News of the week selected by Impactscool – April 23, 2018

The most important news on technology and the future, selected from all over the the web for Impactscool’s readers

Having a conversation with a book is possible thanks to “Talk to books”

From today it will be possible to talk with a book thanks to a new Google tool, which allows you to ask questions to more than 100.000 volumes. The service is called “Talk to books” and is currently available in English. How does it work? It allows you to enter a question and receive the answer directly from the books that talk about the topic in question. “Talk to books” selects for us whole paragraphs, highlighting the most significant passage with the bold. This tool is not intended to replace keyword research but understandes our language and bases its work on analysis and selection on meaning. The goal of this semantic research is to obtain a sentence similar to a real answer, which is plausible and could therefore be pronounced by an interlocutor during a chat. The results obtained don’t always meet the expectations, but does not the same thing happen even during a normal conversation?

European partnership for the Blockchain

22 European countries have formed the European Blockchain Partnership with the aim of exchanging information, experiences and expertise on Blockchain technology. Each of the countries involved has signed a joint declaration in which it commits to designate a national representative who will work, together with the EU executive, to define the lines of intervention of the Partnership, also taking advantage of the experience of the EU Observatory and Forum on the blockchain established by Brussels last February. The European Commission’s investments in the project linked to the blockchain have already exceeded 80 million euros, to which an additional 300 million will be added between now and 2020. With the European Blockchain Partnership, the 22 Nations aim to avoid a fragmented approach by the various actors in the sector and to consolidate the role of Europe in the development and diffusion of this technology. Italy, unfortunately, is not among the signatories of the Partnership, which instead involves, among others, France, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands.

Artificial intelligence applied to journalism for news without prejudices

It is called Knowhere News the startup that combines artificial intelligence technology and journalism, to give readers unbiased and free from prejudice news. Once the theme has been chosen, the AI consults more than a thousand sources and, on the basis of what has been found, builds its “impartial” version of the news, trying to remove every subjective vision and potential prejudices. Moreover, the system considers the reliability of the sources to give greater importance to the information reported on authoritative sites. This process, which takes about 60 seconds, is followed by a check by human editors who improve the text. Once the revision is complete, the final version of the text is sent back to the AI in order to improve its performance. The risk of this process, however, is that the system assimilates possible prejudices of journalists, who must therefore be careful not to undermine their impartiality. The creators of Knowhere are convinced that this technology can forever change the way we inform ourselves, but are we sure we want a journalism completely devoid of opinions?