Intel and Baidu partner on Nirvana Neural Network AI training processor

At Baidu’s Create conference for AI developers in Beijing today, the company and Intel announced a new partnership to work together on Intel’s new Nervana Neural Network Processor for training. As its name very clearly states, this forthcoming chip (NNP-T for short) is a processor built specifically for the task of training neural networks for the purposes of performing deep learning at scale.

Baidu and Intel’s collaboration on the NNP-T involves working together on both the hardware and software side of this custom accelerator to ensure that its optimized for use with Baidu’s PaddlePaddle deep learning framework, which will complement existing work that Intel has already done to ensure that PaddlePaddle is set up to perform best on its existing Intel Xeon Scalable processors. The NNP-T optimization will specifically focus on applications of PaddlePaddle that focus on distributed training of neural networks, to complete other types of AI applications.

Intel’s Nervana Neural Network Processor lineup, named after ‘Nervana,’ the company it acquired in 2016, is developed by the Intel AI group led by former Nervana CEO Naveen Rao. The NNP-T is tailor-made for training AI (ingesting data sets and learning how to do the job its supposed to do), while the NNP-I (announced at CES this year) is designed specifically for inference (taking the results of the learning process and putting into actions, or actually doing the job it’s supposed to do).

The NNP made its debut in 2017, and the first-generation chip is currently being used as a software development prototype and demo hardware for partners, while the new so-called ‘Spring Crest’ generation are targeting production availability this year.

Demo your startup at TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019

Every year hundreds of startups launch with dreams of becoming the next enterprise software unicorn. And it’s no wonder, given the $500 billion market and the rate at which the enterprise giants snap up emerging players. If you’re the founder of an early-stage enterprise startup, join us for TC Sessions: Enterprise in San Francisco on September 5 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Even better, grab the opportunity by the horns and buy a Startup Demo Package. There is limited space available. This is your chance to plant your company in front of some of the most influential enterprise movers and shakers — we’re talking more than 1,000 attendees. Demo tables are reserved for startups with less than $3 million in funding and are available for $2,000, which includes four tickets to the event.

This day-long intensive event features speakers, panel discussions, demos, workshops and world-class networking. Get ready for a head-on, hype-free exploration of the considerable challenges enterprise companies face — regardless of their size.

TechCrunch editors will interview founders and leaders from both established and up-and-coming companies on topics ranging from intelligent marketing automation and the cloud to machine learning and AI. And they’ll question enterprise-focused VCs about where they’re directing their early, middle and late-stage investments.

The full roster of speakers is still to be announced, but here’s a quick hit of who you can expect at TC Sessions: Enterprise.

You’ll hear from Scott Farquhar, co-founder and co-CEO of Atlassian, a company that’s changed the way developers work. Want to hear more about enterprise and the cloud? Snowflake’s co-founder and president of product, Benoit Dageville, will be on hand to talk about the company’s mission to bring the enterprise database to the cloud.

Have someone you want to hear from our stage? Submit your speaker suggestion here.

Pro Tip: For each TC Sessions: Enterprise ticket you buy, we’ll register you for a complimentary Expo Only pass to TechCrunch Disrupt SF on October 2-4.

TC Sessions: Enterprise takes place September 5 at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Don’t miss this opportunity to showcase your early-stage enterprise startup in front of leading enterprise software founders, investors and technologists. Buy your Startup Demo Package today.

Looking for sponsorship opportunities? Contact our TechCrunch team to learn about the benefits associated with sponsoring TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019.

Apple Sans Ive

Well, this has been interesting. After almost 30 years with Apple, Jony Ive is leaving, to found his own firm LoveFrom with his friend and frequent collaborator Marc Newson — also leaving Apple. The response to this news has been predictably histrionic from Apple watchers and press.

The narratives, to summarize, are essentially that:

  • Jony had checked out, become incompetent or just plain lazy
  • Apple is doomed because he is leaving

If those narratives look contradictory then you have eyes.

If you take the sum of the breathless (dare I say thirsty) stories tying together a bunch of anecdotes about Jony’s last couple of years, they are trying to paint a picture of a legendary design figure that has abandoned the team and company he helped build, leading to a stagnation of forward progress — while at the same time trying to argue that the company is doomed without him.

Ok.

Ironically (or perhaps inevitably) even the phrasing of the tweets that accompanied these stories were couched in inflammatory positioning. Tim Cook’s email (actually quite plainly stated) was touted as ‘scathing’, the Journal posited the question: ‘Why hasn’t Apple had a hit product in years? A look at the internal drama around the departure of its design chief helps explain.’ A conclusion that its story only hints at.

Most watchers of the company that I know who were asking and listening to Apple people over the past couple of years are aware that Jony has been on borrowed time with the company. Shocking, this was not — a surprise it was always guaranteed to be given how much control Jony keeps over how and when he does press.

Back in 2015, it was clear that Jony wanted to do less paper pushing and more pencil pushing. And the past decade of Apple has been nothing if not an explosion of management challenges. Enormous growth in product volumes, splintering product lines that made an attempt to leave less room under the pricing and feature umbrella and, yeah, a hell of a lot more people.

“Many of Apple’s critics are purely nostalgic,” Ben Bajarin of Creative Strategies puts it. “Wanting Apple to go back to the days when some of the designs were more bold, iconic, possibly polarizing, but in that time Apple was selling tens of millions of products not hundreds of millions of products. This is a crucially important point that many in the public sphere miss. “

All of that growth means that the job of someone like Jony would naturally shift from scooting a pencil around a drafting board to something more like management — or, in Apple’s case, teaching.

I’m not the Journal’s (or any other publication’s, thank god) public editor. So I will not be fisking the stories that have come out about Jony and his work habits. I’ve never been that good at it and I don’t really have the stomach for it these days. I do have thoughts, though about the way that these anecdotes are tied together in a narrative.

Given that I have covered the company closely for years, I know a lot of the people who were involved in some of these situations. Jony did, in fact, move to holding design meetings at his house in SF. They absolutely held design meetings at The Battery to collate device opinion. He has a design studio in other homes like Hawaii and London. He has absolutely spent more time in the city than down at Apple headquarters over the past few years. The design teams, in and out of the industrial design people, absolutely saw less of him than before.

There are also bits and pieces in the various stories over the past few days that are not, as I understand them, accurate, or represented in an accurate context. But the more important point is that no one I know felt that Jony had checked out or abandoned the team.

As he stated himself, Jony was just plain tired. What prolific designer do you know that is excited about doing more management and less design?

Also, I fully reject the narrative that Apple has somehow floundered because Jony has been absentee. During the period, the company has shipped some enormously successful products — including the major category hit Apple Watch. As one note, I found the criticism that Jony wanted a gold watch so that made the Apple Watch a boondoggle to be enormously hilarious.

The gold watch had 2 distinct purposes:

  • Jony wanted to make it
  • It set expectation that this was a product worth wearing all day

I think it is 100% possible and fair to argue that the first point means Jony had too much power or that it was him exercising that power in a way that felt foreign to Apple’s egalitarian ideals about computing. But the fact is that, regardless of how many they sold, it made a splash and did, in fact, push Apple into the world of fashion and wearable conversation in a way that it hadn’t ever before.

That toe-hold gave them time to figure out what the Watch is actually for and it is a very real success for the company. During the same period, Apple shipped the iPhone X months ahead of schedule, and major updates to every line including the iMac.

I can certainly understand one or more members of the design team resenting the lack of intimate one-on-one time that Jony used to spend with the team when Apple shipped fewer products in more time. And not all of Jony’s influence over the past few years is pristine in hindsight. The MacBook keyboards still suck, I’ll give you that one.

Basically, all design is worth critiquing, and Jony isn’t above that. If something doesn’t work consistently or feel human centric, then it doesn’t matter if 1950’s Dieter Rams himself designed it, it’s crap.

But the argument that Jony derailed product at Apple looks like complete nonsense when you observe the facts. And every design team member I’ve spoken to over the last 4 years has said that Jony, while at times difficult, demanding and intense, has also been an enormous enabling force when it comes to spending the time, resources and energy it took them to get a product or feature to the level they wanted. Resources like on-the-ground materials consultation in China, collaborations with artists around the world, research into the effects of a design — the willingness to ‘do the most’ in search of a solution. None of that went away.

That said, if Jony doesn’t like managing, guess what Jony is not going to be enthusiastic about? As Shel Silverstein put it: “If you have to dry the dishes, and you drop one on the floor, maybe they won’t make you dry dishes any more.”

There is certainly calculus in everything an executive at any big company says publicly — but I think you can believe Jony when he says that he feels like he can be useful elsewhere.

“I certainly have an ambition and feel almost a moral obligation to be useful,” he says in this FT piece. “I feel I’ve been fortunate enough to work with remarkable people over the last 30-plus years and have worked on some very interesting projects and solved some very difficult problems. I feel keenly aware of a responsibility to do something significant with that learning.”

He wants out, and that’s what he’s doing. But he’s not leaving the company in terrible shape, from either an overall perspective and from an internal perspective.

Let’s move away from the anecdotal. What’s more interesting to me than any of this Jony shit talking is where Apple design goes from here.

Apple has put Evans Hankey and Alan Dye in charge of design, reporting to Jeff Williams. Wring your hands all you want about Apple becoming an operations company but, like, where have you been for the last 10 years?

Yes, Apple is a different company now, and it should be. While Jony has given us some amazing work (and some amazing what the hell moments) over the years, its going to be fascinating to watch a new leadership tackle the next era at Apple.

I think it’s also smart of Apple not to announce a single ‘Jony replacement’ at this juncture. Any immediate comparison would likely not do them any favors and this gives the team time to find a new center and a new direction over the next couple of years. I think someone will emerge as the design lead here eventually, but I’m not sure who.

Evans, as I understand it, was hand picked by Jony to lead the ID team as a manager, a job she’s already been doing. She’s a capable design manager with hundreds of patents to her name. More importantly, Apple has a historic and systemic policy that they don’t just put people in to do a job, they put them there to learn from them and to teach them. The Apple way of doing things is institutionalized and taught to new hires.

This institutional tissue, I believe, will survive Jony leaving.

One of the things that struck me the most about a lot of the recent stories is that it painted members of the design team as feckless automatons that could not proceed without Jony approving every move. That’s not true and honestly not even possible. There’s no way Apple could ship on the schedule they have done over the past few years if Jony being late to a meeting would handicap them.

There are a lot of very smart and very talented people at Apple and they are not all named Jony.

I’m also very interested to see how Alan Dye gets on with Apple. He’s got a calm, understated demeanor in person that can come across a bit flat, but he’s clearly very engaged with the task. He’s respected by Apple designers who feel that his work speaks for itself internally and that he has the chops. One of the arcs of Dye’s tenure has been to unify the look and feel of iOS across its platforms in terms of typography like San Francisco.

One of the biggest potholes that the software design team has ever hit, in my opinion, was iOS 7. It needed to be a break with the past for some legitimate reasons, like the expansion of iOS onto new platforms like the car, the watch and beyond. But Jony brought print, not interaction, designers from other parts of Apple in to flesh out the final design and that ended up presenting as a radical new but also radically less usable iOS.

iOS 7, to me, has always reminded me of an apocryphal saying I heard but can’t remember where. It’s about the notoriously difficult to drive Porsche 911: Porsche made a beautiful mistake, and it’s spent 50 years fixing it.

The 911 was a car that was designed to be imbalanced from the beginning by placing the engine in the rear, to emphasize power transfer to the ground via weight and traction. Also, no joke, so you could still fit groceries in it.

Unfortunately, it also enabled massive oversteer, with the car swinging wide on corners incredibly suddenly if pushed too hard. Porsche has refined that design with every iteration, improving every other aspect of the vehicle like traction, larger wheelbase, steering, braking and gearing. Just to get it to a place where the original vision remained intact, but, you know, less fire and dying.

Apple has done much the same since iOS 7, taking a concept that it felt was necessary and continuing to pull it back into a place that feels more usable.

One of the things that stood out to me at the time was that iOS 7 led with a ‘panes of glass’ metaphor. They weren’t all that explicit about it then but it seemed clear to me that they saw this as a way to support all kinds of interfaces from palm first to heads up. An evolution of the information appliance.

Dye and the design team (and Jony, tbf) have spent the last couple of years making big strides fixing the mechanical issues, but it was very exciting to me to see the panes of glass metaphor heavily emphasized at WWDC this year. They’re just panes with depth, texture and hopefully more accessible context this time around.

Even though Jony is a ‘unicorn’ designer, Apple has always thrived on small teams with decision makers, and they’re not all one person. The structure of Apple, which does not rely on product managers, still leaves an enormous amount of power in the hands of the people actually doing the work. I’m not as concerned as a lot of people are that, with Jony leaving, there will suddenly be a slavish hewing to the needs of ‘ops over all’. It’s not in the DNA.

That doesn’t mean however, that there aren’t still question marks. Jony was an enormous force in this company. It is completely natural to be curious, excited and, hell yeah even worried about what his departure will do to the design focused Apple people love to love.

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An Adidas Futurecraft shoe with a midsole printed by Carbon

As for me, I hope that there can be a balance struck between the established patterns of Apple design and new schools of thought. No company should remain rooted in the past completely. There are wildly interesting things happening in design and manufacturing at the moment. Trends like programmatic or “AI” design that allow designers to define an algorithm and a set of constraints, and then generate ‘impossible’ shapes out of edgy materials to obtain a result unable to be sketched or sculpted by traditional processes.

The shoe pictured above is a collaboration between an artist and an algorithm. Daniel Arsham, Adidas and a startup called Carbon made this with the help of a design program that understands the goals and materials its working with, but charts its own path to getting there. This is the new school of design.

The compression of the design and manufacturing stacks into one segment is going to be the defining characteristic of this age of product development in my opinion. Apple needs to jump on that wave and ride it.

There’s a Steve quote, prominently displayed on the wall of the Infinite Loop 4 building in its old Cupertino headquarters.

“I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.”

I’d love to see Apple’s design teams do just that, embrace these new schools of thought and find ways to integrate them into the way that it has always worked. There hasn’t been a more fascinating time to follow this company in years. Whatever happens it won’t be boring.

Samsung shuts down its AI-powered Mall shopping app in India

Samsung has quietly discontinued an app that it built specifically for India, one of its largest markets and where it houses a humongous research and development team. The AI-powered Android app, called Samsung Mall, was positioned to help users identify objects around them and locate it on shopping sites to make the purchase.

The company has shut down the app a year and a half after its launch. Samsung Mall was exclusively available for select company handsets and was launched alongside the Galaxy On7 Prime smartphone. News blog TizenHelp was first to report about the development.

At the time of the launch, Samsung said the Mall app will complement features of Bixby, the company’s virtual assistant. Bixby already offers a functionality that allows users to identify objects through photos — but does let them make the purchase.

“The first insight while developing Samsung Mall was that consumers may be looking to find the price, the colour, delivery options and a lot of other things. Indian consumers want to find the best deals first. They aren’t tied up with one particular portal as well,” Sanjay Razdan, Director of Samsung India told local outlet India Today at the time of the launch.

Samsung had partnered with Amazon, Shopclues and TataCLiQ to show relevant results from these retailers on its “one-stop online experience” app. Users were also able to compare prices to see which website was offering them the item at lowest cost.

Samsung Mall app was downloaded about five million times from Google Play Store in India since March 2018, Randy Nelson, Head of Mobile Insights at analytics firm SensorTower told TechCrunch. The app had begun to lose its popularity in recent months, though.

“Downloads in May totaled 275,000 — which was down 38% year-over-year from 476,000 in May 2018. It was ranked No. 1,055 by downloads in India’s Google Play store in May — down from 487 a year ago,” said Nelson.

Once the top smartphone vendor in India, Samsung has lost that crown to Xiaomi. The Chinese smartphone maker has held the tentpole position in India for two straight years now, according to research firm IDC.

A Samsung spokesperson in India, reached out by TechCrunch on Monday, has yet to comment on the story.

‘Deepfake’ revenge porn is now illegal in Virginia

Virginia has expanded a revenge porn law to include “deepfakes,” the fabricated or manipulated videos and images of people made using machine learning that have begun popping up with increasing regularity.

The law, which went into effect Monday, now makes it illegal to share nude photos of videos of someone without their permission— whether they’re real or fake ones. The law also covers photoshopped images or any other kind of fake footage, not just the more advanced, and harder to spot, deepfake imagery and videos.

Virginia has had a revenge porn law on the books since 2014. But it didn’t properly cover fabricated images and videos, an act that has become more common thanks to advances in software.

The pace of this technology, which is improving at an astonishing rate, has left state and federal lawmakers flat-footed. Victims of deepfaked revenge porn often don’t have recourse because it’s not covered by current law. And yes, deepfake porn exists. The app DeepNude, which existed until a warranted backlash prompted the creator to take it down, used neural network to turn an image of any clothed woman into a rendering of her nude.

Lawmakers are beginning to react with mixed results. For instance, the DEEPFAKES Accountability Act was introduced last month Congress by Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY). That bill would criminalize synthetic media that is broadcast or shared as an authentic video or image.

The proposed federal legislation is a much broader regulation aimed at fake videos and images that imitate a person. The bill would require anyone creating synthetic media content that imitates a person to disclose that it’s altered or generated, using “irremovable digital watermarks, as well as textual descriptions.” The bill would give victims the right to sue creators and/or otherwise “vindicate their reputations” in court.

The UK government is reviewing a law that specifically deals with the making and sharing of non-consensual intimate images in response to a rise of abusive and offensive digital communications.

The commission reviewing the law will focus on revenge porn as well as deepfaked porn and cyber flashing, which involves sending unsolicited sexual images to a person’s phone by taking advantage of technologies like Bluetooth that allow for proximity-based file sharing.

VCs bet on Aegis AI, a startup using computer vision to detect guns

A new startup using computer vision software to turn security cameras into gun-detecting smart cameras has raised $2.2 million in venture capital funding in a round led by Bling Capital, with participation from Upside Partnership and Tensility Venture Partners.

Aegis AI sells to U.S. corporations and school district its technology, which scans thousands of video feeds for brandished weapons and provides threat-detection alerts to customers within one second, for $30 per camera, per month. Coupling AI and cloud computing, Aegis integrates with existing camera hardware and video management software, requiring no on-site installation or maintenance.

“We can take over the role of a security guard with much higher accuracy at a much lower cost,” Aegis co-founder and chief product officer Ben Ziomek tells TechCrunch.

The financing round comes as a fresh cohort of businesses look to new technologies to protect against gun violence. AI-based gun detection is an unproven method, but investors and entrepreneurs alike are hopeful it represents a new era in threat-detection and safety. Seattle-based Virtual eForce, Israel’s AnyVision and Canadian tech startup SN Technologies are among the startups focused on improving security systems across the globe.

For Aegis co-founder and chief executive officer Sonny Tai, protecting against gun violence is personal. The first-time founder, who previously spent nearly a decade in the Marine Corps, grew up in South Africa where gun violence was all too common.

“We had a close family friend who was fatally shot in his own home 20 years ago,” Tai tells TechCrunch. “This prompted my mother to decide that we should immigrate to the U.S. On my end, it inspired a lifelong passion in me. I had to do something about the U.S. gun epidemic.”

IMG 9352 01 01

Aegis AI co-founders Sonny Tai (left) and Ben Ziomek

Lacking engineering expertise, Tai looked to Ziomek for technical support. Ziomek previously spent several years at Microsoft, most recently leading engineering and data science teams within the company’s AI program. Together they built Aegis, which is currently in the process of uprooting from Chicago to establish headquarters in New York City.

The pair spent 18 months building the technology they say can reliably recognize weapons in security camera footage. They had to take an “aggressive” data augmentation approach to develop the AI, Ziomek explains, as opposed to just scraping the web for images of weapons to feed to the platform.

“If you look at most of the state of the art computer vision models, they are really built specifically for the task of differentiating hundreds of different objects and the objects are very large,” Ziomek said. “We are looking for hard-to-see objects; we honed our system to look for small, dark objects in highly-complex scenes.”

“Traditionally — even if you’re working at Google or Microsoft — you scrape the internet for cats or hot dogs and you use a model based on that,” he added. “What happens when you do that same approach for weapons? You get product images, Instagram shots from people at the shooting range; all of these have no resemblance to real security camera footage.”

To teach its software to identify weapons, Aegis began by scrubbing the web for photos of weapons, then they reached out to key influencers in the personal safety space, who proved to be essential resources throughout the process. To complete the data collection process, they got their hands on real security footage and even took their own posed photos holding weapons to fill in any of the AI’s blind spots.

With a fresh bout of funding, Aegis will develop its technology to detect other threats, including bombs and vehicles.

What’s up with Lidar, crypto mafias, influencer marketing, Shuttl, and assistive tech

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Startups at the speed of light: Lidar CEOs put their industry in perspective

Our science and AI correspondent Devin Coldewey has a blockbuster look at the current state of affairs in the lidar industry. What started as those gyrating “spinners” on top of partially autonomous cars has evolved into a variety of mechanisms like metameterials, all the while VCs have dumped hundreds of millions of dollars on to new ventures.

The big challenge today though is to move from curios in the lab to production-ready hardware prepared for the open road. While some startups have netted early partnerships with car manufacturers like BMW, nothing is set in stone yet, even as a consolidation of the industry seems absolutely imminent.

There’s no shortage of lidar alternatives — as long as you don’t need something that’s ready to roll off the production line.

“Almost everything is in R&D, of which 95 percent is in the earlier stages of research, rather than actual development,” explained Austin Russell, founder and CEO of Luminar . “The development stage is a huge undertaking — to actually move it towards real-world adoption and into true series production vehicles. Whoever is able to enable true autonomy in production vehicles first is going to be the game changer for the industry. But that hasn’t happened yet.”

And

“I’ve been approached at least four times in the last two months with an offer to buy a lidar company,” said Innoviz CEO Omer Keilaf. “It doesn’t surprise me to see some convergence. While there are 20 or 30 car makers, only a few are early adopters — companies like BMW, Daimler, Audi — and they’re built in a way to do that. They have dedicated teams for working with companies like us, making sure everything goes right in such a complicated project. And that trend is even stronger when it’s related to functional safety.”

The rise of the new crypto “mafias”

Accomplice’s lead crypto investor Ash Egan offered up his research onto the crypto world, tracking the lineage of almost 200 startups to determine where they all started. His conclusion is that a handful of institutions — among them Stanford, Google, and Goldman Sachs — lead the pack as the best academies for crypto startup founders.

Startups at the speed of light: Lidar CEOs put their industry in perspective

As autonomous cars and robots loom over the landscapes of cities and jobs alike, the technologies that empower them are forming sub-industries of their own. One of those is lidar, which has become an indispensable tool to autonomy, spawning dozens of companies and attracting hundreds of millions in venture funding.

But like all industries built on top of fast-moving technologies, lidar and the sensing business is by definition built somewhat upon a foundation of shifting sands. New research appears weekly advancing the art, and no less frequently are new partnerships minted, as car manufacturers like Audi and BMW scramble to keep ahead of their peers in the emerging autonomy economy.

To compete in the lidar industry means not just to create and follow through on difficult research and engineering, but to be prepared to react with agility as the market shifts in response to trends, regulations, and disasters.

I talked with several CEOs and investors in the lidar space to find out how the industry is changing, how they plan to compete, and what the next few years have in store.

Their opinions and predictions sometimes synced up and at other times diverged completely. For some, the future lies manifestly in partnerships they have already established and hope to nurture, while others feel that it’s too early for automakers to commit, and they’re stringing startups along one non-exclusive contract at a time.

All agreed that the technology itself is obviously important, but not so important that investors will wait forever for engineers to get it out of the lab.

And while some felt a sensor company has no business building a full-stack autonomy solution, others suggested that’s the only way to attract customers navigating a strange new market.

It’s a flourishing market but one, they all agreed, that will experience a major consolidation in the next year. In short, it’s a wild west of ideas, plentiful money, and a bright future — for some.

The evolution of lidar

I’ve previously written an introduction to lidar, but in short, lidar units project lasers out into the world and measure how they are reflected, producing a 3D picture of the environment around them.

Check out the breakout sessions at TC Sessions: Mobility

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How much data is needed to make Autonomous Driving a Reality?
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Think Big by Starting Small: Micromobility Implications to the Future of Mobility

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If You Build It, Will They Buy? – The Role of the FleetTech Partner in the Future Mobility Ecosystem with Brendan P. Keegan
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The Economics of Going Electric: Constructing NextGen EV Business Models
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Bringing Efficiency to Closed-Course AV Testing with Atul Acharya
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Friction-Free Urban Mobility
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Michigan’s Mobility Ecosystem
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Facebook’s content oversight board plan is raising more questions than it answers

Facebook has produced a report summarizing feedback it’s taken in on its idea of establishing a content oversight board to help arbitrate on moderation decisions.

Aka the ‘supreme court of Facebook’ concept first discussed by founder Mark Zuckerberg last year, when he told Vox:

[O]ver the long term, what I’d really like to get to is an independent appeal. So maybe folks at Facebook make the first decision based on the community standards that are outlined, and then people can get a second opinion. You can imagine some sort of structure, almost like a Supreme Court, that is made up of independent folks who don’t work for Facebook, who ultimately make the final judgment call on what should be acceptable speech in a community that reflects the social norms and values of people all around the world.

Facebook has since suggested the oversight board will be up and running later this year. And has just wheeled out its global head of policy and spin for a European PR push to convince regional governments to give it room for self-regulation 2.0, rather than slapping it with broadcast-style regulations.

The latest report, which follows a draft charter unveiled in January, rounds up input fed to Facebook via six “in-depth” workshops and 22 roundtables convened by Facebook and held in locations of its choosing around the world.

In all, Facebook says the events were attended by 650+ people from 88 different countries — though it further qualifies that by saying it had “personal discussions” with more than 250 people and received more than 1,200 public consultation submissions.

“In each of these engagements, the questions outlined in the draft charter led to thoughtful discussions with global perspectives, pushing us to consider multiple angles for how this board could function and be designed,” Facebook writes.

It goes without saying that this input represents a minuscule fraction of the actual ‘population’ of Facebook’s eponymous platform, which now exceeds 2.2BN accounts (an unknown portion of which will be fake/duplicates), while its operations stretch to more than double the number of markets represented by individuals at the events.

The feedback exercise — as indeed the concept of the board itself — is inevitably an exercise in opinion abstraction. Which gives Facebook leeway to shape the output as it prefers. (And, indeed, the full report notes that “some found this public consultation ‘not nearly iterative enough, nor transparent enough, to provide any legitimacy’ to the process of creating the Board”.)

In a blog post providing its spin on the “global feedback and input”, Facebook culls three “general themes” it claims emerged from the various discussions and submissions — namely that: 

  • People want a board that exercises independent judgment — not judgment influenced by Facebook management, governments or third parties, writing: “The board will need a strong foundation for its decision-making, a set of higher-order principles — informed by free expression and international human rights law — that it can refer to when prioritizing values like safety and voice, privacy and equality”. Though the full report flags up the challenge of ensuring the sought for independence, and it’s not clear Facebook will be able to create a structure that can stand apart from its own company or indeed other lobbyists
  • How the board will select and hear cases, deliberate together, come to a decision and communicate its recommendations both to Facebook and the public are key considerations — though those vital details remain tbc. “In making its decisions, the board may need to consult experts with specific cultural knowledge, technical expertise and an understanding of content moderation,” Facebook suggests, implying the boundaries of the board are unlikely to be firmly fixed
  • People also want a board that’s “as diverse as the many people on Facebook and Instagram” — the problem being that’s clearly impossible, given the planet-spanning size of Facebook platforms. Another desire Facebook highlights is for the board to be able to encourage it to make “better, more transparent decisions”. The need for board decisions (and indeed decisions Facebook takes when setting up the board) to be transparent emerges as a major theme in the report. In terms of the board’s make-up, Facebook says it should comprise experts with different backgrounds, different disciplines, and different viewpoints — “who can all represent the interests of a global community”. Though there’s clearly going to be differing views on how or even whether that’s possible to achieve; and therefore questions over how a 40-odd member body, that will likely rarely sit in plenary, can plausibly act as an prism for Facebook’s user-base

The report is worth reading in full to get a sense of the broad spectrum of governance questions and conundrums Facebook is here wading into.

If, as it very much looks, this is a Facebook-configured exercise in blame spreading for the problems its platform hosts, the surface area for disagreement and dispute will clearly be massive — and from the company’s point of view that already looks like a win. Given how, since 2016, Facebook (and Zuckerberg) have been the conduit for so much public and political anger linked to the spreading and accelerating of harmful online content.

Differing opinions and will also provide cover for Facebook to justify starting “narrow”. Which it has said it will do with the board, aiming to have something up and running by the end of this year. But that just means it’ll be managing expectations of how little actual oversight will flow right from the very start.

The report also shows that Facebook’s claimed ‘listening ear’ for a “global perspective” has some very hard limits.

So while those involved in the consultation are reported to have repeatedly suggested the oversight board should not just be limited to content judgement — but should also be able to make binding decisions related to things like Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm or wider use of AI by the company — Facebook works to shut those suggestions down, underscoring the scope of the oversight will be limited to content.

“The subtitle of the Draft Charter — “An Oversight Board for Content Decisions” — made clear that this body would focus specifically on content. In this regard, Facebook has been relatively clear about the Board’s scope and remit,” it writes. “However, throughout the consultation period, interlocutors often proposed that the Board hear a wide range of controversial and emerging issues: newsfeed ranking, data privacy, issues of local law, artificial intelligence, advertising policies, and so on.”

It goes on to admit that “the question persisted: should the Board be restricted to content decisions only, without much real influence over policy?” — before picking a selection of responses that appear intended to fuzz the issue, allowing it to position itself as seeking a reasoned middle ground.

“In the end, balance will be needed; Facebook will need to resolve tensions between minimalist and maximalist visions of the Board,” it concludes. “Above all, it will have to demonstrate that the Oversight Board — as an enterprise worth doing — adds value, is relevant, and represents a step forward from content governance as it stands today.”

Sample cases the report suggests the board could review — as suggested by participants in Facebook’s consultation — include:

  • A user shared a list of men working in academia, who were accused of engaging in inappropriate behavior and/or abuse, including unwanted sexual advances;
  • A Page that commonly uses memes and other forms of satire shared posts that used discriminatory remarks to describe a particular demographic group in India;
  • A candidate for office made strong, disparaging remarks to an unknown passerby regarding their gender identity and livestreamed the interaction. Other users reported this due to safety concerns for the latter person;
  • A government official suggested that a local minority group needed to be cautious, comparing that group’s behavior to that of other groups that have faced genocide

So, again, it’s easy to see the kinds of controversies and indeed criticisms that individuals sitting on Facebook’s board will be opening themselves up to — whichever way their decisions fall.

A content review board that will inevitably remain linked to (if not also reimbursed via) the company that establishes it, and will not be granted powers to set wider Facebook policy — but will instead be tasked with facing the impossible of trying to please all of the Facebook users (and critics) all of the time — does certainly risk looking like Facebook’s stooge; a conduit for channeling dirty and political content problems that have the potential to go viral and threaten its continued ability to monetize the stuff that’s uploaded to its platforms.

Facebook’s preferred choice of phrase to describe its users — “global community” — is a tellingly flat one in this regard.

The company conspicuously avoids talk of communities, pluralinstead the closest we get here is a claim that its selective consultation exercise is “ensuring a global perspective”, as if a singular essence can somehow be distilled from a non-representative sample of human opinion — when in fact the stuff that flows across its platforms is quite the opposite; multitudes of perspectives from individuals and communities whose shared use of Facebook does not an emergent ‘global community’ make.

This is why Facebook has struggled to impose a single set of ‘community standards’ across a platform that spans so many contexts; a one-size-fits all approach very clearly doesn’t fit.

Yet it’s not at all clear how Facebook creating yet another layer of content review changes anything much for that challenge — unless the oversight body is mostly intended to act as a human shield for the company itself, putting a firewall between it and certain highly controversial content; aka Facebook’s supreme court of taking the blame on its behalf.

Just one of the difficult content moderation issues embedded in the businesses of sociotechnical, planet-spanning social media platform giants like Facebook — hate speech — defies a top-down ‘global’ fix.

As Evelyn Douek wrote last year vis-a-via hate speech on the Lawfare blog, after Zuckerberg had floated the idea of a governance structure for online speech: “Even if it were possible to draw clear jurisdictional lines and create robust rules for what constitutes hate speech in countries across the globe, this is only the beginning of the problem: within each jurisdiction, hate speech is deeply context-dependent… This context dependence presents a practically insuperable problem for a platform with over 2 billion users uploading vast amounts of material every second.”

A cynic would say Facebook knows it can’t fix planet-scale content moderation and still turn a profit. So it needs a way to distract attention and shift blame.

If it can get enough outsiders to buy into its oversight board — allowing it to pass off the oxymoron of “global governance”, via whatever self-styled structure it allows to emerge from these self-regulatory seeds — the company’s hope must be that the device also works as a bolster against political pressure.

Both over particular problem/controversial content, and also as a vehicle to shrink the space for governments to regulate Facebook.

In a video discussion also embedded in Facebook’s blog post — in which Zuckerberg couches the oversight board project as “a big experiment that we hope can pioneer a new model for the governance of speech on the Internet” — the Facebook founder also makes reference to calls he’s made for more regulation of the Internet. As he does so he immediately qualifies the statement by blending state regulation with industry self-regulation — saying the kind of regulation he’s asking for is “in some cases by democratic process, in other cases through independent industry process”.

So Zuckerberg is making a clear pitch to position Facebook as above the rule of nation state law — and setting up a “global governance” layer is the self-serving vehicle of choice for the company to try and overtake democracy.

Even if Facebook’s oversight board’s structure is so cunningly fashioned as to present to a rationally minded individual as, in some senses, ‘independent’ from Facebook, its entire being and function will remain dependent on Facebook’s continued existence.

Whereas if individual markets impose their own statutory regulations on Internet platforms, based on democratic and societal principles, Facebook will have no control over the rules they impose, direct or otherwise — with uncontrolled compliance costs falling on its business.

It’s easy to see which model sits most easily with Zuckerberg the businessman — a man who has also demonstrated he will not be held personally accountable for what happens on his platform.

Not when he’s asked by one (non-US) parliament, nor even by representatives from nine parliaments — all keen to discuss the societal fallouts of political disinformation and hate speech spread and accelerated on Facebook.

Turns out that’s not the kind of ‘global perspective’ Facebook wants to sell you.