Saturday, June 9, 2018

Here’s what EA announced at E3 2018

Good afternoon, downtown L.A.! The sun is shining, the birds are singing and the giant banners with gun toting cyborgs have been unveiled.

That can only mean one thing: it’s time for E3! Electronic Arts kicked the show off this morning with the first official press conference, and the big news was, as anticipated, Battlefield V.

Battlefield V

The World War II title will likely get a little more love at the Xbox press conference tomorrow morning, but we did get a look at some compelling gameplay. Notably, the title is getting a Fortnite-style multiplayer, battle royale mode.

Anthem

Bioware’s next title isn’t due out until next February, but Anthem still managed to get a lot of love today at E3. The multiplayer shooter finds players assuming the role of mech suit wearing “Freelancers.”

FIFA 19

Due out September 28, EA’s big soccer (or football or whatever) title is adding UEFA Champions League gameplay, after picking up the license from Konami. That’s big news for European soccer fans, bringing the annual tournament to the title. The company also announced a free trial for Xbox, Playstation and PC players.

Madden NFL 19

The popular football title (the other football) is destined for the PC for the first time in more than 10 years. It will bring with it new, more lifelike player animation when it debuts August 10.

Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order

It wouldn’t be an EA E3 event without some Star Wars love. Due out during the 2019 holiday season, the title will offer a dark take on the familiar universe, allowing users to play as a Jedi. That’s all we know so far, and sadly, there’s no trailer yet to speak of.

Unravel 2

No waiting on this one, however. The yarn of a puzzle platformer sequel just dropped today for the PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.



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Uber is looking to buy the bike-share company behind Citi Bike and Ford GoBike

Uber is reportedly looking into buying Motivate, the company that makes Ford GoBike’s in the San Francisco Bay Area and Citi Bike over on the East Coast. This comes following reports of Lyft getting close to purchasing Motivate in a $250 million deal.

Uber bought bike-share startup JUMP, a dockless, electric bike-share service, earlier this year, for about $250 million. In April, Motivate deployed electric bikes in San Francisco. Once JUMP’s 18-month pilot program with the city is up next June, we can expect to see companies like Motivate, Lime and others apply to deploy their own dockless bikes in the city.

I’ve reached out to Uber and will update this story if I hear back.

Just this week, both Uber and Lyft applied to deploy electric scooters in San Francisco. You can read more about that here.



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How (and when) to watch the E3 2018 press conferences

Sure, E3 doesn’t actually officially start until Tuesday, but the big news kicks off this weekend. Here’s a quick overview of some of the biggest new titles we expect to be shown off at press conferences from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, but there’s a lot more to the show than just the big three.

EA started several days of big announcements with a press conference in downtown L.A. this morning, focused on Battlefield V, Fifa 2019 and a bunch more. Microsoft, meanwhile, will be the first of the big hardware companies to hold court with an early afternoon event on Sunday, followed by Bethesda that night.

Monday is the most packed day of the week with events from Square Enix, Ubisoft and Sony. Nintendo, meanwhile, has Tuesday morning to itself, opting to again return to its pre-recorded streaming format in lieu of renting out a larger hall.

Here’s the full break down.

SUNDAY, JUNE 10

Microsoft: 1PM PT, 4PM ET

What to expect: Crackdown 3, Gears of War, Forza and (maybe?) a new Halo.

Bethesda 6:30PM PT, 9:30PM ET

What to expect: Rage 2, Fallout 76.

MONDAY, JUNE 11

Square Enix 10AM PT, 1 PM ET

Watch live video from Square Enix on www.twitch.tv

What to expect: Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Kingsom Hearts 3, Final Fantasy VII.

Ubisoft 12:30PM PT, 3:30PM ET 

What to expect: Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, new Splinter Cell.

Sony 6PM PT, 9PM ET

What to expect: Death Stranding, Last of Us Part II, Marvel’s Spider-Man

TUESDAY, JUNE 12

Nintendo 9AM PT, 12PM ET

What to expect: Super Smash Bros, Pokemon and (maybe) Fortnite

 



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Some 3rd-party repair shops say they are seeing iPhone 7 and 7 Plus devices with audio chip problems that can lead to the phone getting stuck on the boot screen (Jon Christian/Motherboard)

Jon Christian / Motherboard:
Some 3rd-party repair shops say they are seeing iPhone 7 and 7 Plus devices with audio chip problems that can lead to the phone getting stuck on the boot screen  —  People who repair Apple products say that a grayed-out speaker icon is a symptom of “loop disease,” which can affect aging iPhone 7 and 7 Plus devices.



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Airbnb will now let people register as Open Homes emergency volunteers before a crisis hits

Airbnb — the travel startup that lets individuals rent out private homes or rooms in private homes to people as an alternative to hotels — has racked up more than 17,000 nights in its Open Homes program, a voluntary effort where Airbnb hosts can offer their houses and rooms free of charge to people in cities going through an emergency such as a hurricane or flood or other critical incident, either because those people have been displaced from their homes or because they have come to an area to help family go are going through a crisis.

Now, the company is piloting a new version of the program to make it even more ubiquitous: Airbnb hosts, and anyone who might be willing to put up people in emergencies, can now register so that they will be available on “standby” lists.

The first city that will pilot the new system starting this summer is San Jose, California, and the plan is to roll it out to more cities during the rest of the year, and eventually globally.

The idea to expand Open Homes came out of Airbnb thinking about how to make its program more effective and responsive to crises. The company has in total hosted people in nearly 9,000 homes over 90 disasters, but it found that there was a gap in time between when something happened, and the days it would take to recruit volunteers to provide homes. Given the time sensitivity of the need, the company thought it could do something to be more prepared.

On the part of the city of San Jose, it became the first city to pilot the program for two reasons. It relied on Airbnb in 2017 to provide homes to people displaced during major flooding, where the city needed to evacuate and find accommodation for 14,000 families, so it understood the benefit of the program. And it generally has a larger impetus to get involved in more tech-led initiatives that better leveraged its own place in the heart of Silicon Valley.

“As you might expect, as the biggest city in Silicon Valley, we believe in working in collaboration with tech,” San Jose’s mayor Sam Liccardo said in an interview. “Tech has impacted and changed our economy, but we also know that there is an extraordinary opportunity in having a collaborative approach.”

San Jose and Airbnb have worked together before: the city worked with Airbnb on crafting a scheme for taxing hosts to collect visitors’ taxes that were on par with what visitors paid when staying in hotels, and Liccardo noted that this became a template for how Airbnb worked out similar taxes in other cities.

While flooding was the reason Airbnb provided Open Homes in San Jose, Liccardo said that earthquakes are by far the more worrisome natural disaster that San Jose wants to be prepared for down the line.

Kellie Bentz, Airbnb’s Head of Disaster Response and Relief, says that the company has been working with relief organizations up to now to help coordinate housing options. This new phase of Open Homes will bring it into closer contact with city governments to develop programs.

While exact details will be worked out, Airbnb and cities will work together to get the message out to people, since the idea is to appeal to people beyond Airbnb’s own network of hosts. This will include public service announcements and in-person sessions where people can come and learn more about hosting during critical incidents, where they may not get paid, but Airbnb might provide some degree of cost covering for the efforts. Setting up networks of potential hosts ahead of time will allow Airbnb to have more comprehensive data on individual hosts and what their particular offerings and restrictions might be.

Bentz is very quick to say that the purpose behind this program is not to cosy up to city governments, or to simply expand its network of regular hosts. But I’d point out that both do happen to be potential (if unintended) side effects. City governments have not always been in harmony with Airbnb, which has run afoul of some local regulations that have been built for hotels and in some cases are only now being modified to account for Airbnb’s brand of travel accommodation. This gives Airbnb a place as not a disruptive aggressor, but a help. In the case of hosts, there have been plenty who have stayed at Airbnb’s but are reluctant to open up their own homes, and this gives the company a way of introducing the concept in a less all-in way. (Although, to be very clear, the company says it is not expanding this program for either of these reasons. “If we weren’t doing this with integrity, I would not be here,” Bentz said.)

While the idea is to bring in more than just Airbnb hosts as emergency accommodation volunteers, so far Airbnb hasn’t worked with any other networks that provide a platform to home owners to rent out their places, such as HomeAway. “We would be open to those conversations,” said Bentz. “But so far we have not had interest from them.”



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Geek Trivia: The First Inland Aquarium With Permanent Salt Water Displays Was?

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Silicon Valley scooter wars

Electric scooters have become the hot new area for startups and “innovation.” For those who haven’t been keeping track, there are three main players in the Silicon Valley scooter wars: Bird, Lime and Spin. Bird first launched in Venice, Calif. before expanding into San Francisco in March. It’s worth pointing out that Bird, for now, is strictly an electric scooter company. That’s not the case for Lime and Spin, which both have their own bike-share services deployed throughout various parts of the country and world.

That same month — almost in complete lockstep — Lime and Spin deployed their own electric scooters in the city. Fast forward to June and the city of SF has placed a temporary hold on electric scooters until it can review permit applications. As part of a new city law, which went into effect June 4, scooter companies are not able to operate their services in SF without a permit.

Twelve companies (Uber/JUMP, Lyft, Skip, Spin, Lime, Scoot, ofo, Skip, Razor, CycleHop, USSCooter and Ridecell) have applied for permits in SF, but the city’s Municipal Transportation Agency will issue permits for no more than five companies during the 24-month pilot program. The program would grant up to 2,500 scooters to operate in total, but it’s not yet clear how many scooters each company would be allowed to deploy.

Uber and Lyft’s entrance into the electric scooter space was expected, given that Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told me in April that he had his eyes on electric scooters, and Lyft had reportedly been in talks with the SFMTA about its permitting process. But it became more official this past week when both companies applied for permits to operate in SF. Both Uber and Lyft, which have both recently announced public transit integration, are clearly vying to become the one-stop shop for all transportation needs.

The SFMTA said it’s aiming to notify companies of their permit status by the end of June. If issued a permit, companies must then pay an annual permit fee of $25,000, as well as a $10,000 public property repair and maintenance endowment. Companies must also share trip data with the city.

But the scooter moratorium in SF has little effect on the state of scooters as a whole. The last week alone has been filled with multimillion-dollar investments in electric scooter companies like Bird and Lime. Bird authorized a new $200 million funding round that could value the company at around $1 billion post-money, and Bird competitor Lime is also reportedly raising $250 million. 

Below, you can see where some of these newer players stack up in comparison to each other. This is just a look at companies that have deployed electric scooters in the United States.

Where the scooters at

California is the main hot spot for scooters in the U.S., but they have also popped up in Texas, Washington D.C., North Carolina and other states throughout the country. Unsurprisingly, regulation has proved to be an issue for many of these companies. In SF, the MTA is currently reviewing permit applications from electric scooter companies looking to operate in the city. The permit process came as a result of Bird, Lime and Spin deploying their electric scooters without permission in the city in March.

Over in Austin, dockless electric scooter startup GOAT says it’s working with the city to ensure its service meets the criteria laid out by regulators. Moving forward, GOAT says it’s actively working with other cities to pursue additional operating permits. In D.C., Skip, which is trying to differentiate itself by being more heavy-duty, worked with city officials and lawmakers to ensure it had the greenlight before launching.

Here’s an overview of where you can expect to see electric scooters throughout the country.

Outside of the U.S., Bird is looking at deploying scooters throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In February, Bird brought on Patrick Studener, a former international growth product manager at Uber, to serve as head of EMEA at Bird, according to Studener LinkedIn. Earlier this week, TechCrunch also spotted a job posting for a general manager in Europe to lead market management.

Meanwhile, a source sent us a Lime on the streets of Zurich, Switzerland. Lime, however, has not officially announced electric scooters in Switzerland.

Building scooters

Many companies aren’t actually building their own scooters. Instead, they’re slapping stickers and logos on scooters that have been around for years. Lime, Bird and Spin launched using scooters from Ninebot, a Chinese scooter company that has merged with Segway. Ninebot is backed by investors including Sequoia Capital, Xiaomi and ShunWei. But Lime, Skip, Spin and Bird are looking to change that.

In May, Lime partnered with Segway to launch its next generation of electric scooters. These Segway-powered Lime scooters are designed to be safer, longer-lasting via battery power and more durable for what the sharing economy requires, Lime CEO Toby Sun told TechCrunch last month. Now, instead of a maximum distance of 23 miles or so, Lime scooters can go up to 35 miles.

“A lot of the features in the past on scooters were made for the consumer market,” Sun said. “Not for the shared, heavy-duty markets.”

Lime scooter built in partnership w/ Segway

Bird is also experimenting with some new scooter models, but they seem to modified versions of a Segway ES2. When reached for comment, Bird said it didn’t have many details to provide. Meanwhile, Skip does have plans to build its own custom scooters but currently modifies the Speedway Mini4 63V 21Ah scooters.

Skip scooter deck

With Spin, the company does have plans to build its own scooters but isn’t ready to announce details. What Spin CEO Euwyn Poon would share with me is that the company has spun up a custom production line and supply chain.

GOAT, on the other hand, is deliberately taking the partnership route, having developed GOAT on top of a Segway scooter since the beginning.

“This decision was based not only on a superior quality scooter and the ability to maintain this quality at scale, but also our ability to work side-by-side with the Segway team in Changzhou, China and remotely here in Austin,” GOAT co-founder Jennie Whitaker told TechCrunch in an email. “We believe that it’s important to focus on what you’re the best at, which means allowing Segway to produce superior electric scooters while we focus on building technology to solve mobility problems for the world.”

A new side hustle

Just like ride-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft created new jobs, electric scooter companies seem to be doing the same. During some March public hearings in SF, companies touted how their respective services create jobs for people in low-income communities. Given that each player’s scooters need to be charged, they’re relying on everyday people to scoop up these scooters at night, charge them and then drop them off early the next morning.

Lime, for example, has its Juicer program. Bird has its Charger program, Spin has its Squad program and Skip has street team chargers. Spin pays $5 per scooter, Bird pays between $5 to $25 per scooter charged, depending on how hard it is to find the scooter. And Lime pays up to $12 per scooter, depending on the location.

In March, Harry Campbell over at The Rideshare Guy documented what it was like to be a charger for Bird. The TL;DR is that he had a good time and he could see how it would make sense for people looking to make some extra cash.

Scooter parking

Austin scooter parking

Moving forward, companies are looking at ways to ease some of its effects on sidewalk congestion, which has been a primary concern for city dwellers and legislators. In March, SF Supervisor Jane Kim said she didn’t envision handing out permits until the city could figure out a better way to dock the scooters. At the time, the SFMTA said the onus is on the companies to ensure proper docking and that it’s willing to work with each company around that process.

But over in Austin, the city has taken matters into its own hands. In May, the city adopted new rules that require riders to park in designated areas. This decision was inspired by some action Seattle took around dockless bicycles.

Each city will, of course, regulate in whatever way they think is best. But these designated scooter parking areas do seem like a solid way to ensure people aren’t tripping over scooters left in the middle of the street.

A fallen Bird in SF

In addition to figuring out a way to handle scooter parking, companies also have to worry about vandalism and theft. In SF, before the temporary ban, it wasn’t uncommon to see scooters with graffiti, cut wires or with dismembered parts.

Companies, of course, account for things like this and are keeping tabs. Lime told me lost scooters and vandalism affects less than one percent of its overall fleet across markets.

If you’ve made it this far in the story, I tip my hat off to you. Be sure to holler at me if you see scooters behaving badly, launching in new markets or yelling at people on the streets.



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Accenture wants to beat unfair AI with a professional toolkit

Next week professional services firm Accenture will be launching a new tool to help its customers identify and fix unfair bias in AI algorithms. The idea is to catch discrimination before it gets baked into models and can cause human damage at scale.

The “AI fairness tool”, as it’s being described, is one piece of a wider package the consultancy firm has recently started offering its customers around transparency and ethics for machine learning deployments — while still pushing businesses to adopt and deploy AI. (So the intent, at least, can be summed up as: ‘Move fast and don’t break things’. Or, in very condensed corporate-speak: “Agile ethics”.) 

“Most of last year was spent… understanding this realm of ethics and AI and really educating ourselves, and I feel that 2018 has really become the year of doing — the year of moving beyond virtue signaling. And moving into actual creation and development,” says Rumman Chowdhury, Accenture’s responsible AI lead — who joined the company when the role was created, in January 2017.

“For many of us, especially those of us who are in this space all the time, we’re tired of just talking about it — we want to start building and solving problems, and that’s really what inspired this fairness tool.”

Chowdhury says Accenture is defining fairness for this purpose as “equal outcomes for different people”. 

“There is no such thing as a perfect algorithm,” she says. “We know that models will be wrong sometimes. We consider it unfair if there are different degrees of wrongness… for different people, based on characteristics that should not influence the outcomes.”

She envisages the tool having wide application and utility across different industries and markets, suggesting early adopters are likely those in the most heavily regulated industries — such as financial services and healthcare, where “AI can have a lot of potential but has a very large human impact”.

“We’re seeing increasing focus on algorithmic bias, fairness. Just this past week we’ve had Singapore announce an AI ethics board. Korea announce an AI ethics board. In the US we already have industry creating different groups — such as The Partnership on AI. Google just released their ethical guidelines… So I think industry leaders, as well as non-tech companies, are looking for guidance. They are looking for standards and protocols and something to adhere to because they want to know that they are safe in creating products.

“It’s not an easy task to think about these things. Not every organization or company has the resources to. So how might we better enable that to happen? Through good legislation, through enabling trust, communication. And also through developing these kinds of tools to help the process along.”

The tool — which uses statistical methods to assess AI models — is focused on one type of AI bias problem that’s “quantifiable and measurable”. Specifically it’s intended to help companies assess the data sets they feed to AI models to identify biases related to sensitive variables and course correct for them, as it’s also able to adjust models to equalize the impact.

To boil it down further, the tool examines the “data influence” of sensitive variables (age, gender, race etc) on other variables in a model — measuring how much of a correlation the variables have with each other to see whether they are skewing the model and its outcomes.

It can then remove the impact of sensitive variables — leaving only the residual impact say, for example, that ‘likelihood to own a home’ would have on a model output, instead of the output being derived from age and likelihood to own a home, and therefore risking decisions being biased against certain age groups.

There’s two parts to having sensitive variables like age, race, gender, ethnicity etc motivating or driving your outcomes. So the first part of our tool helps you identify which variables in your dataset that are potentially sensitive are influencing other variables,” she explains. “It’s not as easy as saying: Don’t include age in your algorithm and it’s fine. Because age is very highly correlated with things like number of children you have, or likelihood to be married. Things like that. So we need to remove the impact that the sensitive variable has on other variables which we’re considering to be not sensitive and necessary for developing a good algorithm.”

Chowdhury cites an example in the US, where algorithms used to determine parole outcomes were less likely to be wrong for white men than for black men. “That was unfair,” she says. “People were denied parole, who should have been granted parole — and it happened more often for black people than for white people. And that’s the kind of fairness we’re looking at. We want to make sure that everybody has equal opportunity.”

However, a quirk of AI algorithms is that when models are corrected for unfair bias there can be a reduction in their accuracy. So the tool also calculates the accuracy of any trade-off to show whether improving the model’s fairness will make it less accurate and to what extent.

Users get a before and after visualization of any bias corrections. And can essentially choose to set their own ‘ethical bar’ based on fairness vs accuracy — using a toggle bar on the platform — assuming they are comfortable compromising the former for the latter (and, indeed, comfortable with any associated legal risk if they actively select for an obviously unfair tradeoff).

In Europe, for example, there are rules that place an obligation on data processors to prevent errors, bias and discrimination in automated decisions. They can also be required to give individuals information about the logic of an automated decision that effects them. So actively choosing a decision model that’s patently unfair would invite a lot of legal risk.

 

While Chowdhury concedes there is an accuracy cost to correcting bias in an AI model, she says trade-offs can “vary wildly”. “It can be that your model is incredibly unfair and to correct it to be a lot more fair is not going to impact your model that much… maybe by 1% or 2% [accuracy]. So it’s not that big of a deal. And then in other cases you may see a wider shift in model accuracy.”

She says it’s also possible the tool might raise substantial questions for users over the appropriateness of an entire data-set — essentially showing them that a data-set is “simply inadequate for your needs”.

“If you see a huge shift in your model accuracy that probably means there’s something wrong in your data. And you might need to actually go back and look at your data,” she says. “So while this tool does help with corrections it is part of this larger process — where you may actually have to go back and get new data, get different data. What this tool does is able to highlight that necessity in a way that’s easy to understand.

“Previously people didn’t have that ability to visualize and understand that their data may actually not be adequate for what they’re trying to solve for.”

She adds: “This may have been data that you’ve been using for quite some time. And it may actually cause people to re-examine their data, how it’s shaped, how societal influences influence outcomes. That’s kind of the beauty of artificial intelligence as a sort of subjective observer of humanity.”

While tech giants may have developed their own internal tools for assessing the neutrality of their AI algorithms — Facebook has one called Fairness Flow, for example — Chowdhury argues that most non-tech companies will not be able to develop their own similarly sophisticated tools for assessing algorithmic bias.

Which is where Accenture is hoping to step in with a support service — and one that also embeds ethical frameworks and toolkits into the product development lifecycle, so R&D remains as agile as possible.

“One of the questions that I’m always faced with is how do we integrate ethical behavior in way that aligns with rapid innovation. So every company is really adopting this idea of agile innovation and development, etc. People are talking a lot about three to six month iterative processes. So I can’t come in with an ethical process that takes three months to do. So part of one of my constraints is how do I create something that’s easy to integrate into this innovation lifecycle.”

One specific draw back is that currently the tool has not been verified working across different types of AI models. Chowdhury says it’s principally been tested on models that use classification to group people for the purposes of building AI models, so it may not be suitable for other types. (Though she says their next step will be to test it for “other kinds of commonly used models”.)

More generally, she says the challenge is that many companies are hoping for a magic “push button” tech fix-all for algorithmic bias. Which of course simply does not — and will not — exist.

“If anything there’s almost an overeagerness in the market for a technical solution to all their problems… and this is not the case where tech will fix everything,” she warns. “Tech can definitely help but part of this is having people understand that this is an informational tool, it will help you, but it’s not going to solve all your problems for you.”

The tool was co-prototyped with the help of a data study group at the UK’s Alan Turing Institute, using publicly available data-sets. 

During prototyping, when the researchers were using a German data-set relating to credit risk scores, Chowdhury says the team realized that nationality was influencing a lot of other variables. And for credit risk outcomes they found decisions were more likely to be wrong for non-German nationals.

They then used the tool to equalize the outcome and found it didn’t have a significant impact on the model’s accuracy. “So at the end of it you have a model that is just as accurate as the previous models were in determining whether or not somebody is a credit risk. But we were confident in knowing that one’s nationality did not have undue influence over that outcome.”

A paper about the prototyping of the tool will be made publicly available later this year, she adds.



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