IBL News

Author: IBL News

  • Arizona State University Opens a Lab that Will Create a Metaverse with Zoom

    Arizona State University Opens a Lab that Will Create a Metaverse with Zoom

    IBL News | New York

    Arizona State University (ASU) and Zoom Video Communication opened this month an innovation lab at the Creativity Commons on the Tempe campus.

    It will be equipped with a recording studio, green-screen room, collaboration spaces, and advanced tools.

    This Zoom Innovation Lab at ASU will students will be initially focused on developing new forms of collaboration and Metaverse solutions.

    This lab is part of ASU’s corporate engagement and strategic partnership program.

    “We are embarking on the campus of the future,” said Eric Yuan, Chief Executive Officer of Zoom.

    Projects powered by the Zoom Innovation Lab already underway include the development of a digital twin in a metaverse called ASUniverse and a telehealth app from The Luminosity Lab intended to support doctor-patient visits inside the hospital setting.

    ASUniverse uses real-time 3D models to simulate a virtual campus that is live, adaptive, and changing its environment. It can be for learning, extracurricular activities, campus tours, sporting events, and for allowing students to connect with peers.

    For example, if a learner cannot be on campus, they can create an avatar and visit the ASUniverse via a web browser or with a VR headset. The team is exploring how to further extend the digital experience in this metaverse space with Zoom.

    Currently, 125 ASU students across disciplines are working on the project.

    Regarding the telehealth system, each patient room at Phoenix Children’s Hospital, equipped with Amazon Fire TV for entertainment, will allow physicians and nurses – by adding a camera – to use the Zoom-enabled app to carry out their rounds virtually and connect with patients. It will result in a hands-free interaction for the patient, as well as more efficient visits for hospital staff.

    Additional follow-up projects and iterations will include enhanced classroom and distance learning solutions and smart stadium experiences.
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  • Genius Group Acquires an American Documentary Film Company to Provide High-Quality Educational Videos

    Genius Group Acquires an American Documentary Film Company to Provide High-Quality Educational Videos

    IBL News | New York

    The Singapore – based Genius Group Limited  (NYSE American: GNS), which manages over 2.9 million students in 200 countries, paid $10 million to acquire Revealed Films Inc., a film production company that specializes in multi-part documentaries.

    The Utah – based Revealed Films launches three to four docu-series per year covering topics such as wealth building, health and nutrition, medical issues, religion, and political matters. The firm was founded in 2017 by filmmaker and television producer Jeff Hays and wellness and business expert Patrick Gentempo [in the video below].

    The acquisition, closed on October 4, 2022, will enable Genius Group “to enhance and supplement its always-evolving curriculum with high-quality entrepreneurial education videos,” the company said.

    Revealed Films will continue to operate as a separate entity.

    This is the latest acquisition undertaken by Genius Group since going public in April, following its strategy intended “to disrupt the education sector and build a new curriculum centered around entrepreneurship and lifelong learning.”

     

  • “Career Readiness and Skill Competency Are Key Factors to Measure Student Success”

    “Career Readiness and Skill Competency Are Key Factors to Measure Student Success”

    IBL News | New York

    Career readiness, skill competency, and student educational goals are three of the most important factors for measuring student success. This is the main conclusion of the 2022 State of Student Success and Engagement in Higher Education research released by Instructure (NYSE: INST) [PDF Download]

    Students, faculty, and administrators worldwide believe that student success includes the quality of the faculty, as well as the availability of engaging content, hands-on instruction, and technology.

    According to the research, socioeconomic factors, including access to the internet, learning resources, and technological devices continue to be barriers to student success and engagement, as does psychological well-being. Offering educational technology resources and professional development for educators in technology training is the top way to help address student success struggles.

    Supporting student mental health is still seen as an area of opportunity for institutions.

    Since COVID-19, students, faculty, and administrators are much more inclined to opt for online courses, digital materials, and open education resources than in the past. The convenience and flexibility offered by online or hybrid courses are changing the way students live and learn.

    The report states that three questions remain top of mind:

    • How can students stay engaged and be successful throughout their educational experience and graduate prepared for the modern workforce?
    • How can faculty continuously leverage technology to transform pedagogy to be more engaging, innovative, and inclusive?
    • How can institutions reset and commit to new directives with solutions that better address student and campus goals?

    In this report, Instructure, the maker of Canvas LMS, points out six key trends for student success and engagement in 2022 are:

    1. Students are demanding convenience and flexibility.
    2. Career readiness is of paramount importance.
    3. Competency-based and skills-based learning is in growing demand
    4. Tech-enhanced pedagogy is critical for student engagement.
    5. The digital divide, or gap between those with and those without the Internet, directly impacts student success
    6. The psychological well-being of students is at the forefront of the conversation on student success.
  • A British Platform that Teaches Cybersecurity with Gamification Attracts Big Funding

    A British Platform that Teaches Cybersecurity with Gamification Attracts Big Funding

    IBL News | New York

    The U.K. – based cybersecurity training platform Immersive Labs announced yesterday it had raised $66 million, which adds to another round of $75 million in Series C funding that closed last June. Ten Eleven Ventures led the latest raise. Existing investors — high-profile names such as Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Summit Partners, Insight Partners, Menlo Ventures, and Citi Ventures — participated in the round.

    Through its Cyber Workforce Resilience platform, Immersive Labs teaches cybersecurity skills to employees in a gamified way through simulations and hands-on cybersecurity labs. This way, it evaluates individual and team capabilities, from executive decision-making to hands-on cyber defense teams.

    The company claims to serve customers such as Citi, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Pfizer, Daimler, Humana, Atos, and the U.K. National Health Service.

    “Our customers rely on us because we offer a trusted and effective approach to upskilling and measuring team and individual cyber defense capabilities,” said James Hadley, CEO at Immersive Labs.

    “As we see more focus on proving cyber resilience across public and private sectors, Immersive Labs stands to play a key role in the future of cybersecurity,” said David Palmer, General Partner, Ten Eleven Ventures.

    Immersive Labs originated from a cyber accelerator in London. The founder James Hadley was a former GCHQ security researcher and trainer who realized ordinary employees needed a better way to learn cybersecurity as they were the weakest links in most organizations.

  • YouTube Will Launch a @username Format to Boost User Engagement

    YouTube Will Launch a @username Format to Boost User Engagement

    IBL News | New York

    YouTube announced that over the coming weeks, it will introduce Handles, a unique name with the @ symbol for each channel that will be used to promote it and interact with people.

    The Handle will be how people will mention the channel in their comments and community posts. Handles will become part of the channel URL.

    YouTube will allow channel creators to choose their handles, which can be up to 30 characters.

    The new handle will become a part of the channel URL. For example, if the handle is @user123, the channel URL will be https://youtube.com/@user123.

    If the user hasn’t yet selected a handle for the channel, YouTube will automatically assign a handle, This feature will start on November 14, 2022.

    Handles and @usernames are common across social media, including on sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Telegram, and others.

    Experts note that YouTube’s expansion into TikTok’s territory started with Shorts, and now it follows with handles as a way to encourage users to engage in back-and-forth discussions through their short videos.

  • Duolingo Purchases the Animation Studio that Works on Its Brand

    Duolingo Purchases the Animation Studio that Works on Its Brand

    IBL News | New York

    Duolingo (NASDAQ: DUOL) completed its first official acquisition this month: an illustration and animation tiny studio based in Detroit, MI, called Gunner, which produces elements of the learning platform’s brand marketing campaigns.

    The purchase price wasn’t disclosed publicly. It is expected to be revealed during Duolingo’s next earning call.

    The entire team of 15 people working at Gunner will join Duolingo’s staff as part of the purchase. The studio was already working for Duolingo — as well as other brands, such as Amazon, Dropbox, Spotify, and Google.

    “Art and animation are foundational to the Duolingo brand, and we use them to help make Duolingo a beloved daily habit in millions of learners’ lives,” said Co-Founder and CEO Luis von Ahn in a statement.

    Duolingo also confirmed that it’s opening up an office in Detroit, joining its other offices in Pittsburgh, New York, Seattle, Detroit, Beijing, and Berlin.

    Duolingo’s current stock is trading at $98.30, down over 50% from its 52-week high price of $199.37. The Pittsburgh – based Duolingo reports 500 million users and counted 550 employees worldwide.

  • AI Language Model GPT-3 Arrives into Higher Education

    AI Language Model GPT-3 Arrives into Higher Education

    IBL News | New York

    The arrival of the web-based software GPT-3 as an API service for developers has started to impact the higher education landscape. One of the first applications is writing papers on the cheap. The Chronicle of Higher Ed wonders if this type of artificial intelligence program will kill college writing.

    “These outputs can be astonishingly specific and tailored. When asked to write a song protesting the inhumane treatment of animals in the style of Bob Dylan, the program clearly draws on themes from Dylan’s,” says The Chronicle.

    The GPT-3 software, developed by an Elon Musk-backed, San Francisco-based nonprofit called OpenAI and introduced in 2020, is a kind of omniscient, smart Siri or Alexa that can turn any prompt into prose or even can write code. There are multiple examples of experiments on YouTube with demos of AI robots interacting with humans. [Example I] [Example II] [Example III].

    This technology performs a wide variety of natural language tasks, translating natural language to code. Many companies are currently building products on top of OpenAI’s flagship large language model (LLM).

    In addition to banks using Davinci, the largest GPT-3 model, for its customer service chatbot, this usage of deep learning technology to produce humanlike text, video, and advice is expected to be increasingly implemented in assessments of student learning. The role of faculty, students, research, and publications will be rethought with GPT-3 by the advent of this level of human-computer interaction, according to analyst and writer Ray Schroeder.

    Beyond facts and perspectives, neural networks learn and teach skills, including mathematics, computer programming, creative writing (without plagiarizing responses), and even poetry — after they have absorbed and processed terabytes of text and literature online. GPT-3 has been trained on most of what has been publicly written, including Wikipedia, books, scientific papers, and news articles.

    The success of GPT-3 has encouraged other companies to launch their own LLM research projects. Google, Meta, Nvidia, and other large tech corporations have accelerated work on LLMs.

    Today, there are several LLMs that match or outpace GPT-3 in size or benchmark performance, including Meta’s OPT-175B, DeepMind’s Chinchilla, Google’s PaLM, and Nvidia’s Megatron MT-NLG.

    This month, Amazon’s AI researchers unveiled Alexa Teacher Models (AlexaTM 20B), claiming that it beats GPT-3 on NLP benchmarks. The model is yet to be released publicly. [GitHub repository].

    GPT-3 also triggered the launch of several open-source projects that aimed to bring LLMs available to a wider audience. BigScience’s BLOOM and EleutherAI’s GPT-J are two examples of open-source LLMs available free of charge. Also, Cerebras has created a huge AI processor that can train and run LLMs with billions of parameters at a fraction of the cost.

    However, OpenAI — which has recently slashed the price of its GPT-3 API service by up to two-thirds this month —  is no longer the only company that is providing LLM API services. Hugging Face, Cohere, and Humanloop are some of the other players on the field.

    Hugging Face provides a large variety of different transformers, all of which are available as downloadable open-source models or through API calls. Hugging Face recently released a new LLM service powered by Microsoft Azure, which OpenAI also uses for its GPT-3 API.

    Many organizations can’t handle the technical challenges of training and running the models, as LLM requires dozens or even hundreds of GPUs — huge hardware costs. That’s one of the reasons that OpenAI and other companies decided to provide API access to LLMs.

    • Interaction opportunities with AI: Copy.AI, Blenderbot.AI, Iamsophie.IO

    • Ray Schoeder: Higher Ed, Meet GPT-3: We Will Never Be the Same!

  • 74% of Users Prefer AI Chatbots for Answers to Simple Questions

    74% of Users Prefer AI Chatbots for Answers to Simple Questions

    IBL News | Santa Clara, California

    AI-based automated self-services are increasingly expanding and the response of the audience is being favorable. 74% of customers prefer chatbots for answers to simple questions, and almost a similar number of millennials say that it was a good experience.

    This data was revealed during the Big Data Expo North America Conference, which took part this week in Santa Clara, California.

    Adhar Walia, an expert on conversational AI products and currently a product manager working for CVS Health [in the picture above], said that 128 million people use an AI voice assistant at least monthly.

    Natural Language voice assistants and speech recognition are currently used to engage and capture the audience’s attention, drive natural human-like conversations, and meet customers.

    Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning solutions are being widely adopted by the industry.

    These are the industry-specific solutions according to experts:

    • Ecommerce & Retail:
      – Cross-sell, upsell
      – New Product Sourcing
    • Finance and Banking:
      – Credit Scoring
      – Fraud Detection
      – Portfolio Analysis
    • Productivity
      – Object Detection
      – Voice Analysis
    • Healthcare
      – Early disease detection
      – Identify at-risk patients
      – Healthcare cost optimization
    • Security
      – Anomaly Detection
      – Biometrics
    • Transportation Logistics
      – Theft Prevention
      – Remote Monitoring
  • 85% of Data is Unstructured and Not Ready for AI Use, Industry Experts Say

    85% of Data is Unstructured and Not Ready for AI Use, Industry Experts Say

    IBL News | Santa Clara, California

    Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology in enterprises has become mainstream. This is one of the main conclusions of the AI & Big Data Expo North America conference, which started yesterday and will continue today.

    This in-person and virtual event, hosted in the Santa Clara Convention Center, attracted thousands of attendees — over 5,000, according to the organization of the event. Engineers and business leaders explored the latest innovations and explored impact of AI across industry sectors.

    The adoption of AI has surpassed the 60% of the corporate landscape. The average adoption rate across all geographies was 56% in 2021, up to 6% from 2020, according to data shown by Daniel Wu, Head of AI & Machine Learning Commercial Banking and JP Morgan Chase. The banking executive, who participated in an opening talk, agreed on the fact that data is still pretty siloed. He highlighted that the main challenge in this regard is legacy data with inconsistent quality, and a lack of proper data models increased with the fact that cloud and on-premise hybrid systems end up duplicating it.

    Henry Ehrenberg, Co-Founder at Snorkel AI [in the first picture below], revealed that 85% of data is unstructured, unlabeled, and not ready for AI use.

    Currently, data governance is top of mind for every business leader. Other trends are, according to Mohan Reddy, Co-Founder and CTO of SkyHive and Associated Director of Human Perception Lab at Stanford University :

    • Unified Analytics
    • Graph Neural Networks and Enterprise Applications
    • The emergence of no-code AI Platforms
    • Multilingual models. Transformers as a big part of Enterprise NLP
    • Federated AI Strategies in large enterprises
    • New business models

    Mohan Reddy [in the second picture below] elaborated on how MLOps and AIOps are gaining traction. He also stressed how organizations are looking to build AI trust by establishing protocols for sourcing, handling, and using data for developing ethical AI solutions and preventing algorithmic bias in outcomes.

     

     

  • IBM Teams with 20 Black Universities to Address the Cybersecurity Talent Shortage

    IBM Teams with 20 Black Universities to Address the Cybersecurity Talent Shortage

    IBL News | New York

    IBM announced last week that it will team with 20 historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to address the cybersecurity talent shortage.

    The tech giant will establish Cybersecurity Leadership Centers on the campuses, giving students and faculty access to IBM training curriculum, enterprise security software, certifications, and simulated cyberattack training sessions at no cost.

    The original group of schools in the IBM program included Clark Atlanta University in Georgia, Southern University System and the Xavier University of Louisiana, Morgan State University in Maryland, North Carolina A&T State University, and South Carolina State University.

    The 14 additional universities, announced last week at an HBCU conference hosted by the U.S. Department of Education and the White House, span 11 states and include Tuskegee University in Alabama, Grambling State University in Louisiana, and Norfolk State University in Virginia.

    With 500,000 unfilled cybersecurity jobs in the U.S., the need for expertise is critical, according to a recent IBM Security study.

    Through IBM’s collaboration, faculty and students at participating schools will have access to:

    • Cybersecurity curricula: IBM will develop for each participating HBCU a customized IBM Security Learning Academy portal, including courses designed to help the university enhance its cybersecurity education portfolio. In addition, IBM will continue to give access to IBM SkillsBuild.
    • Immersive learning experience: Faculty and students of participating HBCUs will have access to IBM Security’s Command Center, through which they can experience a realistic, simulated cyberattack.
    • Software: Multiple IBM Security premier enterprise security products hosted in the IBM Cloud.
    • Professional development: Forums to exchange best practices, learn from IBM experts, and discover IBM internships and job openings.