Lifeboat Foundation

Negotiations are a central part of many human interactions, ranging from business discussions and legal proceedings to conversations with vendors at local markets. Researchers specialized in economics, psychology, and more recently, computer science have conducted several studies aimed at better understanding how humans negotiate with one another in the hope of shedding light on some of the dynamics of human decision-making and enabling the development of machines that can replicate these dynamics.

A research team at the University of Southern California has been exploring the possibility of building automated systems that can negotiate with humans. In a paper pre-published on arXiv and set to be presented at the IJCAI conference, they presented a virtual agent based on a framework called IAGO (Interactive Arbitration Guide Online), which can negotiate with humans in a three-round negotiation task. This virtual agent, called Pilot, is one of the finalists of the IJCAI conference’s global negotiation challenge (ANAC).

“Recently, researchers realized the potential applications of building automated systems that can negotiate with humans,” Kushal Chawla, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “These intelligent assistants can be really useful to augment current techniques for training people to have stronger social skills. Examples include teaching business students to negotiate for successful deals or lawyers to accurately assess settlement rates in legal proceedings.”

The pandemic has seen the number of remote workers swell. Now Germany says it wants to make sure new business models work for everyone.

SpaceX won a $2 million contract from the SpEC consortium to study ways to provide weather data to the U.S. Space Force.

WASHINGTON — SpaceX is looking at ways it could provide weather data to the U.S. military. The company is working under a $2 million six-month study contract from the U.S. Space Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center.

Charlotte Gerhart, chief of the Space and Missile Systems Center Production Corps Low Earth Orbit Division, said in a statement to SpaceNews that SpaceX received the contract in July from SMC’s Space Enterprise Consortium.

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Elons fears are real about AI.

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Continue reading “From Essays to Coding, This New A.I. Can Write Anything” »

If the surge in digital finance is universal, the business models behind it are not. In Latin America look out for digital banks and e-commerce pioneers such as Nubank and MercadoLibre, owner of Mercado Pago. In South-East Asia Grab and Gojek, two ride-hailing services, are becoming “super-apps” with financial arms. Fintech firms now provide the majority of consumer loans in Sweden. In America credit-card firms such as Visa (the world’s most valuable financial firm), digital-finance giants such as PayPal (the sixth) and the big banks both co-operate and compete. Tech giants such as Apple and Alphabet are dipping their toes in, tempted by the financial industry’s $1.5trn global pool of profits.

A blockbuster listing shows how fintech is revolutionising finance.

International Business Machines, still the legal name of century-plus-old IBM, has managed over the years to pull off a dubious feat. Despite selling goods and services in one of the most dynamic industries in the world, the IT sector the company helped create, it has managed to avoid growing.

The company that was synonymous with mainframes, that dominated the early days of the personal computer (a “PC” once meant a device that ran software built to IBM’s technical standards), and that reinvented itself as a tech-consulting goliath, lagged while upstarts and a few of its old competitors zoomed past it.

What IBM excelled at more often was marketing a version of its aspirational self. Its consultants would advise urban planners on how to create “smart cities.” Its command of artificial intelligence, packaged into a software offering whose name evoked its founding family, would cure cancer. Its CEO would wow the Davos set with cleverly articulated visions of how corporations could help fix the ills of society.

Continue reading “IBM finally gets rid of some business to focus on the one that matters” »

The electric-car maker could benefit from improving profitability on vehicle sales and huge growth in its nascent energy business.

The US Army is developing augmented reality goggles for dogs to help protect their human guardians.

The BBC reports that the project, funded by the Small Business Innovation Research program, aims to allow soldiers to give dogs specific directional commands while they’re not in direct line of sight.

“Augmented reality works differently for dogs than for humans,” Stephen Lee, an Army Research Laboratory senior scientist, explained in a statement. “AR will be used to provide dogs with commands and cues; it’s not for the dog to interact with it like a human does.”

Jared Isaacman made a small fortune training fighter pilots but his wealth soared this summer when he took his payments processing business public amid the pandemic.