A federal jury in Wisconsin on Wednesday convicted a Chinese wind turbine company of stealing trade secrets, which nearly destroyed a U.S. manufacturer.

China’s Sinovel Wind Group does business in the United States.

“The theft of ideas and ingenuity is not a business dispute. It’s a crime and will be prosecuted as such,” U.S. Attorney Scott Blader said.

According to the government’s case against Sinovel, the company had an $800 million contract for products and services from Wisconsin-based American Superconductor (AMSC).

It said Sinovel conspired in 2011 with two company managers and a former AMSC employee to use computers in Austria to steal wind turbine technology and trade secrets from AMSC and install them on Sinovel turbines.

Sinovel never paid AMSC the $800 million.

Federal prosecutors said Sinovel’s crime cost AMSC dearly; investors dumped more than $1 billion in AMSC stock and about 700 workers lost their jobs, more than half of the company’s global workforce.

Sinovel will be sentenced in June.
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The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board has opened an investigation in an accident involving a Tesla car that may have been operating under its semi-autonomous Autopilot system. 

The board sent two investigators to Culver City, California, to learn whether the Autopilot was on and if so, how the car’s sensors failed to detect a firetruck stopped on a highway near Los Angeles on Monday. 

This is the second time the safety agency will look in to a crash involving Tesla’s Autopilot feature. 

In September, the NTSB determined that while the technology played a major role in the May 2016 fatal crash in Florida, the blame fell on driver errors, including overreliance on technology by an inattentive Tesla driver. 

The California driver said the Autopilot mode was engaged when the car struck the firetruck while traveling 104 kilometers per hour (65 mph). “Amazingly there were no injuries! Please stay alert while driving!,” the Culver City firefighters union said in a tweet.

Tesla wouldn’t say if Autopilot was working at the time of the Culver City crash, but said in a statement Monday that drivers must stay attentive when it’s in use. The company would not comment on the investigation.
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Apple’s next major update of its mobile software will include an option that will enable owners of older iPhones to turn off a feature that slows the device to prevent aging batteries from shutting down.

The free upgrade announced Wednesday will be released this spring.

The additional controls are meant to appease iPhone owners outraged since Apple acknowledged last month that its recent software updates had been secretly slowing down older iPhones when their batteries weakened.

Many people believed Apple was purposefully undermining the performance of older iPhones to drive sales of its newer and more expensive devices. Apple insisted it was simply trying to extend the lives of older iPhones, but issued an apology last month and promised to replace batteries in affected devices at a discounted price of $50.

Despite Apple’s contrition, the company is still facing an investigation by French authorities, a series of questions from U.S. Senate and a spate of consumer lawsuits alleging misconduct.

Besides giving people more control over the operation of older iPhones, the upcoming update dubbed iOS 11.3 will also show how well the device’s battery is holding up. Apple had promised to add a battery gauge when it apologized to consumers last month.

Other features coming in the next update will include the ability to look at personal medical histories in Apple’s health app, more tricks in its augmented reality toolkit and more animated emojis that work with the facial recognition technology in the iPhone X.
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The International Telecommunication Union reports hundreds of millions of people in the world’s poorest countries now have access to the Internet and mobile devices.

It is increasingly difficult to function in this modern digital world without access to the Internet, a smart phone or other digital device. A new report by the International Telecommunication Union finds e-banking, e-commerce and other actions in cyberspace are no longer just the purview of the rich world.

It says all 47 of the world’s Least Developed Countries are making huge strides in increasing their Internet access. The ITU says more than 60 percent of LDC populations are covered by a 3G network, referring to a third generation or advanced wireless mobile telecommunication technology.

It notes by the end of last year, about 700 million people in LDCs had subscriptions to mobile phones, with 80 percent of their populations living within range of a mobile cellular network. Given this progress, the ITU reports LDCs are on track toward achieving the U.N. Sustainable Development Goal on universal and affordable Internet access by 2020.

ITU spokeswoman Jennifer Ferguson-Mitchell tells VOA having access to the Internet and mobile phones has a positive impact on peoples’ lives. She says digital connectivity can provide valuable knowledge and information to populations around the world.

“It gives farmers access to information on crops, when to plant their crops, weather patterns that are happening. It provides access to online education to communities,” she said. “It can make micro and small and medium sized enterprises be able to compete with larger businesses.”

The lTU says universal and affordable Internet access can help LDCs leap-frog in areas such as education, health, government services, trade and can trigger new business opportunities. While this is positive, the report identifies lack of digital skills as a key barrier to Information Communication Technology and Internet use in LDCs.

The report calls on policy makers, industry leaders, and educators to work together to increase digital skills across the Least Developed Countries.

 
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The high cost of living makes finding affordable child care a challenge in Silicon Valley. Three moms have founded the online platform “Roovillage” to help ease the burden. VOA’s Calla Yu reports from San Mateo, California.
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Seven years ago, a computer beat two human quizmasters on a Jeopardy challenge. Ever since, the tech industry has been training its machines even harder to make them better at amassing knowledge and answering questions.

And it’s worked, at least up to a point. Just don’t expect artificial intelligence to spit out a literary analysis of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace any time soon.

Research teams at Microsoft and Chinese tech company Alibaba reached what they described as a milestone earlier this month when their AI systems outperformed the estimated human score on a reading comprehension test. It was the latest demonstration of rapid advances that have improved search engines and voice assistants and that are finding broader applications in health care and other fields.

The answers they got wrong — and the test itself — also highlight the limitations of computer intelligence and the difficulty of comparing it directly to human intelligence.

Error! Error!

“We are still a long way from computers being able to read and comprehend general text in the same way that humans can,” said Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s chief technology officer, in a LinkedIn post that also commended the achievement by the company’s Beijing-based researchers.

The test developed at Stanford University demonstrated that, in at least some circumstances, computers can beat humans at quickly “reading” hundreds of Wikipedia entries and coming up with accurate answers to questions about Genghis Khan’s reign or the Apollo space program.

The computers, however, also made mistakes that many people wouldn’t have.

Microsoft, for instance, fumbled an easy football question about which member of the NFL’s Carolina Panthers got the most interceptions in the 2015 season (the correct answer was Kurt Coleman, not Josh Norman). A person’s careful reading of the Wikipedia passage would have discovered the right answer, but the computer tripped up on the word “most” and didn’t understand that seven is bigger than four.

“You need some very simple reasoning here, but the machine cannot get it,” said Jianfeng Gao, of Microsoft’s AI research division.

Human vs. machine

It’s not uncommon for machine-learning competitions to pit the cognitive abilities of computers against humans. Machines first bested people in an image-recognition competition in 2015 and a speech recognition competition last year, although they’re still easily tricked. Computers have also vanquished humans at chess, Pac-Man and the strategy game Go.

And since IBM’s Jeopardy victory in 2011, the tech industry has shifted its efforts to data-intensive methods that seek to not just find factoids, but better comprehend the meaning of multi-sentence passages.

Like the other tests, the Stanford Question Answering Dataset, nicknamed Squad, attracted a rivalry among research institutions and tech firms — with Google, Facebook, Tencent, Samsung and Salesforce also giving it a try.

“Academics love competitions,” said Pranav Rajpurkar, the Stanford doctoral student who helped develop the test. “All these companies and institutions are trying to establish themselves as the leader in AI.”

Limits of understanding

The tech industry’s collection and digitization of huge troves of data, combined with new sets of algorithms and more powerful computing, has helped inject new energy into a machine-learning field that’s been around for more than half a century. But computers are still “far off” from truly understanding what they’re reading, said Michael Littman, a Brown University computer science professor who has tasked computers to solve crossword puzzles.

Computers are getting better at the statistical intuition that allows them to scan text and find what seems relevant, but they still struggle with the logical reasoning that comes naturally to people. (And they are often hopeless when it comes to deciphering the subtle wink-and-nod trickery of a clever puzzle.) Many of the common ways of measuring artificial intelligence are in some ways teaching to the test, Littman said.

“It strikes me for the kind of problem that they’re solving that it’s not possible to do better than people, because people are defining what’s correct,” Littman said of the Stanford benchmark. “The impressive thing here is they met human performance, not that they’ve exceeded it.”
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It seems like a game everyone wins: Some of China’s biggest tech companies, looking to hook in new consumers, are using cash prizes to draw millions of contenders to mobile-based online quiz shows.

Up to 6 million people at a time log into the free, live games on their smartphones to answer a series of rapid-fire questions in an elimination battle, with those remaining sharing the prize money.

Over the weekend, search engine giant Baidu and video game maker NetEase launched their own online shows, joining news feed platform Toutiao, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd-owned UCWeb and Wang Sicong, the scion of Chinese billionaire Wang Jianlin.

But how they will cash in on the games and stay on the right side of government censors might prove to be a tricky question.

The trivia games have drawn some controversy, heightened by a broader crackdown on online content during the last year under President Xi Jinping, from livestreams and blogs to a campaign against internet addiction.

This month, one quiz show, “Millions Winner,” backed by internet security company Qihoo 360, apologized after it was chastised by a regulator for listing Taiwan and Hong Kong, over which China claims sovereignty, as independent countries in a question.

How firms will monetize the craze is also not yet clear, though some companies, such as online retailer JD.com, have already jumped on the trend, sponsoring shows to help raise their profiles. Many of the games show ads to players during the shows.

“If you ask me why I do this, to be honest, I don’t really know if I can make money,” Zhou Hongyi, chairman of Qihoo, said at an event where he presented a contestant with a 1 million yuan ($156,115.84) prize check two weeks ago. “But from a user’s perspective, I think this is really fun.”

The quiz mania underlines the fierce appetite of China’s consumers for internet entertainment, a trend helping drive billions of dollars of investment into digital news portals, online gaming, internet advertising and television content.

“I heard about this game from a friend who won 1,700 yuan in one day. I immediately decided to join up myself,” Wang Ting, a 26-year-old graduate student in Qingdao, told Reuters. She now spends three hours each day on her phone playing the games.

Uncertain future

Questions, read by a live host, might include: “From which country were pineapples imported to China in the 16th century?” “In which dynasty was the lamb hot pot invented?” or “How many fingers does Mickey Mouse have?”

Contestants get 10 seconds — a time frame designed cut out cheating — to select the correct answer from a choice of three.

Winnings can be up to 3 million yuan per game, but are often split between many winners.

Toutiao parent Bytedance said that “millions of our users” had taken part in its live quiz “Million Dollar Hero” since the show launched at the start of January. It also has a tougher “Hero Game” with harder questions and bigger prizes.

“We’ve been running for just two weeks, so it’s still in the very early stages, but it’s encouraging to see how the game has taken off across the country, and with all age groups,” the company said in a statement to Reuters.

Toutiao, a highly popular news feed app, was valued at around $20 billion in a fundraising last year, sources close to the company told Reuters.

Raymond Wang, managing partner at Beijing law firm Anli Partners, said the shows were a “relatively low-cost way to get to users,” but cautioned there were political and technical risks.

Wang Ran, a prominent investor and head of Beijing-based private investment bank CEC Capital Group, posed a question on his WeChat account about the future of the online quiz show trend.

“A) Growing numbers will jump into the market. B) Someone will win 10 million yuan in one go. C) Authorities will strictly crack down on it. 10 seconds. Go!”
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There’s little doubt that virtual reality is likely to be the future of video gaming. Now, a Russian company in Moscow is pushing the limits of the technology with a game changing VR experience. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Facebook took a hard look in the mirror with a post Monday questioning the impact of social media on democracies worldwide and saying it has a “moral duty” to understand how it is being used.

Over the past 18 months, the company has faced growing criticism for its limited understanding of how misinformation campaigns and governments are using its service to suppress democracy and make people afraid to speak out.

“I wish I could guarantee that the positives are destined to outweigh the negatives, but I can’t,” wrote Samidh Chakrabarti, Facebook’s product manager of civic engagement.

Since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Facebook has been looking more critically at how it is being used. Some of what it found raises questions about company’s long-standing position that social media is a force for good in people’s lives.

In December, in a post titled “Is Spending Time on Social Media Bad for Us?” the company wrote about its potential negative effects on people.

The self-criticism campaign extended to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s personal goals. Each year he publicly resolves to reach one personal goal, which in the past included learning Mandarin, reading more books and running a mile every day.

This year, Zuckerberg said his goal is to fix some of the tough issues facing Facebook, including “defending against interference by nation states.”

Foreign Interference

During the 2016 U.S. election, Russian-based organizations were able to reach 126 million people in the U.S. with 80,000 posts, essentially using social media as “an information weapon,” wrote Chakrabarti. The company made a series of changes to make politics on its site more transparent, he wrote.

False News

Facebook is trying to combat misinformation campaigns by making it easier to report fake news and to provide more context to the news sources people see on Facebook.

“Even with these countermeasures, the battle will never end,” Chakrabarti wrote.

One of the harder problems to tackle, he said, are so-called “filter bubbles,” people only seeing news and opinion pieces from one point of view. Critics say some social media sites show people only stories they are likely to agree with, which polarizes public opinion.

One obvious solution – showing people the opposite point of view – doesn’t necessarily work, he wrote. Seeing contrarian articles makes people dig in even more to their point of view and create more polarizations, according to many social scientists, Chakrabarti said.

A different approach is showing people additional articles related to the one they are reading.

Reaction to Facebook’s introspection was mixed with some praising the company for looking at its blind spots. But not everyone applauded.

“Facebook is seriously asking this question years too late,” tweeted Jillian York, director for international freedom of expression for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
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No cashiers, no lines, no registers — this is how Amazon sees the future of in-store shopping.

The online retailer opened its Amazon Go concept store to the public Monday, selling milk, potato chips and other items typically found at a convenience shop. Amazon employees have been testing the store, which is at the bottom floor of the company’s Seattle headquarters, for about a year.

The public opening is another sign that Amazon is serious about expanding its physical presence. It has opened more than a dozen bookstores, taken over space in some Kohl’s department stores and bought Whole Foods last year, giving it 470 grocery stores.

But Amazon Go is unlike its other stores. Shoppers enter by scanning the Amazon Go smartphone app at a turnstile. When they pull an item of the shelf, it’s added to their virtual cart. If the item is placed back on the shelf, it is removed from the virtual cart. Shoppers are charged when they leave the store.

The company says it uses computer vision, machine learning algorithms and sensors to figure out what people are grabbing off its store shelves.

Amazon says families can shop together with just one phone scanning everyone in. Anything they grab from the shelf will also be added to the tab of the person who signed them in. But don’t help out strangers: Amazon warns that grabbing an item from the shelf for someone else means you’ll be charged for it.

At about 1,800 square feet, the store will also sell ready-to-eat breakfasts, lunches and dinners. Items from the Whole Foods 365 brand are also stocked, such as cookies, popcorn and dried fruit.

The company had announced the Amazon Go store in December 2016 and said it would open by early 2017, but it delayed the debut while it worked on the technology and company employees tested it out.
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Media mogul Rupert Murdoch on Monday called on Facebook to pay “trusted” news publishers a carriage fee, similar to the model used by cable companies, amid efforts by the social media company to fight misinformation on its platform.

“Facebook and Google have popularized scurrilous news sources through algorithms that are profitable for these platforms but inherently unreliable,” Murdoch, who controls the Wall Street Journal as executive chairman of News Corp., said in a statement.

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said on Friday his company would fight misinformation and sensationalism on its platform by using member surveys to identify “trustworthy” outlets.

“There has been much discussion about subscription models but I have yet to see a proposal that truly recognizes the investment in and the social value of professional journalism,” Murdoch said.

The quality of news on Facebook has been called into question after alleged Russian operatives and spammers spread false reports on the site, including during the 2016 U.S. election campaign.

Facebook and Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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Assessing someone’s medical status was easy on the TV series, Star Trek. Dr. McCoy just waved his tricorder over the patient, and any broken bones, concussions or internal bleeding were instantly revealed.

While in real life, ultrasounds and x-rays help physicians diagnose everything from breast cancer to kidney stones, those scans can not reveal what is inside the masses.  Having that immediate knowledge could help millions of patients avoid unneeded stress and surgery.  

Purdue University Biomedical Engineering professor Ji-Xin Cheng has devoted his life’s work to technology that will be able to provide that internal view. He and his team have developed several medical tools that help diagnose patients using sound and light. “Eventually we want to make a device like the tricorder in Star Trek,” he explains, “so our dream is to make a movie into a real practice.”

Label-free imaging

In conventional medicine, surgeons must either cut out suspect tissue for analysis, or risk exposing already very sick patients to fluorescent dyes and nanoparticles.  These “labels” light up lesions so doctors can study them.

Team member Jesse Vhang explains their technique – called “label-free imaging” – eliminates more invasive or toxic procedures by bouncing light off molecules in the tumor.

“We do not need a label,” he points out. “We can basically look at the vibrations of the molecules and these vibrations can generate signals in our microscope.”

Those vibrations serve as molecular fingerprints, unique to each type of molecule.  The patterns can be mapped to identify such things as lipids, proteins, and nucleic acids.  In essence, the devices give doctors the ability to look at a patient in three instead of two dimensions.

Vhang says, “For example we could use this to image biological samples from patients.  We can see if the patient has cancer, which usually accumulates a lot of lipids.” The label-free imaging devices have shown promise in identifying kidney, liver, and breast cancer.  

MarginPAT

One device, the MarginPAT, funded by the National Institute of Health, will also help breast cancer surgeons remove tumors more efficiently and accurately.  In the United States, about a quarter of all breast cancer patients must undergo a second surgery to remove missed malignant cells. The developers expect MarginPAT will dramatically reduce that number.

Cheng and his partner, Dr. Pu Wang, founded Vibronix to manufacture the device.  Wang says it could revolutionize medicine around the world.

“I think this will be good in mainland China where medical practice is not as good as the tier one hospitals in the big cities or aboard.  They will be able to use the setup to provide the same surgery as the big city doctors.”

If all goes as planned, the MarginPAT will be on the market within three years and several more of Cheng’s label-free imaging devices will not be far behind, making his dream of a real Star Trek tricorder one step closer to reality. 
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