Critical minerals are raw, non-fuel materials that are vital for manufacturing products that are essential to national security.

DARPA is teaming up with the US Geological Survey (USGS) to explore how machine learning and AI can accelerate critical mineral assessments.

“The USGS’s critical mineral resource assessments are at the heart of our domestic supply and production of critical minerals,” said Dr Anne Fischer, Deputy Director of DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office.

“We want to have a measurable, immediate impact on the USGS’s ability to reach some of its objectives, especially in ways that are critical to national security.”

DARPA says that assessing the current list of 50 critical minerals is labour-intensive and takes too long to meet today’s supply chain needs.

The AI competition will include two challenges:

• Map Georeferencing Challenge: Participants will receive a dataset of 1,000 or more maps of various types for training and validating models with the goal of fitting coordinate points that can be referenced to known locations in one or more base maps.
• Map Feature Extraction Challenge: Participants will be provided with a training set consisting of maps with each legend item labelled and characterised (as point, line, or polygon) and a binary pixel map reflecting the feature’s coverage in the map. The goal of the challenge is to identify all features in a map that appear in the map’s legend.

“DARPA is known for fostering innovation by creating problem-focused research communities, and we’re excited to put the results of this competition to immediate use,” said Sarah Ryker, associate director for energy and mineral resources at the USGS.

“The United States is under-mapped, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provides a historic opportunity to catch up – if we can precisely target our investments in new mapping. We hope that new capabilities emerging from these challenges will enable us to do exactly that.”

For each of the challenges, $10,000 will be awarded for first place. Second place will take home $3,000. $1,000 will be awarded for third place.

While the rewards on offer aren’t huge for the AI industry, they’re a nice bonus and participants can take pride in contributing to projects that could make a real difference.

Registration for the map georeferencing challenge is now open. Registration for the map feature extraction challenge opens on 29th August.

You can find out more information and register for the challenges here.

(Photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash)

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London.

Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

The post DARPA seeks AI solutions for sourcing critical minerals appeared first on AI News.

Nuance gained renown for originally creating the backend of that little old virtual assistant called Siri (you might have heard of it?)

The company has since continued to focus on building its speech recognition capabilities and has a number of solutions which span particular industries such as healthcare to general omni-channel customer experience services.

Earlier this year, Microsoft decided Nuance is worth coughing up $19.7 billion for.

As such large deals often do, the proposed acquisition caught the eyes of several global regulators. In the case of the EU, it was referred to the Commission’s regulators on 16 November.

The regulator said on Tuesday that the proposed acquisition “would raise no competition concerns” within the bloc and that “Microsoft and Nuance offer very different products” after looking at potential horizontal overlaps between the companies’ transcription solutions.

Vertical links in the healthcare space were also analysed but it was determined that “competing transcription service providers in healthcare do not depend on Microsoft for cloud computing services” and that “transcription service providers in the healthcare sector are not particularly important users of cloud computing services”.

Furthermore, the regulator concluded:

• Microsoft-Nuance will continue to face stiff competition from rivals in the future.
• There’d be no ability/incentive to foreclose existing market solutions.
• Nuance can only use the data it collects for its own services.
• The data will not provide Microsoft with an advantage to shut out competing software providers.

The EU’s decision mirrors that of regulators in the US and Australia. However, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced its own investigation earlier this month.

When it announced the deal, Microsoft said that it aims to complete its acquisition by the end of 2021. The CMA is accepting comments until 10 January 2022 so it seems that Microsoft may have to hold out a bit longer.

(Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash)

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo. The next events in the series will be held in Santa Clara on 11-12 May 2022, Amsterdam on 20-21 September 2022, and London on 1-2 December 2022.

The post EU clears $19.7B Microsoft-Nuance deal without any small print appeared first on AI News.

The CMA (Competition & Markets Authority) has been investigating whether the deal is anti-competitive. In August, it declared the deal does indeed raise “serious competition concerns”.

Arm founder Hermann Hauser went further and suggested the merger would amount to “surrendering the UK’s most powerful trade weapon to the US”.

Among the concerns are that Nvidia could limit competitors’ access to key technologies. The CMA claims to have received “a substantial number” of concerns from rivals and some have even offered to invest in Arm if it helps the company to remain independent.

Dorries has ‘quasi-judicial’ powers under the Enterprise Act 2002 to intervene in mergers on public interest grounds.

As part of its ‘Phase One’ report, the CMA determined the merger has the possibility of a “substantial lessening of competition across four key markets”. Those markets are data centres, Internet of Things, the automotive sector, and gaming.

Beyond the impact on competition, evidence provided from departments across government have also led the Secretary of State to deem that national security could be harmed from the merger and warrants further investigation.

“I have carefully considered the Competition and Market Authority’s ‘Phase One’ report into NVIDIA’s proposed takeover of Arm and have decided to ask them to undertake a further in-depth ‘Phase Two’ investigation,” commented Dorries.

“Arm has a unique place in the global technology supply chain and we must make sure the implications of this transaction are fully considered. The CMA will now report to me on competition and national security grounds and provide advice on the next steps.”

The CMA now has 24 weeks to conduct Phase Two of its investigation, although this could be extended by eight weeks if necessary. Upon receiving the report, the Digital Secretary could take action to remedy any adverse effects to the public interest or refer it back to the CMA.

David Bicknell, Principal Analyst, and Dr Lil Read, Analyst, on the Thematic Research Team at GlobalData, commented:

“This latest government probe is another nail in the coffin for the proposed merger between Nvidia and Arm. With proceedings likely to extend into late 2022 at the earliest, Nvidia should just abandon the deal and focus on its future away from Arm.

Ordering a security review signals that the UK government doesn’t want this bid to succeed. Couple this with an already underway EU investigation and the further prospect of a China referral, and Nvidia faces some tough questions. It is unlikely it will want the continued uncertainty of a bid that is going nowhere.

We think it is time for Nvidia to move on, and for Softbank to return Arm to where it found it—the stock market.

Nvidia’s future beyond Arm extends into the metaverse, a virtual world where users share experiences and interact in real-time within simulated scenarios. Nvidia is already targeting the metaverse as a key pillar of its future – a wise decision as GlobalData believes it will be the next big technology megatheme.”

Nvidia, for its part, has promised to work with UK regulators to alleviate concerns. The company has already pledged to keep Arm in the UK and hire more staff.

The company’s announcement of a new AI centre in Cambridge last year – which features an Arm/Nvidia-based supercomputer, set to be one of the most powerful in the world – was expected to be part of a bid to show UK regulators of the firm’s commitment to the country.

“Arm is an incredible company and it employs some of the greatest engineering minds in the world,” said Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia. “But we believe we can make Arm even more incredible and take it to even higher levels.”

“We want to propel it – and the UK – to global AI leadership.”

(Image Credit: UK Parliament under CC BY 3.0 license)

Looking to revamp your digital transformation strategy? Learn more about the Digital Transformation Week event taking place in Amsterdam on 23-24 November 2021 and discover key strategies for making your digital efforts a success.

The post UK Digital Secretary orders ‘Phase Two’ probe into Nvidia-Arm merger appeared first on AI News.

The company has sponsored a competition on Kaggle which challenges data scientists to create models which predict if a device is likely to become infected with malware given a current machine state.

In a blog post, Microsoft wrote:

“The competition provides academics and researchers with varied backgrounds a fresh opportunity to work on a real-world problem using a fresh set of data from Microsoft.

Results from the contest will help us identify opportunities to further improve Microsoft’s layered defenses, focusing on preventative protection.

Not all machines are equally likely to get malware; competitors will help build models for identifying devices that have a higher risk of getting malware so that preemptive action can be taken.”

Participants are supplied with 9.4GB of anonymised data gathered from 16.8M devices to build their models.

A pot of $25,000 prize money will be used to incentivise participation spread out as:

• 1st Place – $12,000
• 2nd Place – $7,000
• 3rd Place – $3,000
• 4th Place – $2,000
• 5th Place – $1,000

The best performing entry, thus far, has achieved 68.9 percent accuracy – though it’s likely this will be improved before the end.

Entries must be submitted before the competition closes on March 13, 2019.

You can find out more and enter on Kaggle here.

 Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and their use cases? Attend the co-located AI & Big Data Expo events with upcoming shows in Silicon Valley, London, and Amsterdam to learn more. Co-located with the IoT Tech Expo, Blockchain Expo, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo.

The post Microsoft wants AI to predict when a PC is going to be infected appeared first on AI News.