NEWS Literature AI -
NEWS Literature AI - predicting a bestseller How Artificial Intelligence is coming to the aid of book publishers Avast explores IoT Security in the Smart Home era Company CTO uses IFA+ Summit presentation to outline Avast’s activities Gesa Schöning is founder and managing director of QualiFiction GmbH, whose pioneering intelligent software aims to predict which books will be bestsellers. Originally a cultural scientist and bookseller, Gesa has already helped launch two startups on the German market. We asked her what exactly QualiFiction is, and how the idea came about. QualiFiction is a software for analysing and predicting book successes based on AI. The smart software supports publishers and authors to estimate the potential of texts and find the next success story. More than 3.8m texts are sent to publishing houses each year, alone in Germany. Most of them are rejected unread. This will easily overlook talented authors and good stories. With our software are going to change that and give better chances to authors. Please tell us a little about your background… I'm a cultural scientist and came early into contact with publishers. The book market today has many problems that could be solved with the help of new technology and AI. That's exactly my approach. Before founding QualiFiction with my colleague Ralf Winkler, I helped to build and market two more startups and gained a lot of management experience. Now, Ralf and I have the knowledge to develop a strong AI software. We do this with a great passion for literature and culture and want to influence the further development of AI in a positive direction. What, in a nutshell, will you be talking about at the IFA+ Summit? How can it work that a software using AI can even analyse texts and predict which manuscript has potential for success? How could Gesa Schöning Founder and managing director of QualiFiction GmbH an unknown author become a bestselling author within 30 seconds using the software? I'd like to give some insight on how our software works and what results come from it. And last but not least: how will our culture and our reading behavior change as a result of the further development of AI? Literature.ai - Prediction of the Next Bestselling Author Using Artificial Intelligence? 2 Sept 2018 - 12:00 Mid-day Hall 26b, GRAND THEATER Ondrej Vlcek Avast’s CTO Ondrej Vlcek is Avast’s CTO, and general manager of the consumer business unit. At this year’s IFA+ Summit, he will give a presentation focusing on the security of Internet of Things (IoT). At an Avast workshop, which takes place after the panel, he will explore how IoT security relates to Smart Home. We asked him what the key issues will be when it comes to IoT security solutions. Adding security solutions on top of smart devices, like refrigerators or thermostats is complex. Due to the high diversity of devices, it is difficult to develop a solution for each individual device. Furthermore, IoT device resources are limited and these resources are already fine-tuned to perform a specific task. As most smart device data is streamed over the network, network-level protection is the most sensible solution to protecting IoT devices. What can you tell us about IoT security and the Smart Home? In the panel, I will talk about how we can keep smart home environments secure and protect people’s privacy, using new technologies, including artificial intelligence. At Avast, we are working on an important project called the Avast Smart Life platform, a new IoT security offering that protects people’s digital lives. How do you protect people online and how does machine learning fit into that? At Avast, we have been using machine learning for years. We have a threat detection network of over 400 million endpoints – the largest in the industry – which generates vast quantities of data. By feeding our next-generation technologies with this data, we are constantly learning about new threats that help us protect our customer base. How important is it to have a platform like the IFA+ Summit? The IFA+ Summit is special, because it brings together so many interesting people. I particularly think this year’s cluster topics, intelligence, society, interaction, and experience, are important, as they will drive discussions around the future of IoT, human-machine interactions and machine learning Panel Discussion: Fears of Redundancy - The Relationship between Biological and Non-Biological Intelligence 2 Sept 2018 - 12:30 PM Hall 26b, GRAND THEATER 38
NEWS Embrace the robot future Dr Jens Lambrecht’s mission is to dispel the myth that robots will be job-killers Dr Jens Lambrecht Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Technical University A speaker at the IFA+ Summit on the subject of humanising robots, Dr Jens Lambrecht combines the academic research central to his professorship in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Technical University of Berlin with his work as co-founder and MD of start-up GESTALT Robotics. We asked how his career started in the world of robotics and AI After my PhD in human-robotinteraction, I held different positions within software development and robotic innovation. In 2016, we founded GESTALT Robotics as software solution provider for intelligence and autonomous mobility. Over time, AI got more and more relevant in robotics to overcome repetitive behaviour serving flexibility in unstructured conditions like you typically find in domestic environments.” What does the future hold? Robotics and smart automation hold great application potential in industry and consumer markets. From a technology standpoint value creation will be more and more on the side of the software and intelligence. Hence, the future of robotics lies in mobility and environmental understanding. There won’t be an every-purpose creation for domestic usage in the next decade, but more and more domestic tasks will be automated starting with lawn movers and robotic vacuum cleaners. What can people expect to hear when they come to your presentation at the IFA+ Summit? First of all, our vocation is to introduce robots as positivelyexperienced user-centric assistance systems making our lives easier instead of being job killers - a wrongful assumption still widespread. A focus will be on how Augmented Reality can help to use robots for everyday tasks. How important is it to have a platform like the IFA+ Summit in order to foster thought leadership in this field? The IFA+ Summit gives us the opportunity to share and align our vision of the future of robotics with the audience, shaping the products of tomorrow while discussing business development and recruiting more experts Assigned to Assist: Robots Are Not here to Take Your Job 3 Sept. 2018 - 11:50 am Hall 26b, GRAND THEATER www.ifa-international.org IFA International • Friday 31 st August 2018 39
