Category: Technology

Sophia, one of the world's most advanced and perhaps most famous artificial intelligence (AI) humanoid robot, was a big hit at this year's Information & Communication Technology International Expo in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Visitors, including various dignitaries, were excited to meet the life-like AI robot as she communicated with expo guests and expressed a wide range of facial expressions. As VOA’s Mariama Diallo reports, Sophia has become an international sensation. ...

When a CIA-backed venture capital fund took an interest in Rana el Kaliouby's face-scanning technology for detecting emotions, the computer scientist and her colleagues did some soul-searching — and then turned down the money. "We're not interested in applications where you're spying on people," said el Kaliouby, the CEO and co-founder of the Boston startup Affectiva. The company has trained its artificial intelligence systems to recognize if individuals are happy or sad, tired or angry, using a photographic repository of more than 6 million faces. Recent advances in AI-powered computer vision have accelerated the race for self-driving cars and powered the increasingly sophisticated photo-tagging features found on Facebook and Google. But as these prying AI "eyes" find new applications in store checkout lines, police body cameras and war zones, the…

India has asked Facebook to prevent the spread of false texts on its WhatsApp messaging application, saying the content has sparked a series of lynchings and mob beatings across the country. False messages about child abductors spread over WhatsApp have reportedly led to at least 31 deaths in 10 different states over the past year, including a deadly mob lynching Sunday of five men in the western state of Maharashtra. In a strongly worded statement Tuesday, India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology said the service "cannot evade accountability and responsibility" when messaging platforms are used to spread misinformation. "The government has also conveyed in no uncertain terms that Whatsapp must take immediate action to end this menace and ensure that their platform is not used for such mala fide…

A Portuguese tech firm is uncorking an Android smartphone whose case is made from cork, a natural and renewable material native to the Iberian country. The Ikimobile phone is one of the first to use materials other than plastic, metal and glass and represents a boost for the country's technology sector, which has made strides in software development but less in hardware manufacturing. A Made in Portugal version of the phone is set to launch this year as Ikimobile completes a plant to transfer most of its production from China. “Ikimobile wants to put Portugal on the path to the future and technologies by emphasizing this Portuguese product,” chief executive Tito Cardoso told Reuters at Ikimobile’s plant in the cork-growing area of Coruche, 80 km (50 miles) west of Lisbon.…

It was 50 years ago the sci-fi epic 2001: A Space Odyssey by author Arthur C. Clarke and filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, opened in theaters across America to mixed reviews. The almost three-hour long film, was too cerebral and slow- moving to be appreciated by general audiences in 1968. Today, half a century later, the movie is one of the American Film Institute’s top 100 films of all time. VOA’s Penelope Poulou explores Space Odyssey’s power and its relevance 50 years since its creation. ...

Hey, did my congressman really say that? Is that really President Donald Trump on that video, or am I being duped?   New technology on the internet lets anyone make videos of real people appearing to say things they've never said. Republicans and Democrats predict this high-tech way of putting words in someone's mouth will become the latest weapon in disinformation wars against the United States and other Western democracies.   We're not talking about lip-syncing videos. This technology uses facial mapping and artificial intelligence to produce videos that appear so genuine it's hard to spot the phonies. Lawmakers and intelligence officials worry that the bogus videos — called deepfakes — could be used to threaten national security or interfere in elections.   So far, that hasn't happened, but experts…

Carlos Garcia was three years into his first job in technology at Merrill Lynch when he first learned what a 401K retirement savings account was. He was floored when he learned that a colleague had already saved $30,000 in three years, and the company had matched it.   The concept of making money off money was foreign to Garcia, an MIT graduate who was born in Texas to immigrants from Mexico. His story is not uncommon among U.S. Hispanics, who lag behind other demographic groups when it comes to saving for retirement. But for Garcia, the episode became the inspiration many years later for Finhabits, a bilingual digital platform designed to make savings and investment accessible for Latinos.   Finhabits launched last year into a crowded world of robo-advisers, savings…

Researchers at a public university in Sweden are creating a 3-D, virtual reality model of the Milky Way. They say their work could change how surgeons separated by oceans collaborate on medical examinations. VOA's Arash Arabasadi reports. ...

June 30 marks Asteroid Day, a U.N.-sanctioned campaign to promote awareness around the world of what's up in the sky. In Milan, scientists are assembling a new telescope that uses "insect vision" to spot risky celestial objects. Faith Lapidus explains. ...

Hailing "great economic success" during the first 18 months of his administration, U.S. President Donald Trump is calling for more companies to be like Taiwan's electronics component manufacturer Foxconn and invest in the United States.  At a groundbreaking event for the foreign company's latest and largest investment in the upper Midwestern state of Wisconsin, Trump described the planned $10 billion manufacturing facility "as the eighth wonder of the world."  That may be a generous exaggeration, but the plant is one of the largest foreign direct investment projects ever in the United States.  "We are demanding from foreign countries, friend and foe, fair and reciprocal trade," Trump said, as he defended his confrontational trade policies and hailed further direct investment in the United States by manufacturers from other countries.  Trump hailed…

Melting glaciers and rising seas in Greenland; raging fires in Northern California; a relentless drought in Somalia and the disappearing Amazon forests. Famine, Feast, Fire and Ice are the four installments in a virtual reality (VR) documentary on climate change by filmmakers Eric Strauss and Danfung Dennis.   The series, showcased at AFI Docs, the American Film Institute’s Documentary festival in Washington, D.C., offers a 360-degree view of destructive phenomena brought by climate change on our planet. It immerses viewers into the extremes of Earth’s changing climate.   Eric Strauss told VOA he hopes that when someone watches the series as it drives home this idea that there is no hiding from global warming. “This is coming for all of us, regardless of where we live or what our income…

Your Amazon packages, which usually show up in a UPS truck, an unmarked vehicle or in the hands of a mail carrier, may soon be delivered from an Amazon van. The online retailer has been looking for a while to find a way to have more control over how its packages are delivered. With its new program rolling out Thursday, contractors around the country can launch businesses that deliver Amazon packages. The move gives Amazon more ways to ship its packages to shoppers without having to rely on UPS, FedEx and other package delivery services. With these vans on the road, Amazon said more shoppers would be able to track their packages on a map, contact the driver or change where a package is left — all of which it…

Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd on Wednesday settled a seven-year patent dispute over Apple's allegations that Samsung violated its patents by "slavishly" copying the design of the iPhone. Terms of the settlement, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, were not available. In May, a U.S. jury awarded Apple $539 million, after Samsung had previously paid Apple $399 million to compensate for patent infringement. Samsung would need to make an additional payment to Apple of nearly $140 million if the verdict was upheld. How much, if anything, Samsung must now pay Apple under Wednesday's settlement could not immediately be learned. An Apple spokesman declined to comment on the terms of the settlement but said Apple "cares deeply about design" and that "this case…

With parents often playing catch-up with the fast pace of technology, it's often difficult to really know what their children are doing on their electronic devices. VOA’s Mariama Diallo reports. ...

U.S. President Donald Trump is pushing Congress to approve legislation that would give the government new ways to review foreign technology investments in the United States to guard against national security threats. Trump had at first called for imposing limits on Chinese investments in U.S. technology companies and high-tech exports to China, but shifted to urging lawmakers to enhance an existing review process. He said Wednesday the revamped reviews would give the government the "ability to protect the United States from new and evolving threats posed by foreign investment while also sustaining the strong, open investment environment to which our country is committed and which benefits our economy and our people." He said the legislation would give the government "additional tools to combat the predatory investment practices that threaten our…

As gigabytes of data flow from field to fingertips, click by click, the technological divide has been closing between teams at the World Cup. While the focus has been on the debut of video assistant referees, less obvious technical advances have been at work in Russia and the coaches have control over this area, at least.  No longer are the flashiest gizmos to trace player movements and gather data the preserve of the best-resourced nations. All World Cup finalists have had an array of electronic performance and tracking systems made available to them by FIFA. “We pay great attention to these tools,” Poland coach Adam Nawalka said. “Statistics play an important role for us. We analyze our strength and weaknesses.” The enhanced tech at the teams’ disposal came after football’s…

Barbie, the world's most iconic doll, is venturing into coding skills in her latest career as a robotics engineer. The new doll, launched Tuesday, aims to encourage girls as young as seven to learn real coding skills, thanks to a partnership with the kids game-based computing platform Tynker, toymaker Mattel said. Robotics engineer Barbie, dressed in jeans, a graphic T-shirt and denim jacket and wearing safety glasses, comes with six free Barbie-inspired coding lessons designed to teach logic, problem solving and the building blocks of coding. The lessons, for example, show girls how to build robots, get them to move at a dance party, or do jumping jacks. According to U.S. Department of Commerce statistics, 24 percent of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) jobs were held by women in 2017.…

A former top U.S. Defense Department official is questioning the morality of Google’s decision not to renew a partnership with the Pentagon. "I believe the Google employees have created a moral hazard for themselves,” former Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work said Tuesday. Google announced earlier this month that it would not renew its contract for Project Maven, after 13 employees resigned and more than 4,600 employees signed a petition objecting to their work being used for warfare. Project Maven seeks to use artificial intelligence, or AI, to help detect and identify images captured using drones. Many of the Google employees who objected to the project cited Google’s principle of ensuring its products are not used to do harm. But Work, who served as deputy defense secretary from 2014 through July…

The human backup driver in an autonomous Uber SUV was streaming the television show "The Voice" on her phone and looking downward just before fatally striking a pedestrian in suburban Phoenix, according to a police report. The 300-page report released Thursday night by police in Tempe revealed that driver Rafaela Vasquez had been streaming the musical talent show via Hulu in the 43 minutes before the March 18 crash that killed Elaine Herzberg as she crossed a darkened road outside the lines of a crosswalk. The report said the crash, which marks the first fatality involving a self-driving vehicle, wouldn't have happened had the driver not been distracted. Dash camera video shows Vasquez was looking down near her right knee for four or five seconds before the crash. She looked…

Intel Corp Chief Executive Brian Krzanich resigned on Thursday after a probe found his consensual relationship with an employee violated company policy. The head of the largest U.S. chipmaker is the latest in a line of powerful men in business and politics to lose their jobs or resign over relationships viewed as inappropriate, a phenomenon highlighted by the #MeToo movement. "An ongoing investigation by internal and external counsel has confirmed a violation of Intel's non-fraternization policy, which applies to all managers," Intel said in a statement. The board named Chief Financial Officer Robert Swan as interim CEO and said it has begun a search for a permanent CEO, including both internal and external candidates. Intel declined to give any further information about the probe. Intel shares fell 1.5 percent in…

Social media app Instagram announced Wednesday that it would be increasing its time limit for videos posted on its platform from one minute to 10 minutes, as part of a general expansion of the app's video capabilities. The photo-sharing app also announced it would be launching a stand-alone app called IGTV to host these long-form videos. The app will be available this week, according to technology website, The Verge. "When you watch longer video, you need a different context," Instagram co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom told The Verge. "We really wanted to separate those two, so you could choose which adventure you wanted to go down." The longer videos will also be available through a tab in the original Instagram application. Accounts with wide audiences will be able to post…

Amazon, JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway have picked well-known author and Harvard professor Dr. Atul Gawande to transform the health care they give their employees. The three corporate titans said Wednesday that Gawande will lead an independent company focused on a mission they announced earlier this year: figure out ways to improve a broken and often inefficient system for delivering care. Health care researchers have said any possible solutions produced by this new venture will be felt well beyond the estimated 1 million workers the three companies employ in the United States. Other businesses that provide employee health coverage are eager to find solutions for health care costs that often rise faster than inflation and squeeze their budgets in the process. Berkshire Chairman and CEO Warren Buffett has described health…

Barely six months after inaugurating a tiny software-coding boot camp in a basement in Tokyo, Silicon Valley transplant Kani Munidasa stood before some of Japan's top business leaders in February with a warning: software was threatening their future. A Sri Lankan native with a Japanese mother and wife, Munidasa was speaking at the invitation of Nobuyuki Idei, a former chief executive of Sony. Idei had offered to become an adviser to the boot camp, called Code Chrysalis, whose mission of bringing Japan's software engineering up to global standards and helping its companies transform aligned with his own. "Idei-san told me, 'Tell it as it is; don't sugar-coat anything. They need to hear that change has to happen,'" Munidasa said, recalling how he showed up at the executives' meeting in a…

Two men on motorbikes approached a broken-down vehicle in Caracas one day earlier this month in what could have been a nightmare scenario in one of the world's most dangerous cities where roadside robberies and murders are an everyday occurrence. The men took up positions either side of the green four-wheel-drive vehicle, with a 33-year-old female schoolteacher behind the wheel, and guarded it until a tow truck arrived two hours later to cart it off to a garage. The two guards are employees of a new mobile application called "Pana" - "Buddy" in Venezuelan slang - which dispatches security crews to stranded drivers who request help. It's a reflection of how Venezuelans are turning to technology to overcome the dangers and nuisances of living in the crisis-hit country. Mobile payment…

When Neha Maldar testified against the traffickers who enslaved her as a sex worker in India, she spoke from the safety of her own country, Bangladesh, via videoconferencing, a technology that could revolutionize the pursuit of justice in such cases. The men in the western city of Mumbai appeared via video link more than 2,000 km (1,243 miles) west of Maldar as she sat in a government office in Jessore, a major regional hub for sex trafficking, 50 km from Bangladesh's border with India. "I saw the people who had trafficked me on the screen and I wasn't scared to identify them," Maldar, who now runs a beauty parlor from her home near Jessore, told Reuters. "I was determined to see them behind bars." "I told them how I was…

Laura was barely 18 when a palm reader told her she could make $180 a month working in beetroot farms in Russia — an attractive sum for a girl struggling to make a living in the town of Drochia, in Moldova's impoverished north. That she had no passport, the fortune teller said, was not a problem. Her future employers would help her cross the border. "They gave me a [fake] birth certificate stating I was 14," Laura, who declined to give her real name, told Reuters in an interview. That was enough to get her through border controls as she traveled by bus with a smuggler posing as one of her parents. It was the beginning of a long tale of exploitation for Laura — one of many such stories…

Parents suspicious that their children may be addicted to video games now have support from health authorities. The World Health Organization has listed "gaming disorder" as a new mental health problem on its 11th edition of  International Classification of Diseases, released on Monday. But as VOA's Zlatica Hoke reports, not all psychologists agree that compulsive gaming should be on that list. ...

Norway tested a two-seater electric plane on Monday and predicted a start to passenger flights by 2025 if new aviation technologies match a green shift that has made Norwegians the world's top buyers of electric cars. Transport Minister Ketil Solvik-Olsen and Dag Falk-Petersen, head of state-run Avinor which runs most of Norway's airports, took a few minutes' flight around Oslo airport in an Alpha Electro G2 plane, built by Pipistrel in Slovenia. "This is ... a first example that we are moving fast forward" towards greener aviation, Solvik-Olsen told Reuters. "We do have to make sure it is safe - people won't fly if they don't trust it." He said plane makers such as Boeing and Airbus were developing electric aircraft and that battery prices were tumbling, making it feasible…