Is Technology Good for the Younger Generation?

„A lot of the learning process that has to do with synaesthetic representation of semantics is called, how you give meaning, to the way your senses overlap is an essential, a core component of education.

That’s how you learn how to speak.

That’s how we learn how to walk.

That’s how you learn not to touch a warm stove.

By connecting how it sounds like with what it looks like, with how it feels like with whether it cuts you, with whether it’s abrasive, all of these billions of types of operations are continually being optimised in the mind of a kid.

Now, imagine what using a tablet means to the system.

It takes away, it’s like ripping out of core sense, touch. It is destroying touch. Because touch becomes, from an informational point of view, the surface of a tablet, means no tactile information, or almost no tactile information, no texture, no temperature.

It is like getting your kids to get used to worshipping something that is dead, from a neurological point of view is like letting, notwithstanding the, let’s say, potential diseases and whatever, but giving to kids a tablet to play with it is like giving them a dead cat.

Sure, it doesn’t rot and it doesn’t stink.

But from a technical point of view, the fact that it has no texture, it has no temperature, it has no bump or no variation, it is impoverishing a core neurological process of young children.

So this neurological process is critical until about five to seven years old. So basically if you give them a tablet, you are neurologically destroying children up to seven years old and that is that has been measured.” – Bogdan Bocșe, CEO @ Knosis.AI

Is Cloud Sustainable?

Bogdan Bocșe, CEO @ Knosis.AI, discussed the link between Artificial Intelligence and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Here is the episode:

Is Cloud Sustainable?

We have designed a way to leverage the cloud, let’s say, as a means to increase the efficiency of the energy grid. Because the consumption produced by the cloud is by estimate dating from 2016, so pretty much outdated, already taking up 2.5 to 3% of energy consumption in Europe.

And it’s the fastest-growing energy consumer.

And I’m not talking fast as in 10% a year, I am talking fast in doubling every five years.

By some estimates, this energy consumption of IT, of the cloud, in 20 years will reach 20%, of energy consumption, which is unsustainable.

But if we play our cards, right, we can make the number be 7-8-9 percent over the next 20 years.

And one of the things we’re working on is basically using a huge consumer, which is a lot more predictable than households, consumers, right, you can turn it on and off, you can know what effect it has if you turn something off now and turn it on later.

And we sent a proposal, a technical proposal for leveraging this flexibility or huge consumer, in order to fix the energy grid to consume less, when you have less, than to consume more when you need more.

Because one of the key problems of the energy theory right now is what is called the ”duck neck problem”, which refers to the difference between the peak of renewable production and the peak of consumption in time over the span of a day.

So basically, you have the peak of production around noon, and you have the peak of consumption around evening. And basically, that means that you get a lot of green energy when it’s useless, and you have none of it when you need it.

And we can use the cloud to flick the two. And if we do that, just for one in 1000 of the energy grid, the economic advantages are huge, just one, not one person, one in 1000.

And by this sort of idea where people who buy cloud computing, get an option, you can buy it now you can stop the processing now, and you pay this fee, or you can leave the processing for when we have renewable energy in the grid. And it will be easy. If you wait, it’s cheap, and you save Earth.

And you also get a certificate saying that our computation was done using bla bla bla bla bla, and you sign it cryptographically.

And that guy or that company can put it on the website and say look, 80% of our processing is done, not in a carbon-neutral way, in a carbon-negative way.

Because if you reduce the burden on the network, you don’t just use how much carbon you emit. But you also eliminate the need to produce carbon to offset that balance by conventional means, because the way that the way this balance is settled right now is by burning gas when you don’t have energy.

So basically, we have a lot of renewable energy, but we don’t have it when we need it.

And we don’t know how to make batteries, but we know how to turn the cloud into a battery, a negative battery.

But for technical purposes, the negative battery is just the positive battery or a different type. – Bogdan Bocșe, CEO @ Knosis.AI

AI & SDGs | What Clicks Actually Mean

Bogdan Bocșe, CEO @ Knosis.AI, discussed the link between Artificial Intelligence and the Sustainable Development Goals.

Here is the episode:

AI & SDGs | What Clicks Actually Mean

We need to transform the sort of environmental and sustainable development goals, we need to transform them into perceivable immediate actionable sets, and very offensive, very, not offensive, but very aggressive.

All AI solutions, which are trained exclusively with data coming from a single human person, are biased.

So basically, if you take the word of any single person, you are biased.

So basically, all the solutions that are using judgments or labels or supervision of any sort from a single person per case are by definition of the word bias, and we have solutions for this.

And we have a solution that instead of avoiding bias, measures the types of bias that are being experienced. It actively tests the user request to trick the user of having a biased procedure.

It goes that way to explicitly not having a bias to see if it goes the other way: by removing part of the context to see if it was the other way.

And I will give you a very simple example of a prototype that we built. We haven’t deployed it yet for the customer, but maybe we’re lucky this year. We have this solution for augmenting data and measuring the bias because we wanted to use it for measuring consecutive bias.

We don’t have this product yet. We have a lot of other projects. I won’t do this marketing campaign right now, but the idea is like this, we go to a company and go like:

Do you want to know what sort of biases your Executive Board has?

Cool! Give them this link.

And that link gives you a series of very boring administrative tests: look at some resumes, read some e-mails, but it’s booby-trapped.

For instance, if I show you the profile of a person, I will measure whether you click on the pictures of a certain job, more often than the pictures of something else.

Also if you click on the picture from a CV, you are biassed.

If you click, if you express intention of seeing, you are biassed.

My girlfriend always makes fun of me:

You know, you will have so many girls that you will need to interview, you have so many girls that will be around you. And I go like yeah, but my point is to make sure that I’m a good manager. I want to make sure that I do not put into me information that I know will hurt my decision process.

It is my job to protect myself from being a sexist. – Bogdan Bocșe, CEO @ Knosis.AI

Knosis and Magurele Science Park join forces

We are glad to announce that we join forces with Măgurele Science Park community for a fruitful partnership that will bridge the gap between the business and academic environment.

At Knosis, we are passionate about transforming the fruits of state-of-the-art research and innovation into real-world use cases, which deliver measurable business value.  Knosis.AI offers access to a marketplace for Augmented Artificial Intelligence (AAI) in which human attention and knowledge meet Machine Learning algorithms, creating Hybrid Intelligence capable of encoding/decoding, classifying and processing visual and textual patterns, and (semi-) natural language processing (NLP). Thus, Knosis offers a HUB for AI, where you have access to:
  •       Augmentation for data in any format (image, text, video, audio, IoT in-field measurements)
  •       Experts for augmenting the data, including sensitive data
  •       Data management system (DMP), with highly secured access control
  •       Pre-trained AI models that can be re-trained, calibrated, tested and published directly from the HUB
  •       User-friendly pattern models’ dashboard 
  •       AI map to compare the quality of the AI models in relation to the market and to the state-of-the-art 
 Our expertise is a well-knit puzzle of machine learning, data integration and management and service-oriented enterprise IT architecture and development. As the boundary between human and digital consciousness becomes more difficult to navigate through, modern workers want to acquire skills that give them long-term personal and professional autonomy. This is why Knosis uses a technology that is being patented (Human-to-Human, Human-to-Machine, Human-to-Machine-to-Human, H2M2H) to combine the two learning streams. Thus, people help the AI to learn, while the AI help people to develop automation & scripting skills and learn common expressions in a user-friendly environment, without the need for coding skills and knowledge, so that attaining digital and coding skills becomes a natural and social process. Therefore, we are looking for partners to join us in this journey. Our vision is to remove the barriers between human and artificial intelligence. We believe in a world of equal access to information, in which the goal of innovation becomes sustainability of life, culture, education and environment.

Tastatură Braille 3D, disponibilă comunității gratuit pe GitHub

Rareș Manolache, un tânăr cu experiență în modelarea 3D, a creat primul prototip DIY al unei tastaturi QWERTY Braille, gândit pentru a putea fi imprimat 3D, și a publicat proiectul pe platforma GitHub, un website cu resurse open-source, de unde poate fi descărcat gratuit și confecționat la orice centru de imprimare 3D.

 

Proiectul de inovație a pornit de la o constatare: faptul că există o nevoie reală, dar tastaturile pentru nevăzători sunt puține pe piață și foarte costisitoare, prețul lor pornind de la 200 euro. Pentru că nu există o alternativă completă la această situație, inginerul Rareș Manolache a creat prototipul de tastatură Braille 3D pentru a oferi acces la oportunități pentru persoanele cu abilități speciale, cu instrumente potrivite pentru ei.

Tastatura folosită pentru primele prototipuri este o T-Dagger Bora Mechanical ​Blue Switch cu un aspect de tip Tenkeyless (87 keys, 80%), iar tastele au un profil DSA, deoarece acesta are un profil redus cu vârf sferic și permite o mai bună plasare a simbolurilor Braille peste fiecare tastă. Imprimarea 3D s-a făcut folosind tehnologia SLA cu ajutorul imprimantei Prusa SL1.

„Acest proiect a pornit ca un hobby, m-am gândit cum am putea să creăm o tastatură care să vină în ajutorul persoanelor nevăzătoare și să aibă un preț accesibil. Primul prototip al tastaturii a fost inspirat de informații găsite pe internet. Am creat 80 de abțibilduri cu simboluri Braille, care se lipeau pe o tastatură mecanică existentă cu switchuri clicky (fiecare apăsare de tastă creează un click strident). Al doilea prototip are la bază abțibildurile create anterior transformate în taste individuale pentru fiecare caracter în parte, care pot fi montate pe orice tastatură mecanică cu switchuri de tip MX. Acum lucrăm la cel de-al treilea prototip care va fi construit de la zero și cuprinde modelul 3D pentru întreg layout-ul de tastatură Braille, însoțit de o fișă de produs a tastelor și tuturor părților componente.” – Rareș Manolache, Co-Founder & CTO Printed

Tastatura poate fi produsă din rășină la un cost de aproximativ 120 euro, semnificativ mai mic față de tastaturile din comerț, cost ce include materia primă, imprimarea 3D și manopera de curățare și montare, însă costul se poate eficientiza pentru producții în serii mici.

Proiectul de cercetare a fost susținut financiar de Knosis.

„Faptul că telefonul mobil a devenit principalul dispozitiv de navigare online, ne limitează la folosirea a două degete cu care ne exprimăm, de aceea propunerea lui Rareș Manolache de a confecționa acest model 3D de tastatură s-a potrivit ca o mănușă. Tastatura 3D Braille creată de el este un prilej de a chestiona cum tehnologia poate îmbunătăți inteligența artificială sau naturală, de care beneficiază persoanele cu abilități diferite, variate și valoroase, pentru a construi o Lume Nouă Digitală mai inclusivă. Ne dorim astfel să aflăm de la oameni cum putem proiecta și calibra produsele software și hardware pentru a venit în ajutorul persoanelor cu abilități diverse.” – Bogdan Bocșe, Specialist în Inteligență Artificială și CEO @ Knosis.

Prototipul a fost testat cu ajutorul asociației AMAis:

„De peste 5 ani, la AMAis organizăm ateliere în care nevăzătorii învață să folosească tehnologia. Utilizarea laptopului sau a calculatorului ocupă un loc important. Una dintre cele mai mari provocări auzite de-a lungul timpului de la cursanții  începători e că vor să învețe mai repede tastatura, locul fiecărei taste. Cred că proiectul tastaturii în Braille ar însemna un real ajutor pentru persoanele cu deficiențe de vedere, ar face pași mai rapizi către independență.” – Alexandru Cucu, Tech Lead @ AMAis

Cele două companii, Printed și Knosis.AI, împreună cu asociația AMAis doresc să îmbunătățească prototipul și să pună la dispoziție tastatura Braille școlilor pentru copii cu nevoi speciale și asociațiilor interesate de incluziunea socială.

Despre Printed

Compania Printed oferă servicii de consultanță, design, creare și personalizare de modele de imprimare 3D, utilizând cele mai avansate tehnologii disponibile pe piață.

Despre Knosis

Compania Knosis.AI oferă un marketplace de Inteligență Augmentată Artificial (IAA) în care atenția și cunoștințele umane întâlnesc algoritmii de Machine Learning, creând Inteligența Hibridă, capabilă să codeze și să decodeze, să clasifice și să proceseze tipare vizuale și textuale, precum și limbaje naturale și semi-naturale.

Despre AMAis

Misiunea AMAis este de a construi o societate echitabilă pentru persoanele cu dizabilități temporare sau permanente prin aplicarea principiilor designului incluziv în: arhitectură, tehnologie, proiecte sociale. Astfel AMAis proiectează și construiește incluziv, accesibilizând lumea fizică (ex. clădiri de birouri, locuințe, parcuri), dar și lumea virtuală, construind aplicații unde nevăzătorii descoperă prieteni și experiențe noi, dezvoltând proiecte sociale prin care persoanele cu dizabilități să capete o viață independentă prin ateliere de mers cu bastonul, gătit, dezvoltare personală și tehnologie.