An external advisory council to help advance the responsible development of AI

Alphabet’s Google said it was launching a global advisory council to consider ethical issues around artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies and to ‘ to guide the responsible development and use of AI in our research and products. ‘

To complement the internal governance structure and processes that will help to implement the principles, an Advanced Technology External Advisory Council (ATEAC) is established.

The eight-member Advanced Technology External Advisory Council includes Joanna Bryson, an associate professor in computing at the University of Bath; William J. Burns, a former US deputy secretary of state, and Dyan Gibbens, chief executive of Houston-based drone startup Trumbull, according to a Google blog post.

Fathers of AI honoured with Nobel Prize of computing

Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun have been honoured with Turing award, which carries a $1 million prize.
Their decades of hardwork and their persistence paid off when the Association for Computing Machinery awarded them the ACM AM Turing Award, an honour that over the years has become famous as the “Nobel Prize of computing”, for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs in the field of deep neural networks.

Geoffrey Hinton works at Google as a vice-president and senior fellow.
Mr. LeCun is chief AI scientist at Facebook.
Mr. Bengio remains immersed in academia as a University of Montreal professor in addition to serving as scientific director at the Artificial Intelligence Institute in Quebec .

“For a long time, people thought what the three of us were doing was nonsense,” Mr. Hinton said in an interview with. “They thought we were very misguided and what we were doing was a very surprising thing for apparently intelligent people to waste their time on. My message to young researchers is, don’t be put off if everyone tells you what are doing is silly.”

Turing Awardees

For more info. please visit-

https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/artificial-intelligence-pioneers-win-tech-nobel/article26653986.ece

Fast encryption to cheap smartphones by Google’s Adiantum

Encryption helps keep personal data, files, accounts, and pretty much everything inside the phone safe and sound, away from the hands of thieves and cybercriminals.

One can’t crack into someone else’s phone without knowing their pattern/PIN/password, and can’t extract information or files out of it either. But the problem with encryption is slower performance.

Adiantum is a new encryption algorithm developed by Google that serves as a lighter, more efficient alternative to AES encryption.

It’s made specifically to run without any added dedicated hardware, which means that cheaper devices and older devices, like Android Go phones, will be able to take advantage of this new encryption algorithm to have privacy and security.

Adiantum also aims to secure sensitive information and encrypt other devices such as smartwatches and Internet-connected medical devices, according to Google’s blog post.

Please check out this Google’s post this blog post for more information:

https://security.googleblog.com/2019/02/introducing-adiantum-encryption-for.html

Source:The Verge : Google has a new form of encryption called Adiantum that’s designed to bring storage encryption to cheaper Android devices without impacting performance. Currently, devices such as low-powered Android Go smartphones, smart watches, and TVs fall below Google’s performance requirements for encryption. With Adiantum, Google says that every Android device can be encrypted, meaning privacy won’t just be for those who can afford it.

Closure of Google+

Google+ will be shut down for good on 2 April, with all profiles and pages to be deleted on that day.
The deletion does not affect other Google services. Photos and videos stored in Google Photos, will not be affected. Your Google account, which is linked to services such as Gmail, YouTube and Maps, will continue to work, but your Google+ account, which was only used for the social network, will be deleted.

Why is Google doing this?

The company’s official explanation is that it decided to shutter the site “due to low usage and challenges involved in maintaining a successful product that meets consumers’ expectations”.

Perhaps those “challenges” largely relate to a data leak in the social network that it discovered in March 2018 but did not disclose for six months.

That leak “potentially affected up to 500,000 accounts”, allowing third-party applications to access information marked as private, although Google said it had found “no evidence that any profile data was misused”.

The company had initially planned to shut the social network down in August this year, but in November it discovered another bug that gave apps access to non-public information, and brought forward the shutdown to April.

Google employees doubt CEO Sundar Pichai’s vision

According to a report by The Bloomberg, a recently conducted survey by Google called Googlegeist suggests that when questioned about the confidence the employees have in CEO Sundar Pichai, 74% responded yes, which has dipped from 92% of last year’s survey.

A similar decline in affirmative answers was seen when employees were asked about the work satisfaction and compensation paid to them, and more, with 54% responding in favor of Google as opposed to the 64% seen in 2018.

The figures aren’t too concerning but Google needs to look into the declining number and figure out solutions to gain back the goodwill of its employees.