Google incorporates Artificial Intelligence into its search results
05/06/2023During Google's annual developer conference, Google I/O, the company has publicly announced its commitment to Artificial Intelligence to improve its search results. Similarly, Google will introduce the generative AI collaboration tool, Duet AI, in Cloud and Workspace. The objective in this case is to assist in programming and generating personalized content in services like Gmail, Slides, or Meet. Google has opened generative AI support in Vertex AI and has also announced the Text Embeddings API for applications that require semantic understanding of text or images. At the developer conference, Google's Vice President and General Manager of Search, Elizabeth Reid, gave a live demonstration of how they are applying Artificial Intelligence in their search engine. The AI results will be displayed in a box at the top of the page with links to verify the provided information. Below the box, the rest of the results will be listed as usual, although Reid also mentioned that thanks to AI, they will now be more relevant.
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Video calling apps listen when the microphone is off, according to a study
25/04/2022A group of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (United States) has determined that video conferencing applications can continue accessing audio data even if the user has disabled the microphone. To demonstrate this, they have studied the most popular video conferencing applications and have analyzed the behavior of the mute button until they has determined that all the applications that they has tested whether the microphone was open or closed, occasionally collected raw data and delivered it to the servers of their services. In their research they have worked with binary analysis tools to see how the audio was transferred from the application to the audio drivers of the computers and then to the network. They aslo have created, through machine learning models ( 'machine learning'), a classifier of daily activities that, with 82% accuracy, has determined which activities users were doing while their microphones were, theoretically, silenced. In relation to this, the authors of this work recall that beyond muting the microphone, you can turn off the microphone of a device through the settings menu, a safer option to limit access to confidential information and sensitive data. All the conclusions of this study will be known next July in the Privacy Improvement Technologies Symposium.
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The European Commission is committed to manufacturing chips in Europe to be less dependent on Asia
15/10/2021With the chip crisis still on the table, the European Commission is defining a new law to developing the semiconductor industry in Europe, so the local manufacturers can be less dependent on international supply chains. “We currently depend on chips made mostly by Asia. It's not a question of competitiveness: it's a question of technological sovereignty ”, said Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission. The document revealed by Euractiv, conclude that this new legislation demonstrates “the need to strategically reduce dependencies on third parties” and that its objective is to improve “security of supply”. The initiative would be part of the new European Commission’s digital policy that would also include, a cyber-resilience law, and also initiatives to promote digital skills among citizens. At the moment the implementation calendar of these new digital policies of the European Commission has not transcended, but it seams would not be until the third quarter of 2022, when it could be launched.
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