Google’s has awarded €706,000 ($800,000) to the UK’s Press Association (PA) so they can develop robot reporters or news-bots that can generate 30,000 articles a month

Digital News Initiative

The funding is part of Google’s €150m Digital News Initiative, a three-year program in support of European journalism using technology. The initiative is in its third and final year, and lis looking to provide funding for 7 projects in 27 countries.

Codenamed RADAR, or Reporters and Data and Robots, the Press Association project is a joint effort with Urbs Media, a UK startup specialising in automated data journalism.

Why?

On the one hand, this is an effective and less labour-intensive way to satisfy the demand for more news. Some sceptics, however, have noted that the initiative could be a handy way for tech and advertising giant Google to help websites to get more readers and thereby gain more advertising business and revenue for itself.

On its website, the PA has issued a statement about RADAR’s role in meeting the growing demand “for consistent, fact-based insights into local communities, for the benefit of established regional media outlets, as well as the growing sector of independent publishers, hyperlocal outlets and bloggers.”

Natural Language Processing Software

For the news bots to generate information and stories, natural language processing software will be used on a grand scale. The PA and Urbs Media will reportedly select a team of five journalists to identify, template, and edit data-driven stories. These journalists will apply the code to publicly available government databases to churn out stories.

Hope For The Local Press

This comes at a most opportune time where Britain’s hard-pressed and diminishing local press need to meet the demands for more and more page views, as well as filling spaces in print. PA Editor-in-Chief Pete Clifton has reportedly acknowledged the usefulness of RADAR in terms of cost-effectiveness in providing incisive local stories, and the fact that, although skilled human journalists are still vital in the process, local media would find it very difficult to produce articles in the numbers necessary with the limited number of journalists that they have.

Not Just The Press Association
Although the PA received the largest grant of UK recipients, Google also gave funding to other organisations as part of the initiative. These include Wikipedia (€385,000), City University (known for its popular journalism school (€335,113), fact-checking body ‘Full Fact’ (€300,000), owner of various computing titles ‘Dennis Publishing’ (€160,000), and Al Jazeera (€50,000).

News Bots Already Used In Some Countries

News bots are already being used by some media companies. In China, for example, Xiaomingbot generated hundreds of stories for last year’s Rio Olympics, and The Los Angeles Times’ own news bot, Quakebot, recently made headlines when it generated news of an earthquake off the coast of Santa Barbara, California.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

This kind of initiative is another example of how many businesses are finding ways to promote and harness the power of technologies such as AI to help meet demand, particularly where services e.g. customer service, are concerned, in a cost effective, value adding way. It is also an example of how automation is beginning to be used to replace human jobs.

Research firm Gartner, for example, estimates that up to 85% of customer service centres will become virtual by 2020 e.g. by using more bots, and Facebook announced last April F8 that anyone can now make their own bot using Facebook’s application programming interface (API) known as ‘Messenger Platform’.

Also, in March this year, a report by PwC claimed that over 30% of UK jobs could be lost to automation by the year 2030. How much automation and what kind of automation individual businesses adopt will, of course, depend upon a cost / benefit analysis compared to human workers, and whether automation is appropriate and is acceptable to their customers.

A smart new system from Swedish company Anticimex is now using smart technology to bring pest control into the 21st century by tracing rats and revealing vital information about where they converge or nest.

Used To Be Manual

Like many companies in that industry sector, pest control for the main industrial clients of Anticimex used to involve the manual process of the setting up of traps, and stopping by once a week or once a month to check if the trap had caught a rat.

The Inspiration

Anticimex CIO Daniel Spahr is reported as saying that the inspiration for the change from manual checking to smart innovation came from when, as a regional manager in central Europe, he read about rat infestations in Copenhagen and the invention of a motion detector-based rat trap to be used in the sewer system.

Catching Rats The Smart Way

When smart traps first came into being, the system has some basic reporting features. These were improved upon over time, and this process was helped by Anticimex engaging software company IFS to further develop the new platform for smart traps. This led to a trial of the new Anticimex in Finland this April.

As well as tracing rats and giving information about where they converge or nest, the smart traps work by sending real-time data and reporting if motion is detected, or if a trap has been activated. The information collected by the units can be used to improve the sales and marketing of the product, and give customers a detailed idea of the pest control efforts happening in their properties.

Battery Powered

The traps themselves are powered by various sizes of rechargeable batteries. Equipped with SIM cards, the units send text messages via SMS through 2G and 3G networks, alerting Anticimex of any activity with its traps 24 hours a day. The units send out warnings if the batteries need to be recharged / batteries that need to be replaced, etc. This information can help Anticimex plan their resources for its smart traps.

Hard To Hack

Despite worries about how smart devices of all kinds can be vulnerable to attacks by cyber criminals, Anticimex are reported to be confident that the devices and their communications are highly secure and difficult to hack.

Financial Rewards

The move by Anticimex into innovative smart technology appears to be paying off as the pest control company is now achieving revenues of US$474 million.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

This is another example of how some very old problems are now being solved using the latest smart technology. In the case of Anticimex, vision and inspiration, plus a strategic alliance with a technology company has delivered an important technical and competitive advantage, and could revolutionise a whole industry.

If this can be achieved with a pest control business, other businesses should be asking themselves how / if technology could play a part in solving some of the challenges for businesses and their customers in a cost-effective way, and whether the fresh perspectives and ideas offered by alliances e.g. with technology companies could help move things more quickly forward in new, exciting, and lucrative directions.

It has been reported that a drone being flown dangerously close to Gatwick airport was the reason why four Easyjet and one British Airways flights had to be diverted.

Runway Operations Suspended

Reports indicate that runway operations at Gatwick for two periods (one nine, and one five minute period) between 6pm and 7pm on Sunday 2nd July were suspended.

The resulting flight diversions during that period meant that many passengers ended up far from their intended destination (West Sussex), in places such as Stansted, Southend (Essex), and Bournemouth (Dorset).

The Drone

Reports about the exact nature of the drone itself are limited, other than to say that it was observed in the vicinity of Gatwick. Sussex Police are reported to be investigating the matter, but as yet the drone pilot has not been identified, and police were not able to recover the drone from the scene.

Certainly Not The First Time

The UK’s safety body jointly funded by the Civil Aviation Authority and the Ministry of Defence known as Airprox has recorded 70 such incidents last year, and 33 so far in this year. In fact, there has been a total of 142 Airprox incidents involving drones since 2010, with 40 of them being recorded near Heathrow, and 6 (7 including the latest) being recorded near Gatwick.

Could Have Been Worse – Has Been Worse

Although this latest incident caused a good deal of disruption, previous encounters with drones have posed more immediate and apparent danger.

In June, for example, a Loganair pilot attempting to land Edinburgh airport had to take evasive action after a drone came within only 20 metres of his plane.

Revised Code

A code (recently revised) exists in the UK to help ensure that drone pilots operate their crafts safely. The code specifically states that drones shouldn’t be flown near airfields or near aircraft, and that they should be flown below 120m (400ft) and at least 50m (150ft) away from people. This latest incident, and the fact that drones have been sighted by aircraft 12,500ft from the ground, show that not all drone pilots have read / abide by the code.

The Civil Aviation Authority has warned that flying drones near airfields carries serious punishments under law, including possible imprisonment.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Drones have found a use in many current business applications e.g. monitoring construction projects, film and TV, and the aerial photography market. They have also been tested and tipped for use in the future by e.g. Amazon for parcel deliveries. A move towards autonomous vehicles and new transport technologies means that drones currently have a bright future when used responsibly and professionally in the commercial world. Incidents such as the one at Gatwick give unwanted bad publicity to technology that has a lot of safe, cost saving, and productive uses in the right hands. It also points to the need for regulations and guidelines to be developed and revised as such new industries grow.

The human rights charity has been given the go-ahead by the UK High Court to make a legal challenge against the so-called ‘Snooper’s Charter, and will be enabled to do so with the help of £50,000 of crowdfunding raised earlier this year via CrowdJustice.

What Is The Snooper’s Charter?

The Snooper’s Charter is another name for the Investigatory Powers Act which became law in November 2016. It was designed to extend the reach of state surveillance in Britain. The Charter requires web and phone companies (by law) to store everyone’s web browsing histories for 12 months, and also to give the police, security services and official agencies unprecedented access to that data. The Charter also means that security services and police can hack into computers and phones and collect communications data in bulk, and that judges can sign off police requests to view journalists’ call and web records.

Why Challenge It?

The charity ‘Liberty’ wants to challenge the Charter on the arguments that surveillance of everybody in the UK may not be lawful or necessary, and that whistleblowers and experts have warned that the powers would actually make it more difficult for security services to do their jobs effectively.

There are also the arguments that the new law puts too much power in the state’s hands, could be and invasion of privacy, and that the government storing large amounts of sensitive information about each of us could in itself be irresponsible and a security risk.

Some critics have also expressed suspicions about the motives of the UK government for introducing the law e.g. to censor and control rather than to protect.

Helped By Recent Judgement

Liberty’s argument has been helped by the fact that last December, the European Court of Justice (in a separate case, represented by Liberty lawyers) ruled that the same powers in the old the UK state surveillance law the ‘Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act’ (DRIPA) were unlawful.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

It goes without saying that, especially in the light of the recent UK terrorist attacks, the UK’s ability to spot and foil potential plots is vital. Although the new surveillance Charter may include measures that could help with that, many people and businesses (communications companies, social media, web companies) are uneasy with the extent of the legislation and what it forces companies to do, how necessary it is, and what effect it will have on businesses publicly known to be snooping on their customers on behalf of the state. The 200,000+ signatures on a petition calling for the repeal of the Investigatory Powers Act after it became law late last year, and the £50,000 crowdfunding raised from the public in less than a week to fight the bill, both emphasise the fact that UK citizens value their privacy and take the issues of privacy and data security very seriously.

A deal which led to the sharing of healthcare records of 1.6 million patients in the UK with Google’s AI company ‘DeepMind’ has been judged by the UK data protection watchdog the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) to have not complied with the Data Protection Act.

What Deal?

Back in May 2016 a data sharing agreement between Google’s A.I. Company DeepMind and the Royal Free NHS Trust meant that Google was granted access to the information of the patients for 5 years up to 2017 of 3 London Hospitals, namely;  Barnet, Chase Farm and the Royal Free Hospital.

The information was intended to be used by Google for the specific purpose of developing an app called ‘Streams’ to alert doctors when a person is at risk of developing acute kidney injury (AKI). NHS figures at the time showed the need for such an app because kidney injuries were believed to cause 40,000 deaths a year in the UK.

What Went Wrong?

A member of the public complained, the ICO investigation took place, and it was reportedly found that there were some shortcomings in how the data was handled e.g. some patients were not adequately informed that their data would be used as part of the deal. This led to concerns being raised about transparency for patients about how records were being used.

Protection

The Royal Free Trust originally stated that the patient data that Google would be given access would be encrypted, and that the Google DeepMind employees working on the project would not be able to identify any individuals from it.

There were also assurances that Google could not use the data in any other part of its business; that the data would be stored in the UK by a third party, and that all data will be deleted when the agreement expires at the end of September 2017.

Not Unusual

Despite concerns being raised in the media when the deal was first announced, the Royal Free NHS Trust pointed out that information sharing agreements of this kind weren’t unusual and that it was one of 1,500 agreements with third-party organisations that process NHS patient data.

Now What?

The ICO has now asked for the Trust to commit to changes which will ensure that it is acting within the law by signing an undertaking. The Trust has been asked to establish a proper legal basis under the Data Protection Act for the Google DeepMind project (and for future such projects), to complete a privacy impact assessment, to commission an audit of the trial and share the results with the ICO, and to show how it will comply with its duty of confidence to patients in any future trial involving personal data.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

If your organisation works in a medical field or develops products or services with medical applications or inputs, an agreement of this nature with the NHS or a private health company could represent an R&D opportunity. As the national data guardian Fiona Caldicot pointed out in this case, there was huge potential that creative use of data could have on patient care and clinical improvements.

This story is, however, a reminder that companies / project partners should always be very clear on the Data Protection law (and GDPR as it will be next year) before embarking on a project. It also illustrates how privacy impact assessments are an important data protection tool in digital innovation, and how, just because new technologies enable businesses to do more, it does not mean these tools should always be fully utilised. The price of innovation shouldn’t be the erosion of legally ensured fundamental privacy rights, and the costs for companies that don’t take account of this could be great.