Facebook-owned photo-sharing service, Instagram has released an artificial intelligence mechanism which will serve to filter off offensive comments and spam.
“Many of you have told us that toxic comments discourage you from enjoying Instagram and expressing yourself freely,” Co-founder and Chief Executive Kevin Systrom said in a blog post yesterday.
“To help, we’ve developed a filter that will block certain offensive comments on posts and in live video,” he added.
This is coming as Internet companies, including Facebook, are working to curb trolls, hate speech and the spread of violent ideology on their platforms.
Instagram said that the filter scanning for spam is designed to work in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish; and according to Systrom, the offensive-comment filter will launch first in English.
“Our team has been training our systems for some time to recognize certain types of offensive and spammy comments so you never have to see them,” Systrom said, adding: “The tools will improve over time”.
He further stated that “All other comments will appear as they normally do and you can still report comments, delete comments or turn them off”.
To access the comments filter, click the “…” settings menu from the profile and scroll to tap “Comments”. [See illustration below].
Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube this week announced the launch of an anti-terror partnership aimed at thwarting the spread of extremist content online.
The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism intends to share engineering, research and knowledge to help “continue to make our hosted consumer services hostile to terrorists and violent extremists,” the companies said as reported.
Each of the technology giants has been working individually to prevent its platforms or services from being used to promote or spread extremist views.
Tim Cook has said Artificial Intelligence (AI) on Apple’s products is watching the habits of the tech firm’s numerous customers.
The Apple’s Chief Executive Officer made this known in an interview with MIT Technology Review, going into details to point out non-flashy examples of Apple using AI to very quietly make its products better.
“Image recognition in our photos, for example, or the way Apple Music learns from what we have been listening to and adjusts its recommendations accordingly.
“Even the iPhone battery lasts longer now because the phone’s power management system uses machine learning to study our usage and adjust accordingly,” said the Apple chief.
The recent I/O developer conference confirmed that Google thinks AI and machine learning will be all that matters in the future, and nearly every new thing it announced for Android had some kind of AI angle.
But Apple is trying to gently remind people that while it might not throw its advancements around so much, Apple’s not falling behind in the AI department.
Cook says the fact that the press doesn’t always give Apple credit for its AI may be due to the fact that Apple only likes to talk about the features of products it is ready to ship, while many others “sell futures”.
“We are not going to go through things we’re going to do in 2019, ’20, ’21. It’s not because we don’t know that. It’s because we don’t want to talk about that,” Cook said.
Cook’s attitude is very typically Apple.
It’s the whole ethos of making things that “just work”: why tell people that an AI is fiddling with their battery life if there’s nothing they can do to affect it? Instead, Apple chooses to brag about the thing that you’ll actually notice: iPhones have consistently excellent battery life, even with smaller batteries inside than many of the Android rivals.
Apple is starting to mention its AI advancements a little more.
Machine learning was a buzzword that kept on coming up on stage at WWDC 2017, and with Apple’s advancements into AR, it’s going to be difficult to avoid talking about AI and image recognition in the coming years.
In 1996, I was in primary two; fast forward 6 years, in 2001, I came in contact with computers and its attendant technology, where else than in Lagos of Nigeria. This marks a tech revolution in my world. Since then I have never been the same; I practically became a gadget freak.
Between 2001 and 2016, bearing in mind that tech revolution began to take its toll in the year 2000 in Nigeria, technology has changed the world in diverse ways. Looking back into time is a stark reminder of just how much the awareness of technology has advanced barely two decades in our clime, occasioned by accelerations in the telecoms sector.
Author as a Computer Desktop Publisher at the Odunayo CyberHub in 2002
It is easy to forget that this was a time before many people had even a dial-up modem to access the World Wide Web and send Electronic mail, let alone a dedicated broadband connection that did not prevent anyone else in the house using the phone for actual calls.
When I was entering primary school, Windows 95 was about to launch. Windows 95 certainly did make PCs more popular, and was followed by the massive success of Windows XP, which, despite being unsupported by its maker, is still being used by millions around the globe.
Counting Windows 10, there have been eight versions of Microsoft’s ubiquitous operating system in the last two decades: 98, Me, Vista, 2000, XP, 7, 8, and now 10. Make that seven if you do not count Windows 2000 as a consumer OS.
Wait a minute; if you played Dangerous Dave, Shadow Knight and Prince of Persia or even the DOS version of Mortal Combat, then you are on the other side.
The import of the Internet and its attendant impact cannot be exhaustively discussed. It speaks volume more than 20 editions of encyclopaedia can hold. These days there is not much you can do with a Smartphone in Flight mode. Virtually every app relies on its connection to the ‘information superhighway’, the Internet. And, what is the use of an offline PC?
How technology has changed the world in 20 years!
The recommendation back then in 2002 was to buy a machine with a 200MB hard drive, 8MB of RAM and a 75MHz or 100MHz processor. Getting online was an expensive business. Your bargain basement PC cost a fortune, and that didn’t even include a modem, CD-ROM drive or sound card. If you had those you had a “multimedia” PC, and it means you are top notch.
Today, even basic Smartphones have a CPU that is at least 10x more powerful than a 2002 PC and costs roughly one-tenth as much. In the budget laptops group, today, you will find models with 8GB of RAM, 1TB hard drives and processors that run at over 3GHz, and you can have all that after a little hustle.
We look back 20 years and smile at the paltry figures, no doubt, but right now these machines are veritable bargains. Of course, we now know the price of everything but the value of nothing.
In fact, the Internet has changed more than just technology: it has changed the way we communicate, the way we work, do our homework, listen to music… in short; it has changed the way we live.
The future of computing, and that of technology, is even brighter. 3D printing technology is with us already; the Internet of things is here with us, and I am expecting when I will start downloading houses, cars and what have you in the actual sense of it.
Smarthomes — where you can dial your kitchen from the office and you get your dinner made before you are home, where you can have a robot doing house chores and drones running errands for you — are here with us. Self-driving and smokeless cars are here with us.
Air-conditioned clothing, gadgets that measure the performance of athletes, and the ones you are counting up in your mind now, are all here with us – all thanks to the advancement of technology, and as LG puts it, life’s good!
Who wouldn’t want to pimp their existence!? Who wouldn’t want to be sophisticated in this era!?
With the current drive for Artificial Intelligence (AI), Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), the future of the world with technology will be like some sci-fi movies.
Google’s AI-powered job search tool, Google for Jobs, seems to be live for some users. The feature which works in regular search is now visible to some users in the US.
According to Android Police, a relevant search for job lists some vacancies from job listing sites. Unfortunately, there is still no word whether the feature is still being tested or has started rolling out steadily. The new Google for Jobs search feature will be limited to the US market initially. There has been no word whether the search tool will be expanded to more markets outside the US.
Announced at Google I/O 2017, the all-new Google for Job initiative is meant to help job seekers find a job right from the Search. The company at its annual developer conference named a few partners for job listings including LinkedIn, Monster, Glassdoor, Careerbuilder, and Facebook among others.
Google for Jobs will further let job seekers filter job openings based on location, category, date posted, and full-time or part-time employment, and other options.
The new job search tool has been announced with a focus to make finding jobs that were traditionally harder to search for and classify, including service and retail jobs , comparatively easier. Google CEO Sundar Pichai had at the I/O 2017 Keynote named some companies that were piloting the new Google for Job search tool like FedEx and Johnson & Johnson. Pichai had stressed about why the company felt the need for Google Jobs as almost half of US employers were having issues filling open positions while job seekers weren’t even aware about a job opening.
Making a transition from algorithmic timeline, micro-blogging site, Twitter has started using deep learning, a trendy type of artificial intelligence (AI) to recommend certain tweets on its 328 million monthly active users’ timelines.
Twitter had introduced algorithmic timeline last year that ranked tweets based on relevance instead of them being in reverse chronological order.
Twitter uses a trendy type of AI to recommend tweets on your timeline
Twitter has brought on people who are talented in this area through acquisitions of companies and it has open-sourced some of its deep learning software, CNBC reported on Tuesday.
“The company is evaluating and scoring thousands of tweets per second to determine what’s worth recommending in timelines, taking into consideration an increasing number of factors, including whether tweets contain images or videos, the number of retweets and likes, and your previous interactions with other account holders,” Twitter’s software engineers said in a blog post.
Other tech giants like Facebook, Google and Microsoft have previously attempted to improve various products using deep learning, a trendy type of AI.
“Before putting the deep learning system into production recently, Twitter was using less computationally intensive machine learning methods such as decision trees and logistical regression,” the software engineers stated.
In a bid to overcome language barriers, social networking giant Facebook has announced a new machine learning translation method, claiming it to be nine times faster than other competitors.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been already in place at Facebook for automatically translating status updates to other languages, but the company is making a transition from lab to app, The Verge reported on Tuesday.
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg
“We’re currently talking with a product team to make this work in a Facebook environment. There are differences when moving from academic data to real environments in terms of language. The academic data is news-type data; while conversation on Facebook is much more colloquial,” the report quoted Facebook’s AI engineer David Grangier as saying.
The new machine learning translation technique has not been implemented yet and exists as a research as of now. But Facebook has said that it will likely happen further down the line.
“Usually, AI-powered translation relies on what are called recurrent neural networks (RNNs), whereas this new research leverages convolutional neural networks (CNNs) instead,” Facebook’s AI engineers explained.
RNNs analyse date sequentially, working left to right through a sentence in order to translate it word by word while CNNs look at difference aspects of data simultaneously – a style of computation that is much better and faster.
“So translating with CNNs means tackling the problem more holistically and examining the higher-level structure of sentences. The [CNNs] build a logical structure, a bit like linguistics, on top of the text,” said Michael Auli, another Facebook AI engineer.
Facebook noted that the AI community were willing to improve upon the commonly used RNNs for translation – a method that has devoured tremendous efforts already.
“The short answer is that people just hadn’t invested as much time in this, and we came up with some new developments that made it work better,” Grangier added.
Amnesty International, AI has accused the Federal Government of stifling freedom of expression in the country by harassing and arresting media practitioners for doing their job.
The group, in a statement released to mark the World Press Freedom Day on Wednesday, said the Federal Government has stepped up its attempt to crush press freedom.
The group said, “An escalating spate of arrests of journalists and intimidation of bloggers as well as the violent crushing of peaceful protests across Nigeria shows the authorities’ determination to suppress the right to freedom of expression, said Amnesty International today on World Press Freedom Day.”
It therefore urged the federal and state governments to respect international human rights law and the Nigerian constitution by protecting the right to freedom of expression and press freedom.
“Escalating arrests of journalists and violent disruption of peaceful protests since the start of 2017 shows staggering decline of freedom of expression and assembly that is pushing Nigeria further down the World Press Freedom Index,” said Osai Ojigho, Country Director at Amnesty International Nigeria.
“The security forces have also consistently used excessive force and intimidation to crack down on Nigerians exercising their right to freedom of peaceful assembly.”
AI cited incidences of harassment and intimidation of journalists in the country, noting that about eight journalists have “been either arrested or intimidated by the authorities”.
It alleged that state governors had also used their control over state security agencies to arrest and subject journalists to all kinds of harassment and intimidation, including charging them on frivolous grounds with the aim of silencing them.
It said, “So far at least three journalists were arrested in this manner in Kaduna state. On April 20, Midat Joseph, a journalist working with Leadership newspaper was arrested and charged with incitement by the Kaduna State government for an alleged private conversation that took place over a year ago on a WhatsApp group about plan for a protest.
“On 16 April, news broke of the murder of Famous Giobaro a journalist with Bayelsa Radio Corporation’s Glory FM in Yenagoa. While it is now suspected that the unknown gunmen were armed robbers, the authorities still have an obligation to promptly and thoroughly investigate the case and bring whoever may be responsible to justice. Only last week, Nigerian Union of Journalists added its voice to the calls to bring suspected killers of journalists to justice.
“Since the Cyber Crimes Act was signed into law in 2015, it has been used as a pretext to arbitrarily arrest bloggers and therefore censor Nigerian cyberspace. For example, in August last year, prominent blogger Abubakar Usman was arrested by the anti-graft agency the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) who claimed he was detained for activities that contravened the Cyber Crimes Act. However they could not point out the exact provision of the act the blogger contravened and the charges were later dropped.
TheNewsGuru.com reports that the Freedom of Information Act was signed into law by former President Goodluck Jonathan on 28 May 2011.
The Federal Government has condemned calls by Amnesty International, AI to halt the planned execution of some inmates on death row in Lagos State.
TheNewsGuru.com recalls that AI had on April 21 urged the Federal Government to establish an official moratorium, with a view to abolishing the death penalty in the country.
However, in a swift reaction, the Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Olushola Enikanolaye , in a statement on Friday said though the Lagos State Government had yet to officially confirm its intention to carry out executions at the Kirikiri Prisons, the Federal Government was aware that total abolition of the capital punishment was yet to be established as a globally acceptable human rights norm.
Enikanolaye said the claim by the AI that death penalty was an outdated and cruel punishment, which violated the right to life, was just propaganda by the organisation.
He noted that AI by its claim ignored the rights of the traumatised family members of victims of violent crimes and rather threw its weight behind those who committed heinous crimes against Nigerians.
Enikanolaye explained that death penalty, as contained in Article 6 of the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights was an exception to the right to life as long as it was not arbitrarily imposed.
He said: “Furthermore, it is reaffirmed that Nigeria, incontrovertibly possesses the sovereign right to determine its laws and operate a criminal justice system within the rule of law.
“The imposition of death penalty is a constitutional matter in Nigeria clearly spelt out under Sections 33(1) and 34(1)(a) of the 1999 Constitution (as amended).
“As AI is probably aware, in every democracy, sovereignty belongs to the people.”
According to him it is therefore, repugnant and imprudent for AI to continue condemning Nigeria’s criminal justice system on the basis of AI’s randomly conducted experiment on the use of the death penalty.
Enikanolaye said: “AI should refocus attention on defending the rights of the traumatised family members of victims of violent crimes, rather than the veiled support for those who have committed heinous crimes against the Nigerian people.
“The Federal Government of Nigeria remains committed to complying with its international human rights obligations while upholding the Constitution and the demonstrated will of the Nigerian people.
“The Federal Government has not deviated from its stated position of a self-imposed de facto moratorium on execution of the death penalty on federal cases following the restoration of democracy in 1999.”
The official added that the Federal Government duly recognises that there is no right more sacred than the right to life.
He said: “Hence, the precondition for imposing the ultimate penalty in Nigeria is conducted with impeccable fairness and propriety, as the Nigerian Judiciary follows an exacting standard and a heightened level of due process in the prosecution of death penalty cases.
“Thus, the well-established safeguards for the prevention of wrongful conviction and execution of the death penalty are fully operational in these cases.”
Google has released search trends for year 2016 recently, dubbed ‘Year in Search 2016’ with Apple topping the list of most searched consumer tech worldwide, raking up four positions worldwide and taking top spot as the most searched mobile phone in Nigeria.
This year, many topics set a new all-time high in search interest. Some were expected while others were a bit surprising.
Google’s Year in Search 2016 is the revelation of all what trended the most on the world leading search engine.
In what seems to be a year of revolution for technology, especially consumer tech, it is unsurprising that Infinix and Tecno dominated the search trend for 2016 in Nigeria.
While Google Pixel stood tall ranking number 5 most searched consumer tech worldwide and Samsung had two entrants in Galaxy S7 and Note 7, Freedom 251 and Nintendo Switch are the only ranking consumer techs that are not smartphones.
Here are the 10 most searched consumer techs worldwide:
iPhone 7
Freedom 251
iPhone SE
iPhone 6S
Google Pixel
Samsung Galaxy S7
iPhone 7 Plus
Note 7
Nintendo Switch
Samsung J7
Here are the 10 most searched mobile phones in Nigeria:
iPhone 7
Infinix Note 3
Samsung Galaxy S7
Tecno Camon C9
Infinix Hot 4
Tecno Boom J8
Infinix Hot 2
Infinix Zero 3
Tecno W4
Tecno W3
Tecno W4 and W3 have been adjudged to make the list of the top 10 most searched mobile phones in Nigeria because of the current economic situation in the country in order to make for cheaper alternative smartphones.
“This year, many topics set a new all-time high in search interest. Some were expected while others were a bit surprising,” a statement read on Google’s trends website.
These trends are coming in a time where the tech space is rapidly facing profound changes, reaching a high with Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and even advancement in biotechnology.
These represent the best guess about what consumer tech and consumer tech companies that will matter in the year to come.
Meanwhile, the top 10 trends on the Year in Search 2016 are: Pokémon Go, iPhone 7, Donald Trump, Prince, Powerball, David Bowie, Deadpool, Olympics, Slither.io and Suicide Squad.
Facebook-owned photo-sharing service, Instagram has released an artificial intelligence mechanism which will serve to filter off offensive comments and spam.
