Month: July 2021

Maine has joined a growing number of cities, counties and states that are rejecting dangerously biased surveillance technologies like facial recognition.

The new law, which is the strongest statewide facial recognition law in the country, not only received broad, bipartisan support, but it passed unanimously in both chambers of the state legislature. Lawmakers and advocates spanning the political spectrum — from the progressive lawmaker who sponsored the bill to the Republican members who voted it out of committee, from the ACLU of Maine to state law enforcement agencies — came together to secure this major victory for Mainers and anyone who cares about their right to privacy.

Maine is just the latest success story in the nationwide movement to ban or tightly regulate the use of facial recognition technology, an effort led by grassroots activists and organizations like the ACLU. From the Pine Tree State to the Golden State, national efforts to regulate facial recognition demonstrate a broad recognition that we can’t let technology determine the boundaries of our freedoms in the digital 21^st century.

Facial recognition technology poses a profound threat to civil rights and civil liberties. Without democratic oversight, governments can use the technology as a tool for dragnet surveillance, threatening our freedoms of speech and association, due process rights, and right to be left alone. Democracy itself is at stake if this technology remains unregulated.

We know the burdens of facial recognition are not borne equally, as Black and brown communities — especially Muslim and immigrant communities — are already targets of discriminatory government surveillance. Making matters worse, face surveillance algorithms tend to have more difficulty accurately analyzing the faces of darker-skinned people, women, the elderly and children. Simply put: The technology is dangerous when it works — and when it doesn’t.

But not all approaches to regulating this technology are created equal. Maine is among the first in the nation to pass comprehensive statewide regulations. Washington was the first, passing a weak law in the face of strong opposition from civil rights, community and religious liberty organizations. The law passed in large part because of strong backing from Washington-based megacorporation Microsoft. Washington’s facial recognition law would still allow tech companies to sell their technology, worth millions of dollars, to every conceivable government agency.

In contrast, Maine’s law strikes a different path, putting the interests of ordinary Mainers above the profit motives of private companies.

Maine’s new law prohibits the use of facial recognition technology in most areas of government, including in public schools and for surveillance purposes. It creates carefully carved out exceptions for law enforcement to use facial recognition, creating standards for its use and avoiding the potential for abuse we’ve seen in other parts of the country. Importantly, it prohibits the use of facial recognition technology to conduct surveillance of people as they go about their business in Maine, attending political meetings and protests, visiting friends and family, and seeking out healthcare.

In Maine, law enforcement must now — among other limitations — meet a probable cause standard before making a facial recognition request, and they cannot use a facial recognition match as the sole basis to arrest or search someone. Nor can local police departments buy, possess or use their own facial recognition software, ensuring shady technologies like Clearview AI will not be used by Maine’s government officials behind closed doors, as has happened in other states.

Maine’s law and others like it are crucial to preventing communities from being harmed by new, untested surveillance technologies like facial recognition. But we need a federal approach, not only a piecemeal local approach, to effectively protect Americans’ privacy from facial surveillance. That’s why it’s crucial for Americans to support the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act, a bill introduced by members of both houses of Congress last month.

The ACLU supports this federal legislation that would protect all people in the United States from invasive surveillance. We urge all Americans to ask their members of Congress to join the movement to halt facial recognition technology and support it, too.

Source: Tech Crunch

Mobileye, a subsidiary of Intel, has expanded its autonomous vehicle testing program to New York City as part of its strategy to develop and deploy the technology.

New York City joins a number of other cities including Detroit, Paris, Shanghai and Tokyo where Mobileye has either launched testing or plans to this year. Mobileye launched its first test fleet in Jerusalem in 2018 and added one in Munich in 2020.

“If we want to build something that will scale, we need to be able to drive in challenging places and almost everywhere,” Mobileye president and CEO Amnon Shashua said during a presentation Tuesday that was streamed live. As part of the announcement, Mobileye also released a 40-minute unedited video of one of its test vehicles equipped with a self-driving system navigating New York’s city streets.

These vehicles, which began testing in New York City last month, are driving autonomously with a safety operator behind the wheel using only cameras. The vehicles are equipped with 8 long-range and 4 parking cameras powered by its fifth generation system on chip called EyeQ5.

That does not mean that Mobileye is taking a camera-only approach to autonomy once it deploys. The company has also developed another subsystem with lidar and radar, but no cameras that also drives autonomously. The two subsystems of sensors and software will be combined and integrated to provide redundancy in robotaxis. The camera-only subsystem is what Shashua described as at “the cost level for consumers” and one that will be used to evolve driving assist systems. Later this year, Mobilieye’s camera-only system using the EyeQ5 SoC will be launched in a Geely Auto Group vehicle.

New York City has been in Shashua’s sights for more than six months. He first mentioned a desire to test on public roads in New York during the virtual 2021 CES tech trade show in January with the caveat that the company would need to receive regulatory approval. Now, with that regulatory approval in hand, Mobileye is the only company currently permitted to test AVs in the state and city. GM’s self-driving subsidiary Cruise outlined in 2017 a plan to test AVs in New York and even mapped parts of lower Manhattan. The company never scaled up the test program in NYC, deciding instead to focus on its primary target for commercial deployment: San Francisco. 

Mobileye applied for a permit through New York State’s autonomous vehicle technology demonstration and testing program. The company met the requirements outlined in the program which includes compliance with all federal standards and applicable New York State inspection standards as well as a law enforcement interaction plan, according to Mobileye.

“I don’t think there’s anything special about receiving approval you simply need to go through this process, Shashua said, who described it has lengthy and in some ways similar to the stringent requirements to test in Germany. “I think what is special is that it’s very very difficult to drive here.”

Mobileye is perhaps best known for supplying automakers with computer vision technology that powers advanced driver assistance systems. It’s a business that generated nearly $$967 million in sales for the company. Today, 88 million vehicles on the road are using Mobileye’s computer vision technology.

Mobileye has also been developing automated vehicle technology. Its full self-driving stack — which includes redundant sensing subsystems based on camera, radar and lidar technology — is combined with its REM mapping system and a rules-based Responsibility-Sensitive Safety (RSS) driving policy.

Mobileye’s REM mapping system crowdsources data by tapping into consumer and fleet vehicles equipped with its so-called EyeQ4, or fourth generation system on chip, to build high-definition maps that can be used to support in ADAS and autonomous driving systems. That data is not video or images but compressed text that collects about 10 kilobits per kilometer. Mobileye has agreements with six OEMs, including BMW, Nissan and Volkswagen, to collect that data on vehicles equipped with the EyeQ4 chip, which is used to power the advanced driver assistance system. On fleet vehicles, Mobileye collects data from an after-market product it sells to commercial operators.

Mobileye’s technology is mapping nearly 8 million kilometers day globally, including in New York City.

The strategy, Shashua contends, will allow the company to efficiently launch and operate commercial robotaxi services as well as bring the technology to consumer passenger vehicles by 2025. Shashua explained this dual approach in an interview with TechCrunch in 2020. 

“There was realization that dawned on us awhile ago,” he said at the time. “The Holy Grail of this business is passenger car autonomy: where you buy a passenger car and you pay an option price and with a press of button it can take you autonomously to wherever you want to go. The realization is that you can’t reach that Holy Grail if you don’t go through the robotaxi business.”

On Tuesday, Shashua said Mobileye was the only company that has its foot in both camps. (Although it should be noted that Toyota’s Woven Planet does have some strategic overlap.)

“We’re building our technology in a way that supports scale, especially geographic scale, using our crowdsourced mapping technology and building new sensors such that the entire package — the entire system — will be under $5,000 cost to allow consumer AVs, and on the other hand, we have a division building a mobility-as-a-service or robotaxi service,” Shashua said Tuesday. “This is one of the reasons why we purchased Moovit last year, to enable the customer facing of all the layers above the self-driving system to enable mobility-as-a-service business.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Today, Tractable is worth $1 billion. Our AI is used by millions of people across the world to recover faster from road accidents, and it also helps recycle as many cars as Tesla puts on the road.

And yet six years ago, Tractable was just me and Raz (Razvan Ranca, CTO), two college grads coding in a basement. Here’s how we did it, and what we learned along the way.

Build upon a fresh technological breakthrough

In 2013, I was fortunate to get into artificial intelligence (more specifically, deep learning) six months before it blew up internationally. It started when I took a course on Coursera called “Machine learning with neural networks” by Geoffrey Hinton. It was like being love struck. Back then, to me AI was science fiction, like “The Terminator.”

But an article in the tech press said the academic field was amid a resurgence. As a result of 100x larger training data sets and 100x higher compute power becoming available by reprogramming GPUs (graphics cards), a huge leap in predictive performance had been attained in image classification a year earlier. This meant computers were starting to be able to understand what’s in an image — like humans do.

The next step was getting this technology into the real world. While at university — Imperial College London — teaming up with much more skilled people, we built a plant recognition app with deep learning. We walked our professor through Hyde Park, watching him take photos of flowers with the app and laughing from joy as the AI recognized the right plant species. This had previously been impossible.

I started spending every spare moment on image classification with deep learning. Still, no one was talking about it in the news — even Imperial’s computer vision lab wasn’t yet on it! I felt like I was in on a revolutionary secret.

Looking back, narrowly focusing on a branch of applied science undergoing a breakthrough paradigm shift that hadn’t yet reached the business world changed everything.

Search for complementary co-founders who will become your best friends

I’d previously been rejected from Entrepreneur First (EF), one of the world’s best incubators, for not knowing anything about tech. Having changed that, I applied again.

The last interview was a hackathon, where I met Raz. He was doing machine learning research at Cambridge, had topped EF’s technical test, and published papers on reconstructing shredded documents and on poker bots that could detect bluffs. His bare-bones webpage read: “I seek data-driven solutions to currently intractable problems.” Now that had a ring to it (and where we’d get the name for Tractable).

That hackathon, we coded all night. The morning after, he and I knew something special was happening between us. We moved in together and would spend years side by side, 24/7, from waking up to Pantera in the morning to coding marathons at night.

But we also wouldn’t have got where we are without Adrien (Cohen, president), who joined as our third co-founder right after our seed round. Adrien had previously co-founded Lazada, an online supermarket in South East Asia like Amazon and Alibaba, which sold to Alibaba for $1.5 billion. Adrien would teach us how to build a business, inspire trust and hire world-class talent.

Find potential customers early so you can work out market fit

Tractable started at EF with a head start — a paying customer. Our first use case was … plastic pipe welds.

It was as glamorous as it sounds. Pipes that carry water and natural gas to your home are made of plastic. They’re connected by welds (melt the two plastic ends, connect them, let them cool down and solidify again as one). Image classification AI could visually check people’s weld setups to ensure good quality. Most of all, it was real-world value for breakthrough AI.

And yet in the end, they — our only paying customer — stopped working with us, just as we were raising our first round of funding. That was rough. Luckily, the number of pipe weld inspections was too small a market to interest investors, so we explored other use cases — utilities, geology, dermatology and medical imaging.

Source: Tech Crunch

Our kids can’t read. As of 2019, roughly a third of US fourth graders were unable to read at the level expected of them. The scores have barely changed in decades. Something isn’t working here.

Litnerd, a company out of New York City, wants to try something new. They’re writing books and building lesson plans with a twist: professional actors, streamed into the class, to recreate scenes from each book and — hopefully! — help keep students engaged.

Litnerd programs are built as four one-hour, once-a-week sessions. Students read the book between sessions; once a week, an actor is streamed to the class to re-enact scenes, bring everything together, and move the story along. Sometimes this actor’s segment is pre-recorded. Other times it’s live, with choose-your-own-adventure elements mixed in to let the students steer the ship.

Something about the whole thing just tugs at my heart strings. It reminds me of “auditorium day” in school; those rare days in which our school brought in a special performer — a singer, a motivational speaker, a puppet show, whatever — to somehow wrangle our collective attention. Those days felt so unique, so special. Even decades later, fond memories of those days stick with me.

While it’s currently basing its lesson plans around existing stories and content, Litnerd has its own publishing operation in the works. The goal is to identify the categories and genres that best catch each age group’s (PreK through 5th grade) attention, then write books that, as the team puts it, “help celebrate diversity and inclusion so that all children can see themselves in the stories.”

Litnerd began its life during the pandemic under a different name: TinyBroadway. TinyBroadway shared a lot of its DNA with what would eventually become Litnerd — actors, beamed in through the magic of the Internet, work through lessons and crafts with a handful of kids at a time. Litnerd shifts the concept from B2C to B2B; whereas TinyBroadway’s customer was the parent looking to fill their own kid’s schedule, Litnerd dramatically expands its audience (and hopefully deepens its impact as a result) by working with schools.

I asked Litnerd CEO and founder Anisa Mirza for her thoughts on the shift via email:

“The reality is, the majority of Americans, some 95%, cannot afford homeschooling. Especially when it comes to K-5 years. And doubly when it comes to parents of children belonging to Title 1 schools (majority of NYC schools),” she writes. “This isn’t simply because parents can’t pay out of pocket. Rather, because for 95% of Americans, school represents free daycare (if both parents have to work a typical 9-5, they cannot afford to stay home and watch little Anisa, no matter how fabulous the online homeschool teacher is!). This is when I realized that if we truly want to disrupt K-12 (esp K-5) education, we need a solution that works from the outside in – being part of classroom time and funded by schools.”

Working with schools introduces new challenges and processes, varying a bit from city to city and state to state. In many regions, schools can’t just bring in a company like this on a whim — they’ve got to work with pre-approved, contracted vendors. Since becoming an approved vendor with the New York City Department of Education earlier this year, Anisa tells me over 14,000 students have taken part in Litnerd’s programs. She expects that number to double in the coming months.

Litnerd’s books, workshops and lesson plans are built around the social and emotional learning (or SEL) practices that most US states expect, bringing in topics like self-awareness, responsible decision making, and social awareness to help students grow more than just their ability to read.

Each book comes with its own lesson plan, complete with worksheets and activities for the students and suggested dialogue to help teachers identify and highlight the intended learnings from the stories.

Importantly, the company seems quite mindful about how it all plays out from the teacher’s perspective. They know that most teachers already have far too much to do, and design lesson plans with the goal of minimizing the amount of work they’re adding to a teacher’s day.

“We need SEL for the teachers, too,” Mirza tells me. “We need a social and emotional break for them, as well.”

It’s also a pretty dang cool gig for actors, particularly as the live acting industry works to recover from the pandemic. Actors currently perform and record all their sessions from home; as Litnerd grows, the company hopes to open up coworking-space style drop-in studios.

Litnerd is currently focused on expanding to more schools in New York City, growing beyond that as the varying regional processes allow.

Source: Tech Crunch

I’ve fundraised a lot. Tactically, fundraising is a skill like any other. You get better the more you do it. But practicing gets you nowhere if you don’t have a strong foundation in understanding a fundraising round’s core components.

As a founder, you will understand less than investors when it comes to fundraising. For investors, negotiating with founders is their full-time job. For founders, fundraising is just a small part of building a business. Understanding the basics of venture financing can help founders raise on better terms.

We’ll cover:

• How financing works: SAFEs versus equity rounds.
• How much to raise.
• How to arrive at your valuation.

How financing works: SAFEs versus equity rounds

Venture financing takes place in rounds. The first stage is the pre-seed or seed round, then a Series A, then a Series B, then a Series C and so on. You can continue to raise funding until the company is profitable, gets acquired or goes public.

We will focus here on seed-stage funding — your very first funding round.

SAFEs

Post-money SAFEs are the most common way to raise funding. These documents are used by Y Combinator, angel investors and most early-stage funds. You should raise on post-money SAFEs using standard documents created by YC. Standard documents have consistent terms that have been drafted to be fair to both investors and founders.

By using the standard post-money SAFE, your negotiation can focus on the two terms that matter:

1. Principal: The amount you want to raise per investor.
2. Valuation cap: The value of your business.

Source: Tech Crunch

Blue Origin is set to launch its fully reusable New Shepard spacecraft with humans on board for the first time on Tuesday, and it’s sending Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos up along with his brother and two record-setting astronauts. The launch livestream above is scheduled for 6:30 a.m. CDT (7:30 a.m. EDT/4:30 a.m. PDT), with the actual liftoff targeted for 8 a.m. CDT (9 a.m. EDT/6 a.m. PDT).

The full flight profile includes a takeoff from Blue Origin’s remote West Texas facility, followed by an ascent to a height of roughly 62 miles above the Earth’s surface. Those on board, including Bezos, his brother Mark, 82-year-old Wally Funk and 18-year-old Oliver Daemen will then experience between three and four minutes of weightlessness inside the New Shepard capsule, before it returns to Earth slowed by parachutes for a touchdown in the West Texas desert and then a recovery by Blue Origin staff.

This is not significantly different in terms of timing or sequence from the 15 prior New Shepard flights that Blue Origin has flown, but this is the first one with humans on board (including the world’s richest), so it’s obviously the one to watch.

Source: Tech Crunch

The rumors of a CNN streaming service were true. The network has unveiled a CNN+ service that will offer a blend of live and on-demand shows that are “separate and distinct” from existing TV coverage. It will debut sometime in the first quarter of 2022. CNN hasn’t narrowed down the price, but lead executive Andrew Morse told Variety in an interview that there wouldn’t be an ad-supported tier at launch.

The centerpiece, as you’d expect, will be the live material. CNN+ plans to offer eight to 12 hours of in-depth topical coverage and “lifestyle” material every day, with both veterans and newcomers at the helm. You’ll also have chances to interact with anchors and experts in real-time discussions. This won’t be a digital replica of CNN’s usual news, then, but you may have reasons to tune in every day.

The on-demand catalog unsurprisingly taps into CNN’s existing collection, including shows like Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown and United Shades of America. There will be original shows and movies for the internet service, although CNN+ won’t reveal those until later in 2021.

Officially, Morse said CNN+ wouldn’t be bundled or otherwise tie into HBO Max despite the WarnerMedia connection. Variety sources, however, claimed there was a “strong probability” the service would be bundled with HBO Max and Discovery+ after WarnerMedia and Discovery finalize their merger.

Morse considered the CNN+ launch the largest the network has had since it started TV service in June 1980. It was also a chance to experiment with formats that blur distinctions between entertainment and news, the executive added.

The question, of course, is whether or not viewers will bite. CNN has had success with long-form content like the late Anthony Bourdain’s shows, but it’s not clear if people are ready to pay a monthly fee to see them. There’s also the matter of streaming service overload — you might not be thrilled to subscribe to yet another offering just to be sure you catch everything CNN has to offer.

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on Engadget.

Source: Tech Crunch

Uber has announced the first major expansion of its grocery delivery service in the US. The company is more than doubling the number of service areas this week to north of 400 cities and towns. It now serves several major markets through the Uber and Uber Eats apps, including San Francisco, New York City and Washington DC.

The rapid expansion was partly fueled by a partnership with Albertsons Companies and its 1,200 grocery stores across the country. Albertsons owns brands including Safeway, Jewel-Osco, Acme, Tom Thumb and Randalls. Uber also offers delivery from regional chains such as Southeastern Grocers and New York’s Red Apple Group. Uber Pass and Eats Pass subscribers don’t need to pay delivery fees on grocery orders over $30.

Grocery delivery became an important component of Uber’s business during the toughest parts of the COVID-19 pandemic, because the number of rides people were taking dropped significantly. The company is also dealing with a driver shortage that led to higher prices for rides. Uber bought several delivery startups over the last couple of years to fuel its growth in that sector, such as Cornershop, Postmates and Drizly.

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on Engadget.

Source: Tech Crunch

Velodyne Lidar CEO Anand Gopalan is leaving the lidar company at the end of July as the sensor supplier continues to struggle with internal drama.

Gopalan, who was previously CTO, is leaving the top leadership position after about a year and a half on the job.

Velodyne said Monday in a statement that a team of top executives that includes COO Jim Barnhart, CFO Drew Hamer, Chief People Officer Kathy McBeath and Chief Commercial Officer Sinclair Vass will run the company as a search for a new chief executive is conducted. The company didn’t disclose why Gopalan was leaving.

Gopalan’s resignation comes after months of internal drama and business setbacks for a company that has been considered the leading supplier of lidar, the light detection and ranging radar sensor that is considered a critical component to commercially deploy autonomous vehicles.

The resignation is the latest in a series of issues that have cropped up since Velodyne Lidar struck a deal to merge with special purpose acquisition company Graf Industrial Corp. At the time, it was reported that Velodyne’s founder David Hall, along with backers Ford, Chinese search engine Baidu, Hyundai Mobis and Nikon Corp. would keep an 80% stake in the combined company. Hall became executive chairman and Gopalan remained CEO position.

Hall and his wife Marta Thoma Hall clashed with the SPAC that acquired Velodyne. In February, David Hall was removed as chairman of the board and Marta Thoma Hall lost her chief marketing officer position following an investigation by the board of “inappropriate behavior.”

Meanwhile, Ford, which had held almost 13.1 million shares — a value of about $244 million — in Velodyne at the close of the third quarter of 2020, sold off its stake by the end of the year.

Velodyne sensors had been used by Ford in its autonomous vehicle testing. The intention was that those would be the go-to sensor for its autonomous vehicles once they were deployed commercially.

Veoneer had even announced in 2019 that it was leveraging Velodyne’s technology for a contract to supply the sensor to Ford (and by extension its autonomous vehicle technology supplier Argo AI). But Veoneer reported in February that it had lost its contract.

Argo, which had acquired lidar company Princeton Lightwave, unveiled in May details on a long-range lidar sensor that it claims has the ability to see 400 meters away with high-resolution photorealistic quality and the ability to detect dark and distant objects with low reflectivity. With so much progress internally, Argo and Ford staked their future plans on its own lidar.

In a May letter, David Hall blamed the SPAC, specifically the SPAC-appointed members of the combined company’s board, for its poor financial performance and called for the resignation of Gopalan and two board members.

As part of Velodyne’s announcement on Gopalan’s resignation, the company restated its business outlook for 2021 revenue, noting that its guidance of between $77 million and $94 million remains unchanged. Velodyne will report second quarter financial results August 5.

Source: Tech Crunch