to neural networks.
https://www-zdnet-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/what-is-ai-heres-everything-you-need-to-know-about-artificial-intelligence/
What is artificial intelligence (AI)?
It depends who you ask.
What are the uses for AI?
What are the different types of AI?
Narrow AI is what we see all around us in computers today — intelligent systems that have been taught or have learned how to carry out specific tasks without being explicitly programmed how to do so.
General AI
General AI is very different and is the type of adaptable intellect found in humans, a flexible form of intelligence capable of learning how to carry out vastly different tasks, anything from haircutting to building spreadsheets or reasoning about a wide variety of topics based on its accumulated experience.
What can Narrow AI do?
There are a vast number of emerging applications for narrow AI:
- Interpreting video feeds from drones carrying out visual inspections of infrastructure such as oil pipelines.
- Organizing personal and business calendars.
- Responding to simple customer-service queries.
- Coordinating with other intelligent systems to carry out tasks like booking a hotel at a suitable time and location.
- Helping radiologists to spot potential tumors in X-rays.
- Flagging inappropriate content online, detecting wear and tear in elevators from data gathered by IoT devices.
- Generating a 3D model of the world from satellite imagery… the list goes on and on.
What can General AI do?
A survey conducted among four groups of experts in 2012/13 by AI researchers Vincent C Müller and philosopher Nick Bostrom reported a 50% chance that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) would be developed between 2040 and 2050, rising to 90% by 2075.
What is machine learning?
What are neural networks?
What are other types of AI?
Another area of AI research is evolutionary computation.
What is fueling the resurgence in AI?
What are the elements of machine learning?
As mentioned, machine learning is a subset of AI and is generally split into two main categories: supervised and unsupervised learning.
Supervised learning
Unsupervised learning
Which are the leading firms in AI?
Which AI services are available?
All of the major cloud platforms — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform — provide access to GPU arrays for training and running machine-learning models, with Google also gearing up to let users use its Tensor Processing Units — custom chips whose design is optimized for training and running machine-learning models.
Which countries are leading the way in AI?
It’d be a big mistake to think the US tech giants have the field of AI sewn up. Chinese firms Alibaba, Baidu, and Lenovo, invest heavily in AI in fields ranging from e-commerce to autonomous driving. As a country, China is pursuing a three-step plan to turn AI into a core industry for the country, one that will be worth 150 billion yuan ($22bn) by the end of 2020 to become the world’s leading AI power by 2030.
How can I get started with AI?
While you could buy a moderately powerful Nvidia GPU for your PC — somewhere around the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 or faster — and start training a machine-learning model, probably the easiest way to experiment with AI-related services is via the cloud.
How will AI change the world?
Robots and driverless cars
Fake news
Facial recognition and surveillance
Healthcare
Reinforcing discrimination and bias
AI and global warming (climate change)
Will AI kill us all?
+++++++++++++
more on AI in this iMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=artificial+intelligence+education
Coming out in Germany today: Soft Burial by Fang Fang
https://www.swr.de/swr2/literatur/fang-fang-weiches-begraebnis-100.html
https://mychinesebooks.com/soft-burial-novelist-fang-fang-land-reform-china/ https://theculturetrip.com/asia/china/articles/why-did-chinese-authorities-ban-the-award-winning-novel-soft-burial/
+++++++++++++++
more on China in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=china
U.S. is ‘not prepared to defend or compete in the A.I. era,’ says expert group chaired by Eric Schmidt – In a report, it warned that AI systems will be used in the “pursuit of power” and that “AI will not stay in the domain of superpowers or the realm of science fiction.” from r/Futurology
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/02/us-not-prepared-to-defend-or-compete-in-ai-era-says-eric-schmidt-group.html
The National Security Commission on AI warned in a 756-page report on Monday that China could soon replace the U.S. as the world’s “AI superpower” and said there are serious military implications to consider.
The 15 members of the commission include technologists, national security professionals, business executives and academic leaders. Among them are Amazon’s next CEO, Andy Jassy, Oracle CEO Safra Catz, Microsoft Chief Scientific Officer Eric Horvitz and Google Cloud AI chief Andrew Moore.
China has stated that it wants to be a global leader in AI by 2030. The report’s authors have said it is vital that the U.S. does all it can to eliminate the chance of this happening.
+++++++++++
more on cybersecurity in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=cybersecurity
Nreal (Finally) Expanding to the US This Spring
https://arpost.co/2021/02/22/nreal-finally-expanding-to-the-us-this-spring/amp/
The China-based company announced the Nreal Light smart glasses in May of 2019. The surprisingly sleek and powerful consumer glasses with a $500 price tag
They’ve had huge success in China, but China is a pretty unique market. In late 2019, they expanded to Korea
the company is partnered with Deutsche Telekom and LG Uplus in Germany and Korea respectively, so it’s not too far a stretch to wager that the US branches of those carriers (T-Mobile and LG Electronics) will form at least part of their US distribution channels.
Finch Technologies makes body-tracking wearable devices to serve as controllers for XR applications and experiences including the recently announced FinchRing (this is the promised cherry on top).
The finger-worn hand tracker is designed to enable convenient and discreet 6-degree-of-freedom controls.
- Tagesschau 2025 – an application based on a German news program that will present, among other features, holographic weather forecasts;
- A virtual basketball game called DunkaAR;
- An MR mode for the in-browser MMORPG Dragon Awaken;
- An augmented reality football streaming application from Magenta Sport.
++++++++++++++
more on immersive in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=immersive
more on Nreal in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=nreal+smartglass