Reports from the Heart of the Machine
Edit: Shanshan
Even international technology giants such as Google seem to have difficulties in promoting the business of artificial intelligence landing medical care and urban management.
In August, Google Health, The head of Google Health, left google health, and Google later decided to disband Google Health.
Recently, Google's smart city business has followed in its footsteps, Google parent company Alphabet announced the restructuring of its troubled smart city company Sidewalk Labs, and the company's CEO Dan Doctoroff himself will leave the company due to possible ALS.
Whether it's smart cities or healthcare, much of the reason Google is down to data trust issues: Consumers are deeply concerned about their opacity about how and who controls it.
1. Plagued by controversy
In fact, Google's smart city business has been controversial since its layout.
In June 2015, Google CEO Larry Page posted on Google+ that the company had founded an innovative company called SidewalkLabs, whose strategy was focused on improving human urban life by reducing the cost of living, increasing transportation efficiency, solving energy use problems, and so on.
"Although this is only a modest investment for Google and is some distance from Google's core business, we hope to really improve people's lives." Page believes that as more and more people around the world move to cities to work and live, the future development of smart cities will contain unlimited opportunities.
DanDoctoroff, CEO of SidewalkLabs, is also a veteran of the industry, serving as Bloomberg CEO and Vice Mayor of New York's Economic Development and Reconstruction.
"In this day and age, there are growing concerns about equity, cost, health and the environment in cities, and unprecedented technological change will improve the efficiency, flexibility and adaptability of cities." Doktolov said in a press release.
Sidewalk wanted to build a "city of the future" in Toronto, but without success.
In October 2017, Sidewalk Labs and Toronto-based nonprofit developer Waterfront Toronto began planning for a "smart" development of the 12-acre Quayside site.
The Quayside project aims to transform Toronto's waterfront into a smart city, offering features such as self-driving cars, smart garbage collection, smart air quality measurement, and heating streets. It all seems rosy, but the idea of collecting data in public spaces is controversial.
According to the plan, sidewalk will not only place sensors in smart communities, but also try to collect urban data through public Wi-Fi installations as an important basis for improving housing quality and formulating smart transportation decisions. There are also many consumers, Google, a data-making company that makes a living, questioning its potential motivations for collecting and using data.
In October 2018, Sidewalk announced the establishment of an independent data trust regulator that will require all companies wishing to collect or use city data in the future to be subject to supervision, analysis and approval. At the same time, Sidewalk has made three major commitments: not to sell personal information, not to use personal information for advertising, and not to disclose personal information to third parties without explicit consent.
But sidewalk's idea of third-party "data trust" hasn't completely dispelled privacy advocates' concerns, but has instead been criticized by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association for its opacity about how and who controls it, demanding that the Canadian government stop the development of the Quayside project.
On May 7, 2020, Sidewalk Labs announced that it was officially shelving the Quayside project.
"The Quayside project was important to us and it was a tough decision." Daniel L. Doctoroff said in a media interview: "Due to the unprecedented economic uncertainty in the global and Toronto real estate markets, the viability of the project has become too difficult based on the previous financial budget. After much deliberation, we concluded that it no longer made sense to continue with the Quayside project."
2. The CEO leaves and the product is split
"The unfortunate news is that I have decided to resign as CEO of Sidewalk Labs." On Dec. 16, Daniel Doctoroff posted on Medium that he was "very likely" to be diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). ALS is a degenerative disease commonly referred to as Lou Galley's disease.
"In the future, I will spend time with my family and seek a cure for this disease." Daniel Doctoroff said.
In the field of urban design and management, Daniel Doctoroff has distinguished himself. Six years ago, Daniel Doctoroff launched Sidewalk Labs inside Google. Prior to that, he served as President and CEO of Bloomberg LP, a leading news and information provider in the global financial community.
Daniel Doctoroff also served as The City's Deputy Mayor for Economic Development and Reconstruction, leading the City's economic recovery, including the city's most ambitious land-use transformation in modern history; the redevelopment of the former World Trade Center site; the largest affordable housing program ever built by the U.S. city; and the formation of a new central and industrial business district.
Earlier, as managing partner at private equity firm Oak Hill Capital Partners, Daniel Doctoroff founded NYC2012, the organization that pioneered bringing the Olympics to the city.
Daniel Doctoroff is a graduate of Harvard University and university of Chicago School of Law and serves on the boards of the University of Chicago and the Bloomberg Charitable Foundation.
"Sidewalk Labs was founded in 2015 as Google's urban innovation arm and became Alphabet in 2016. From the beginning, we have focused on solving the biggest challenges facing cities through forward-thinking urban design and cutting-edge technologies."
In Daniel Doctoroff's view, Google believes that it is not suitable to participate in the improvement of urban infrastructure, but it can create a "platform that all kinds of people can access", so Sidewalk Labs plans to establish a partnership through a series of investment and mergers.
In its inception, Sidewalk incubated early projects such as Coord, Replica, Cityblock, and SIP. Later, Sidewalk also invested in companies with development potential that have already had an impact on urban innovation, such as Ori, VoltServer, etc.
According to the official website, VoltServer is a leading provider of intelligent power distribution solutions, which has reshaped the distribution of power, leveraging Digital Electricity from centralized sources to distributed endpoint loads to improve customers' basic business applications.
Ori is an interior product design firm, and Sidewalk is involved in its Series B funding round. According to Dan Doctoroff, "Flexibility and efficiency make dense city living not only more enjoyable, but also more affordable." Ori's technology and new approach to conceiving flexible and responsive interior spaces unlocks the potential to provide city dwellers with a first-class urban living experience at an affordable price."
At the same time as announcing his resignation, Daniel Doctoroff revealed:
Starting next year, Sidewalk products Pebble, Mesa, Delve, and Affordable Electrification will join Google as a core business in Google's efforts to sustain sustainability products in the city.
In addition, Canopy Buildings, which is dedicated to automating wooden buildings, will be spun off from Sidewalk and will be assisted by Alphabet to become an independent company.
The construction of smart cities is inseparable from the support of Internet giants. Many giant enterprises are also applying new technologies, such as cloud computing, blockchain, big data, 5G, etc., to new scenarios, empowering urban management and smart city development through AI and digital means.
However, the construction and operation of smart cities is not an easy task. As a pioneer of smart cities, Cisco announced in December 2020 that it would cease its smart city IoT division Kinetic for Cities business after several years of hard work.
How to further promote the construction of smart cities with the help of AI technology under the premise of eliminating user privacy and security concerns will be a problem that urban governance will have to think about in the future, and it is also a challenge and opportunity for technology companies to deeply participate in the intelligent transformation of cities.
For reference:
https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-health-canada-urban-planning-09b2aeb8fa666c534d65f31990fee566
https://medium.com/sidewalk-talk/why-were-no-longer-pursuing-the-quayside-project-and-what-s-next-for-sidewalk-labs-9a61de3fee3a
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-25/toronto-s-alphabet-powered-smart-city-is-growing
https://www.oriliving.com/blog/2019/09/ori-raises-20-million-to-scale-solutions-for-modern-urban-living
https://www.sidewalklabs.com/about
https://www.theverge.com/21257195/alphabet-sidewalk-labs-minnesota-experimental-city-technoutopian-city-failures
https://nypost.com/2019/11/01/google-plans-to-build-smart-city-in-canada/
http://security.qianjia.com/html/2020-05/12_365158.html
https://www.wired.com/2013/05/on-google-island/
https://www.waterfrontoronto.ca/nbe/portal/waterfront/Home/waterfronthome/newsroom/newsarchive/news/2020/may/statement+from+waterfront+toronto+board+chair%2C+stephen+diamond+on+the+quayside+project
Quickly build an enterprise-grade ASR speech recognition assistant with NVIDIA Riva
NVIDIA Riva is an SDK that uses GPU acceleration to rapidly deploy high-performance conversational AI services for rapid development of speech AI applications. Riva is designed to help developers easily and quickly access sessionAL AI capabilities, out of the box, and quickly build high-level speech recognition services with a few simple commands and API operations. The service can process hundreds to thousands of audio streams as input and return text with minimal latency.
On December 29, 19:30-21:00, the main introduction of this online sharing is:
Introduction to Automatic Speech Recognition
Introduction and features of NVIDIA Riva
Rapid deployment of NVIDIA Riva
Launch the NVIDIA Riva client to quickly implement speech-to-text transcription
Use Python to quickly build an NVIDIA Riva-based automatic speech recognition service application