Amazon.com has launched a new program to help students build capabilities into its voice-controlled assistant Alexa, the company told Reuters, the latest move by a technology firm to nurture ideas and talent in artificial intelligence research.

The e-commerce company said it was paying for a yearlong doctoral fellowship at four universities for an undisclosed sum.

Working with professors, the Alexa Fund Fellows will help students tackle complex technology problems in class on Alexa, like how to convert text to speech or process conversation.

Amazon, Alphabet’s Google and others are locked in a race to develop and monetize artificial intelligence. Unlike some rivals, Amazon has made it easy for third-party developers to create skills for Alexa so it can get better faster — a tactic it now is extending to the classroom.

The fellowship may also help Amazon recruit sought-after engineers whose studies will make them more familiar with Alexa than with other voice-controlled assistants. The schools in the program are Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins, the University of Southern California and Canada’s University of Waterloo.

‘A great sandbox’

“We want Alexa to be a great sandbox” for students, Doug Booms, vice president of worldwide corporate development at Amazon, said Wednesday in an interview.

He added that the fellowship’s goal was to excite the next generation of scholars about natural language understanding and other voice technologies, not to produce research for Amazon.

Under the program, students’ projects remain their own intellectual property.

At the University of Waterloo, students are improving Alexa’s interaction with air conditioners so it understands requests to cool a room to its normal temperature, without requiring the user to specify a number in Celsius, said Fakhri Karray, a professor of electrical and computer engineering who is overseeing the work.

Securing close ties to university talent and research has become an urgent priority for many tech firms. Uber Technologies in 2015 took 40 people from Carnegie Mellon’s robotics center in-house to work on self-driving cars and other projects. Microsoft has awarded fellowships to doctoral researchers in different areas of computer science, like artificial intelligence, for years.

Amazon itself created the Alexa Prize competition among universities to push forward conversational artificial intelligence, with a $100,000 stipend for each sponsored team.

The money for the new fellowship comes from the Alexa Fund, an investment by Amazon of up to $100 million to advance voice technology.
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Smartphones have replaced lots of other accessories — cameras, flashlights, calculators. But many people are still reluctant to swap the wallets in their pockets for their digital counterparts.

A key reason consumers are hesitant to adopt mobile payment systems like Apple Pay and Android Pay, surveys say, is fear about security: High-profile retailer data breaches have made buyers wary of sharing credit card information. But while there’s cause not to rely 100 percent on your mobile wallet just yet — lack of widespread acceptance by merchants, for one thing — security concerns shouldn’t be holding shoppers back, experts say.

“I think some people get nervous about this idea of, `This thing is sending telepathic waves to that machine to say that I’m paying,’ ” said Mark Ranta, head of digital banking solutions at ACI Worldwide, a payment systems company.

But your mobile wallet is arguably the safest way to pay, and it offers a few benefits to boot. Here’s why this payment method is worth considering.

Safety

Contactless payment services can offer more security than cash or traditional card usage.

“You never have to take out your credit card or debit card, so there’s a lot less chance of someone seeing it,” said Jason Chaikin, president of biometrics security company Vkansee. “For every transaction, [mobile wallets] create a random, one-time number — a transaction token — and even if someone was able to know that number, it’s not valid later.”

Samsung Pay, Android Pay and Apple Pay each use this process, called tokenization. Although you load your card into the payment app, the actual card number is not shared with the merchant when you pay. Rather, a temporary code is issued in its place, similar to the way EMV chip cards work. EMV credit and debit cards have chips that create a unique code, or cryptogram, when inserted into a merchant’s payment terminal. However, the card is in view while the terminal reads the chip.

Mobile payments provide security measures on top of existing bank protections that chip cards can’t match. Full card numbers are not displayed in mobile wallet apps, and users are able to authorize payments with their fingerprints, which can protect your card information in the event your phone is stolen.

Convenience

Services like Apple Pay let users add multiple cards to their phones or smartwatches, theoretically giving them the option to leave overstuffed wallets and purses at home.

But consumers don’t entirely trust mobile wallets partly because availability is limited, Ranta said. Not all cards and loyalty programs are compatible with the payment services, and some stores are not equipped to take mobile payments. Establishments such as bars and restaurants may accept only cash or plastic. Apple Pay has the highest retailer acceptance rate among the mobile payment services, at 36 percent, according to survey data from the retail consulting firm Boston Retail Partners.

“We’re still very much in the early stages of this,” Ranta said, and for now, the merchant acceptance problem remains.

But when shoppers can use their mobile wallets, they can save time at the register. A common complaint among dissatisfied chip-card users is the slow transaction process, as shoppers wait for the EMV terminal to complete the transaction. Mobile payments can be quicker. A user opens a payment app and holds his device over a terminal; a fingerprint or PIN verifies the purchase.

Shopping online can be faster, too. For example, Apple Pay and Android Pay are accepted on certain websites and in apps like Airbnb, allowing shoppers to make purchases without entering card information — or keeping card numbers on file, which may assuage data-breach fears.

And like some bank apps, a mobile wallet saves your recent transaction history for reference, with the added benefit of allowing you to see all activity in one place, even if your cards are from various banks.

Rewards

Mobile credit card payments function just like regular credit cards. As long as your card is compatible with the service, you’ll continue to earn your usual rewards, like travel points or cash back.

Mobile users can add certain retailer loyalty cards to Android Pay and Apple Pay wallets to seamlessly earn store-specific points. Samsung Pay accepts most membership cards.

Samsung also has its own loyalty program, Samsung Rewards. In addition to credit card rewards, members earn points for Samsung Pay purchases; the points are redeemable for rewards like gift cards and fitness trackers.

Mobile payment still has far to go before shoppers begin leaving their old wallets at home. As technology advances, Chaikin said, innovations and improvements in security will most likely make the process more comfortable and accessible for consumers and retailers alike. “Our mobile phone revolution is really just at the tipping point,” he said.
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Researchers at Egypt’s Nile University are developing a way to turn dried shrimp shells that would otherwise be thrown away into thin films of biodegradable plastic they hope will be used to make eco-friendly grocery bags and packaging.

Six months into their two-year project, the research team has managed to create a thin, clear prototype using chitosan, a material found in the shells of many crustaceans.

“If commercialized, this could really help us decrease our waste … and it could help us improve our food exports because the plastic has antimicrobial and antibacterial properties,” Irene Samy, a professor overseeing the project, told Reuters.

The researchers buy unwanted shrimp shells from restaurants, supermarkets and local fishermen at cheap prices.

Using shrimp shells is more sustainable because it could replace synthetic materials used in plastics and cut the amount of biowaste produced by the Egyptian food industry, Samy said.

The shells are cleaned, chemically treated, ground and dissolved into a solution that dries into thin films of plastic, a technique the team says has potential for large-scale industrial production.

“Egypt imports around 3,500 tonnes of shrimp, which produce 1,000 tonnes of shells as waste. … Instead of throwing the shells away, we can make biodegradable plastic bags,” Hani Chbib, a researcher on the project, told Reuters.

The project is a collaboration between the Nile University team of four and another research group at the University of Nottingham in Britain, where Samy conducted her post-doctoral research and first started experimenting with the idea.

The team has only produced small samples and the project is not yet ready to go into commercial production, but the team is working hard to develop properties that would allow the material to go into widespread use.

“We are continuing to work on enhancing its properties, like thermal stability and durability,” Samy said.
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The company behind Snapchat is trading sharply higher in its Wall Street debut.

Snap Inc. jumped $7, or 41 percent, to $24 a share.

It had priced its initial public offering of 200 million non-voting shares at $17 each on Wednesday. That’s above the expected range of $14 to $16.

Snap’s IPO is one of the most anticipated for a technology company since Twitter’s in 2013. That, in turn, had created the biggest stir since Facebook took its first bow on Wall Street in 2012. Twitter is now valued at $11 billion, while Facebook is $395 billion. Snap’s pricing valued the Los Angeles company at $24 billion.

Snapchat is best known for disappearing messages. It’s popular with young people, but growth has slowed down in recent months.

 
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A Californian musician and a Russian music fan decided to become business partners. They founded a company to manufacture high-end microphones from old machinery that once produced Kalashnikov rifles. VOA’s Faiza Elmasry has more. Faith Lapidus narrates.
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Yahoo will not pay CEO Marissa Mayer her scheduled 2016 bonus, worth as much as $2 million, because of the massive breach her company suffered in 2014.

And Yahoo’s general counsel, Ronald Bell, resigned without severance pay for his department’s lackadaisical response to the security lapses.

Although Yahoo’s security team uncovered evidence that a hacker backed by an unnamed foreign government had pried into user accounts in 2014, executives “failed to act sufficiently” on that knowledge, according to the results of an internal investigation disclosed Wednesday. At that time, Yahoo only notified 26 people that their accounts had been breached.

That breach affected at least 500 million users whose email addresses, birth dates, answers to security questions, and other personal information may have been stolen. Three months later, Yahoo revealed it had uncovered a separate hack in 2013 affecting about 1 billion accounts, including some that were also hit in 2014.

Mayer, a former Google executive, said she would voluntarily turn down her annual bonus and equity grants for 2017 as a result of the incidents. Under the terms of Mayer’s 2012 hiring contract, she is entitled to a performance-based equity award of no less than $12 million every year. Mayer said she wants the board to distribute her annual bonus to Yahoo’s entire workforce of 8,500 employees. The board did not say if it would do so.

Yahoo’s unprecedented data thefts had threatened to derail the sale of its Internet business to Verizon. Instead, Verizon cut $350 million from the purchase price, lowering the value of the deal to about $4.48 billion in cash. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2017.
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The strengthening of cyber capabilities is an important part of China’s military modernization, the government said on Wednesday, warning that the internet should not become “a new battlefield.”

China, home to the largest number of internet users, has long called for greater cooperation among nations in developing and governing the internet, while reiterating the need to respect “cyber sovereignty.”

But Beijing, which operates the world’s most sophisticated online censorship mechanism known elsewhere as the “Great Firewall”, has also signaled that it wants to rectify “imbalances” in the way standards across cyberspace are set.

“The building of national defense cyberspace capabilities is an important part of China’s military modernization,” the Foreign Ministry and the Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s internet regulator, said in a strategy for global online cooperation on the ministry’s website.

China will help in the military’s important role in “safeguarding national cyberspace sovereignty, security and development interests” and “hasten the building of cyberspace capabilities”, the strategy said, but also called on countries to “guard against cyberspace becoming a new battlefield.”

Countries should not engage in internet activities that harm nations’ security, interfere in their internal affairs, and “should not engage in cyber hegemony.”

The United States has accused China’s government and military of cyber attacks against U.S. government computer systems. Beijing denies those claims and also says it is a victim of hacking.

While China’s influence in global technology has grown, its ruling Communist Party led by President Xi Jinping has presided over broader and more vigorous efforts to control and censor the flow of information online.

The “Great Firewall” blocks many social media services, such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat and Google, along with many rights groups sites and some foreign media agencies.

Beijing also adopted a controversial cybersecurity law last year that overseas critics say could shut foreign businesses out of various sectors in China.

Chinese officials say the country’s internet is thriving and that controls are needed for security and stability.
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Snap – owner of popular messaging app Snapchat – is going public on Thursday. And it expects anyone buying up to a quarter of its shares to agree not to sell them for a year.

Applying lock-ups helps companies moderate stock volatility.

A year-long lock-up period is atypically long, potentially signifying strong demand for the IPO, says Lauren Hirsch who covers the story for Reuters.

“There is at least one investor who, we’re hearing from our sources, have asked to buy a really big chunk in the Snapchat IPO, and they kind of give assurance that they are really serious and committed to the company,” Hirsch told Reuters. “They said, ‘Not only do we want to buy a large chunk, but we promise that we’ll hold it for a year.’ So, that’s really good news for Snapchat because they essentially have at least one very interested party, and a very interested party who will provide the stock with some stability when risk in any IPO is a turnover in volatility.”

Snap is targeting a valuation of between $19.5 billion and $22.3 billion for its listing on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday. It is looking to price 200 million shares on Wednesday night at a range of $14 to $16  a share.

 
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Netflix employees were personally affected by U.S. President Donald Trump’s attempt to ban people entering from seven Muslim countries, its CEO said Tuesday.

Reed Hastings has been an outspoken critic of the temporary travel ban, which Trump hopes to revive in a revised form this week, and told The Associated Press on Tuesday that some of his co-workers had gotten caught up in it.

“We had Iranian and Iraqi employees who were unable to come to work,” he said on the sidelines of the Mobile World Congress, the wireless industry’s biggest annual gathering held in Barcelona, Spain.

Netflix was among dozens of tech companies that publicly opposed the travel ban out of fear that it would stifle innovation.

U.S. politics has become as gripping as a TV drama but Hastings says that Netflix, the original distributor of the show House of Cards, is not planning a show based on Trump.

“Maybe someday, but it’s better to make a show about things in the past so you can have some perspective,” he said. “We let the news channels do the things that are current, while hoping to provide a relief from politics to people on both sides.”

One of Netflix’s biggest hits has been House of Cards, a fictional show about the ruthlessness of politics in Washington that first distributed in 2013, well before Trump’s rise to power.

Hastings aims to make Netflix even more global, including by creating more original content in foreign languages.

“We are focused on international expansion, mainly in Europe and Asia,” Hastings said. “It’s just the beginning of the internet. We are producing all over the globe with great success, now also in Spain, France, Germany, the U.K., Turkey, India, and even Japan, with anime shows.”

Netflix, which has some 93 million subscribers across 190 countries, is riding the success of some of its own productions, having won its first Oscar this week for the documentary White Helmets, about Syria’s humanitarian aid force.

Hastings expects the market competition to toughen, however, with traditional broadcasters increasingly moving online — especially with the gradual improvement of handset screens and connections.

“I think broadcast television is really going to move to the internet, so that current TV networks will offer their videos online, just the same as Netflix and YouTube.”

The improvements in wireless 4G and 5G technology is likely to encourage the trend of people watching movies on mobile screens. People can break up their viewing during commutes or lunch hours, personalizing the time in which they consume entertainment.

“We would like to continue to improve the mobile plans in order for everybody to enjoy unlimited video viewing,” Hastings said. “I think it’s possible because we are getting more efficient at video data, so that the networks are not congested. That would be a big breakthrough.”
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The last time the entire Sistine Chapel was photographed for posterity, digital photography was in its infancy and words like pixels were bandied about mostly by computer nerds and NASA scientists.

Now, after decades of technological advances in art photography, digital darkrooms and printing techniques, a five-year project that will aid future restorations has left the Vatican Museums with 270,000 digital frames that show frescoes by Michelangelo and other masters in fresh, stunning detail.

“In the future, this will allow us to know the state of every centimeter of the chapel as it is today, in 2017,” said Antonio Paolucci, former head of the museums and a world-renowned expert on the Sistine.

Michelangelo’s ceiling frescoes include one of the most famous scenes in art – the arm of a gentle, bearded God reaching out to give life to Adam.

The Renaissance master finished the ceiling in 1512 and painted the massive “Last Judgement” panel behind the altar between 1535 and 1541.

The last time all Sistine frescoes were photographed was between 1980 and 1994, during a landmark restoration project that cleaned them for the first time in centuries.

The new photos were taken for inclusion in a new three-volume, 870-page set that is limited to 1,999 copies and marketed to libraries and collectors.

The set, which costs about 12,000 euros ($12,700), was a joint production of the Vatican Museums and Italy’s Scripta Maneant high-end art publishers.

Post-production computer techniques included “stitching” of frames that photographers took while working out of sight for 65 nights from 7 p.m. to 2 a.m., when the chapel where popes are elected is closed.

The project was known to only to a few people until it was unveiled in the chapel on Friday night.

The set includes the entire chapel, including the mosaic floor and 15th century frescoes by artists who have long languished in Michelangelo’s giant shadow.

More than 220 pages are printed in 1:1 scale, including ‘The Creation of Adam’ and Jesus’ face from the Last Judgement. Each volume weighs about 9 kg (20 pounds) and fold-out pages measure 60 by 130 cm ( 24 by 51 inches).

The old photos taken during the last restoration were done with film.

“We used special post-production software to get the depth, intensity, warmth and nuance of colours to an accuracy of 99.9 percent,” said Giorgio Armaroli, head of Scripta Maneant.

“Future restorers will use these as their standards,” he said, adding that each page was printed six times.

Brush strokes are clearly visible as are the “borders” delineating sections, known as “giornate,” or days. Since frescoes are painted on wet plaster, artists prepare just enough for what they can complete in each session.

The photographers used a 10-meter-high (33 feet) portable scaffold and special telescopic lens. The results are now stored in a Vatican server holding 30 terabytes of information.

($1 = 0.9450 euros)
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In an effort to save on labor costs and increase efficiency, fast-food chain Wendy’s will install self-ordering kiosks in about 1,000 of its locations in the United States.

According to David Trimm, a spokesman for the Ohio-based company, franchises that want the kiosks will, on average, install three of them, the Columbus Dispatch newspaper reported.

“They are looking to improve their automation and their labor costs, and this is a good way to do it,” said Darren Tristano, vice president with Technomic, a food-service research and consulting firm in an interview with the Columbus Dispatch. “They are also trying to enhance the customer experience. Younger customers prefer to use a kiosk.”

The company says it will see a return on the investment in kiosks within two years.

The company said the kiosks could help ease crowding during peak demand. For those who prefer ordering from a human, there will still be staff available to take orders, according to the Associated Press.

The kiosks have already been tested at Wendy’s stores in central Ohio.

Wendy’s is not the first retailer to explore self-ordering kiosks, as convenience store Wawa rolled them out in 2012.

The longevity of the kiosks, however, is unclear. Tristano says they may find themselves out of a job as ordering and payment move to smartphones.

The prospect of machines putting humans out of work is a controversial topic. The French presidential candidate from the Socialist Party has suggested a tax on machines that put humans out of work.

That idea has found support from Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft.
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Many dog and cat owners think they know what how their animals are feeling. While that may be true, an animal collar or jacket, equipped with sensors, could give them even more information about the emotional state of their pet. The sensors provide data on things like body temperature and heart rate. VOA’s Deborah Block has more.
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