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Tuesday, June 30, 2020

AI helps people walk safer on different types of terrain

Researchers have developed new software that allows people using robotic prosthetics or external skeletons to walk more safely, more naturally on different terrain types.

The new framework incorporates computer vision into prosthetic leg control and includes powerful artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that allow the software to better explain uncertainty. Among types of terrains that need adjustment, researchers focused on six robotic prosthetic’s behavior: tile, brick, concrete, grass, “upstairs” and “downstairs”.

New Software Developed to Improve Robotic Prosthetics

This new “environment context” framework combines both software and hardware elements. The researchers designed this framework for use with many different lower-limb robotic exoskeletons or robotic prosthetic devices, but with a twist, they added cameras. The camera is worn on eyeglasses and another camera mounted on the lower-limb prosthesis. They evaluated how AI could use computer vision data from both types of cameras when they are used together or used separately.

"Incorporating computer vision into control software for wearable robotics is an exciting new area of research," says Helen Huang, a co-author of the paper. "We found that using both cameras worked well, but required a great deal of computing power and may be cost-prohibitive. However, we also found that using only the camera mounted on the lower limb worked pretty well - particularly for near-term predictions, such as what the terrain would be like for the next step or two." Huang is the Jackson Family Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering at NC State and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In order to train the AI system, researchers connected the cameras to able-bodied individuals - that then experienced in many indoor and outdoor environments. Then, they did a proof-of-concept evaluation by having a person with lower-limb amputation wear the cameras while walking through the same environments.

Source: Science Daily


About us: TMA Solutions was established in 1997 to provide quality software outsourcing services to leading companies worldwide. We are one of the largest software outsourcing companies in Vietnam with 2,500 engineers

Visit us at https://www.tmasolutions.com/


3 Big Challenges for Artificial Intelligence

With the fast-growing of digital technology, the term “Artificial Intelligence” has become more popular, along with the applications of AI in modernizing life. While the potential for development of AI is immense, nothing is 100 percent accurate. AI still has the probability of making mistakes even though humans are always trying to improve and complete. One reason that is indisputable is that: There are always unpredictable definitions, problems or variables that create barriers for people to apply intelligence to teach and program machines.



Prejudice/ Partial: AI will be taught and learned by humans, it will have the intelligence and emotions we desire. But in the process of acquiring that knowledge, if humans interpersonal thoughts such as bias or personal prejudice about a certain subject then AI will certainly learn and dig deep to default that is right things.


Difficulty in acquiring data: If comparing AI as a human, the data will be their food source. Huge data sources are not necessarily good, it is important to identify and filter out what data is needed for AI to learn because excess or inaccurate data can lead to wrong conclusions in decision making. 


High expectations: With the ability to learn and think deeply, people expect AI to have a high degree of accuracy in problem-solving. But AI is still just a machine, and machines are not 100% perfect because they learn from the data provided by humans, but humans were not perfect, nor could machines have the exact ratio. In some areas, especially medicine, while AI has a much lower probability of error than humans, most people will rely on human hands rather than machines.


The approach and becoming part of life have made AI become more and more important. However, nothing is perfect, not even humans. We can only try to reduce the probability of error to the lowest possible level.


Source: VNExpress


About us: TMA Solutions was established in 1997 to provide quality software outsourcing services to leading companies worldwide. We are one of the largest software outsourcing companies in Vietnam with 2,500 engineers

Visit us at https://www.tmasolutions.com/


Monday, June 29, 2020

Plugin Online Tracking

COVID 19 promoted the process of digital transformation quickly and urgently. Education has also become one of the leading areas in demand of transformation. Not only during but also after the COVID 19 pandemic, many people probably realize the importance of online learning.


Will online learning really work without someone to supervise children? That is also the question of many parents when they observe the situation of "funny tricks" that their children behave during the online class. Many teachers have tried their best in order to maintain the quality of the lesson but it not really works.


Understanding the concern of parents as well as schools, TMA Innovation Center has created an online learning behavior monitoring plugin. This system will act as a supervisor and record the learning behavior of students. Any attitude of distraction, doing their own works, leaving the class, or even feeling sleepy, et cetera, will inform the teacher/lecturer in charge. Therefore, the quality and effectiveness of the lesson will be improved.


Source: VN AI Hub


About us: TMA Solutions was established in 1997 to provide quality software outsourcing services to leading companies worldwide. We are one of the largest software outsourcing companies in Vietnam with 2,500 engineers.

Visit us at https://www.tmasolutions.com/

Thursday, June 25, 2020

Artificial vs augmented intelligence: what’s the difference?

Artificial intelligence has accrued some very bad reputation over the years. For some, the term AI has become synonymous with the mass unemployment, mass slavery, and mass extermination of humans by robots. For others, AI often conjures dystopian images of Terminator, The Matrix, Hal 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and warning tweets from Elon Musk.

But many experts believe that those interpretations don’t do justice to one of the technologies that will have a lot of positive impact on human life and society.

Augmented intelligence (AI), also referred to as intelligence augmentation (IA) and cognitive augmentation, is a complement— not a replacement—to human intelligence. It’s about helping humans become faster and smarter at the tasks they’re performing.

At its core, augmented intelligence is not technically different from what’s already being presented as AI. It is a rather different perspective on technological advances, especially those that allow computers and software to participate in tasks that were thought to be exclusive to humans.

And though some may call it a marketing term and a different way to reinstate hype in an already hyped industry, I think it’ll help us better understand a technology whose boundaries its own creators can’t define.

What’s wrong with AI (artificial intelligence)?

The problem with artificial intelligence is that it’s very vague. Artificial means replacement for natural. So when you say “artificial intelligence,” it already alludes to something that is on par with for human intelligence. This definition alone is enough to cause fear and panic about how AI will affect employment and life itself.

For the moment, those concerns are largely misplaced. True artificial intelligence, also known as general and super AI, which can reason and decide as humans do is still at least decades away. Some believe creating general AI is an irrelevant quest and something we shouldn’t pursue altogether. What we have right now is narrow AI, or AI that is efficient at performing a single or a limited set of tasks.


To be real, technological advances in AI do cause challenges, but maybe not the ones that are being so amplified and often discussed. As with every industrial revolution, jobs will be displaced, and maybe in bigger proportions than previous iterations. For instance, self-driving trucks, one of the most cited examples, will impact the jobs of millions of truck drivers. Other jobs might disappear, just as the industrialization of agriculture considerably reduced the number of human laborers working in plantations and farms. But that doesn’t mean that humans will be rendered obsolete as a result of AI becoming prevalent.

There are quite a few human skills that nothing short of human-level intelligence (if it is ever created) can replicate. For instance, even trivial tasks such as picking up items with different shapes and placing them in a basket, a task that a four-year-old child can perform, is an extremely complicated task from AI perspective.

In fact, I believe (and I will write about this in a future post—stay tuned) that AI will enable us to focus on what makes us human instead of spending our time doing boring things that robots can do for us.

What’s right with AI (augmented intelligence)?

When we look at AI from the augmented intelligence perspective, quite a few interesting opportunities arise. Humans are facing a big challenge, one that they themselves have created. Thanks to advances in the fields of cloud computing and mobility, we are generating and storing huge amounts of data. This can be very simple things such as how much time visitors spend on a website and what pages they go to.

But it can also be more useful and critical information, such as health, weather and traffic data. Thanks to smart sensor technology, the Internet of things (IoT) , and ubiquitous connectivity, we can collect and store information from the physical world in a way that was previously impossible.

In these data stores lie great opportunities to reduce congestion in cities, identify signs of cancer at earlier stages, help out students who are lagging behind in their courses, discover and prevent cyber attacks before they deal their damage, and much more. But the problem is, looking through this data and finding those secrets is beyond human capacity.

As it happens, this is exactly where AI (augmented intelligence), and machine learning in particular, can help human experts. AI is particularly good at analyzing huge reams of data and finding patterns and correlations that would either go unnoticed to human analysts, or would take a very long time.

For instance, in healthcare, an AI algorithm can analyze a patient's symptoms and vital signs, compare it with the history of the patient, that of her family and those of the millions of other patients it has in store, and help her doctor by giving suggestions of what the causes might be. And all of that can be done in a matter of seconds or less. Likewise, AI algorithms can examine radiology images hundreds of times faster than humans, and they can help human experts in helping out more patients.

In education, AI can help both teachers and learners. For instance, AI algorithms can monitor students reactions and interactions during a lesson and compare the data with historical data they’ve collected from thousands of other students. And then they can find out where those students are potentially lagging, where they are performing well. For the teacher, AI will provide feedback on every one of their students that would previously require one-on-one tutoring. This means teachers will be able to make optimal use of their time and spend it where they can make the most impact on their students.

For the students, AI assistants can help them improve their learning skills by providing them with complementary material and exercises that will help them fill in the gaps in areas where they are lagging or will potentially face challenges in the future.

As these examples and many more show, AI is not about replacing human intelligence, but it’s rather about amplifying or augmenting it by enabling us humans to make use of the deluge of data we’re generating.

(I personally think intelligence augmentation or amplification is a more suitable term. It uses an acronym (IA) that can’t be confused with AI, and it better describes the functionality of machine learning and other similar technologies. Augmented intelligence refers to the result of combining human and machine intelligence whereas intelligence amplification refers to what functionality these technologies provide.)

To be clear, as I said before, we should not dismiss the challenges that AI poses, the ones mentioned here as well as the ones I’ve discussed in previous posts, such as privacy and bias. However, instead of fearing artificial intelligence, we should embrace augmented intelligence and find ways we can use it to alleviate those fears and meet the challenges that lie ahead.

As AI thought leaders Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee said in a recent Havard Business Review article, “Over the next decade, AI won’t replace managers, but managers who use AI will replace those who don’t.”

Source: The Next Web

Wednesday, June 24, 2020

Vietnam accelerate cloud computing for digital transformation

The Ministry of Information and Communication launched a campaign to promote digital transformation using cloud computing.


With regards to the post-coronavirus period, Vietnam is steadily recovering its economy, experts say digital transformation will aid enterprises adopt a more efficient and cost-effective business model.

Cloud computing is regarded as one of the most fundamental parts of this process, the demand for this has been increasing in the past few years.


Added to that, Minister Nguyen Manh Hung expressed that domestics enterprises have aced telecommunications infrastructure and a similar accomplishment must be achieved to further refine such infrastructure.

He focused great emphasis on the critical role of cloud infrastructure development, given the idea that digital infrastructure is basically the combination of telecommunications infrastructure and cloud computing.

Vietnam is one of the pioneer countries to have adopted a set of criteria and technical specifications for cloud computing services and it is expected that many more Vietnamese cloud providers will reach such standards in the future.

Source: Nhan Dan

About us: TMA Solutions was established in 1997 to provide quality software outsourcing services to leading companies worldwide. We are one of the largest software outsourcing companies in Vietnam with 2,500 engineers

Visit us at https://www.tmasolutions.com/

Artificial Intelligence helps to identify human preferences

Applications of Artificial Intelligence have been used widely in various activities but the potential has been not still discovered yet. Recently, the researchers of a university located in Finland which specialized in science have developed a technique by analyzing people’s electroencephalograms (EEGs) with the help of AI techniques. This technique is called “brainsourcing”, which can clarify the image or content, analyze options, and conclude using brain activities that we have not demonstrated before. 


It works based on the method that breaks up a complex task into smaller tasks to learn individual recognition. Every response is used to create a large instructional data for the system. With more samples of the brain activity, the AI algorithm learned to recognize the relevant contents or images and the result will be more accurate. 


The technology used by the researchers still needs improvements to capture more brain activity and preference information directly from the brain.



Source: ScienceDaily


About us: TMA Solutions was established in 1997 to provide quality software outsourcing services to leading companies worldwide. We are one of the largest software outsourcing companies in Vietnam with 2,500 engineers
Visit us at https://www.tmasolutions.com/


Tuesday, June 16, 2020

Data Scientist and Big Data talent is the most demand in Vietnam in the next five years


In 2020, Vietnam’s economy will largely be driven by digital transformation and disruptive technologies, and the recruitment market will face lack of digital engineers.

With a shortage of high-quality human resources, information technology, especially Big Data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and fintech, is forecasted to be among the top 10 industries with the highest recruitment needs in Vietnam in 2020, according to the 2020 Vietnam Salary Guide report.

The tech sector also continued its rapid growth as businesses across industries continued accelerating their digital transformation and adopting new technologies, especially within the Business Intelligence (BI) and AI space. 
Those positions require specific skills and technology, together with the growth of digitization of information resources all over the world. Data Scientist and Big Data Engineer are expected to be at the top of the list of most in-demand positions in the next five years with their rapidly growing rate. Besides, the demand for software developers will also remain high and stable, due to the continuous development of outsourcing service.
The average turnover rate in Vietnam in 2019 is 24% and reason to leave the current jobs included: Lack of professional development (51.3%); have better job offers (32.4%); have poor relationship with line managers (10.8%); and others (5.5%). 
The seventh edition of the report, focusing on Vietnam’s two major cities Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, provides a detailed picture of current market offerings based on job responsibilities and working experiences among different sectors.

The recruitment landscape in Vietnam in 2019 remained strong as the country receives international investments and looks forward to reaching new heights. Benefited from a young labor workforce, rapid economic growth and political stability, Vietnam is an attractive and competitive investment destination. 

This has contributed to an increase in FDI inflows into the country, especially as more companies relocate their factories to Vietnam amidst the US-China trade tensions. New factory set-up required a lot more production and quality management professionals to ramp up their production capacity.



 Hanoi’s recruitment demand in FMCG

The report also provides 2019-2020 salary statistics for human resources, law, banking and finance, information technology, sales and marketing (in FMCG, health and industrial), financial services and professional services in Vietnam.
Vietnam’s market in 2019-2020 has a demand of recruitment in the textile and garment, electronics and wood manufacturing industries. For instance, the factory manager position can receive a monthly salary of VND350 million (US$15,073) for those with more than 10 years of experience. The position of HR Manager for factories also increased significantly along with production personnel with a salary of up to VND140 million (US$6,029) per month.
The report recommended what companies can do to attract talents: transparent career roadmap & development plan; attractive salary & benefits package; flexible working hours; open culture & work environment; and support from management team.
Source: Hanoi Times
About us: TMA Solutions was established in 1997 to provide quality software outsourcing services to leading companies worldwide. We are one of the largest software outsourcing companies in Vietnam with 2,500 engineers


Friday, June 12, 2020

Vietnam applies Blockchain technology in building smart cities


HCM City plans to develop a regulatory framework and policies associated with blockchain technology to minimize potential risks in building a smart city, a top city official has said.
Tran Vinh Tuyen, vice chairman of the city’s People’s Committee, said: “The city will give top priorities to projects that apply science and technology, especially the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in solving the city’s problems and for smart urban development.” He also said the city would work with agencies to build a roadmap for the application of blockchain in the country.
After a decade of development, blockchain can now be used to build a secure communication platform for smart cities, providing better public services and optimal utilization of available resources, including e-government, urban transportation, and infrastructure needs.
According to the Asia Blockchain Review, Vietnam has become an emerging leader in the field of blockchain technology. More than 2,000 people attended the Vietnam Blockchain Week Conference last year, indicating that a strong blockchain community is growing well in the country.
According to the Asia Blockchain Review, Vietnam has become an emerging leader in the field of blockchain technology. More than 2,000 people attended the Vietnam Blockchain Week Conference last year, indicating that a strong blockchain community is growing well in the country.
Vietnam is among the world’s top 20 countries in terms of the number of internet users, social media users, and smartphone users.
Besides, the young population, fast internet development, and the increased number of e-payments are other factors that make Vietnam favorable for blockchain technology.
The Ministry of Science and Technology will give priority to blockchain start-ups through a new project called “Support a National Innovative Start-up Ecosystem by 2025,” according to Tuyen, vice chairman of the city People’s Committee.
To build a sustainable blockchain ecosystem, all major players including incubators, accelerators, and community building should be involved, experts said.
Vietnam could emerge as one of the next blockchain hubs in Southeast Asia and across the globe, which would help attract foreign investment thanks to huge cryptocurrency transactions and a labor force with a strong caliber, according to Forbes magazine.
Blockchain technology is a shared record of transactions that anyone can see or read. A locking method is employed to prevent any tampering by one party, which helps to make blockchain secure, according to experts.
The conference was attended by hundreds of local and international researchers, entrepreneurs, start-up representatives, and managers in the field of blockchain.

Source: Vietnamnews
About TMA: TMA Solutions was established in 1997 to provide quality software outsourcing services to leading companies worldwide. We are one of the largest software outsourcing companies in Vietnam with 2,500 engineers.

Visit us at https://www.tmasolutions.com/

Tuesday, June 2, 2020

Vietnam 5G deployment to be boosted by state support: experts

The earliest 5G services are set to be commercialized in mid-2020 following trials conducted through 2019

Hanoi — Vietnam’s 5G network is forecast to have a bright future with Government and regulator support while domestic manufacturing of 5G handsets could lower device costs and lend tailwinds to adoption.
According to analysts from Fitch Solutions, 5G appears to be high on the Government’s priority list, with the earliest services set to be commercialized in mid-2020 following trials conducted through 2019.
“We believe the impact will be greatest in the enterprise segment, particularly in Vietnam’s rapidly growing manufacturing sector, with Government initiatives supporting industry uptake. At the consumer level, we expect early launches to centre on larger, higher-income cities, with operators likely to focus on both mobile and fixed-wireless services,” the analysts said.
While fibre-based broadband connections in Vietnam have grown significantly in recent quarters, Fitch believed that fixed-wireless 5G could still serve as a complement to existing fixed services and support the development and adoption of higher bandwidth services, such as virtual reality (VR) video streaming and cloud gaming applications.
The analysts said while these short term moves could put investments into 5G networks on the backburner, the Government could pressure the State-owned operators to focus on 5G deployment. Licences and spectrum are yet to be allocated, although the Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC) could convert 5G trial licences, allocated in 2019, into commercial licences.
Through Resolution 52, introduced in September 2019, the Government aims to actively involve itself in the wider adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies to drive the country’s economic growth.
“We expect the government to lend support to the wider 5G ecosystem through the creation of test beds, or through enterprise grants to adopt 5G technologies,” Fitch said.
The MIC is already looking at licensing certain frequencies to domestic manufacturers of 5G products, and has stated that it will support the development of 5G-capable chips, although further details have not been disclosed.
According to Fitch analysts, the wider availability of low-cost 5G devices in Vietnam will support uptake, primarily among cost-conscious consumers.
“In terms of industry applications, we expect to see strong use of 5G in the manufacturing sector. Adoption of 5G-enabled sensors across the production line is a certainty, although this will centre most largely on the use of private networks in the short run, such as those developed by private players. Operators have made no indication of their 5G plans for the enterprise and industrial sectors, although we expect them to look at developing 5G networks in key economic zones and industrial areas,” the analysts said. — VNS


Source: Vietnam News 
About TMA: TMA Solutions was established in 1997 to provide quality software outsourcing services to leading companies worldwide. We are one of the largest software outsourcing companies in Vietnam with 2,500 engineers.

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