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PR Newswire

Phai Labs releases whitepaper on building fairer AI for candidate screening

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MELBOURNE, Australia, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Phai Labs, the R&D arm of PredictiveHire, has released the whitepaper that informed its FAIRTM Framework, showing how bias in AI can be mitigated with the right steps when using AI for candidate screening.

The FAIRTM Framework (short for Fair AI for Recruitment) received global recognition for its contribution to bias mitigation at the CogX awards.

Phai Labs is releasing the research to further the adoption of their framework and to generate broader interest in the opportunity that AI offers in mitigating bias in hiring.

“Initially my team and I set out to address the fact that badly designed AI systems can amplify bias in hiring, and in doing that, built a framework to monitor and mitigate it,” Chief Data Scientist Dr Buddhi Jayatilleke said.

“This research explores the properties that a machine learning system needs to demonstrate to establish a fairer process for job candidates.”

Based on the findings, Phai Labs identifies bias, validity, explainability and inclusivity as key measurable properties that AI tools in recruitment need to demonstrate.

These four aspects form the basis of fairness in AI-based recruitment tools, helping developers, employers and candidates ask the right questions when assessing or creating assessment tools.

“This whitepaper consolidates a lot of the current thinking around AI and bias, and we want to encourage as many people as possible to read it because this is such a new area of research,” PredictiveHire CEO Barb Hyman said. “Everyone working in this space is on a journey together and it’s important we share and learn from each other to build a better future through AI. Our whitepaper  shows how mitigating bias with AI is possible, and that is definitely something that more people need to understand. We want more people to know how we can do this so it becomes the standard approach.”

Dr Jayatilleke said given this area of research is so new and fast-evolving, it was important his team shared their work broadly so they could get feedback from the community of AI practitioners and researchers. “We are inviting comments from other researchers working in this area. We want to make sure that our framework stands up to robust scientific inquiry.”

The whitepaper can be found on ResearchGate:

http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.17622.73288

About PredictiveHire

PredictiveHire’s mission is to help companies unlock and engage talent at scale. Using the world’s first Smart Interviewer, powered by the world’s largest source of 1st party proprietary text data and advanced Natural Language Processing, we turn simple text conversations into unprecedented talent intelligence enabling organisations to interrupt hiring bias at scale, get to the right talent fast and give every candidate an experience they love.

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PR Newswire

Take a Look Under The Hood of Award Winning Fruit Tech Startup Hectre

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  • Hectre are bringing clever simplicity to the US orchard industry, delivering gains to fruit farmers
  • The popular NZ fruit tech company were named winners in the global AgTech BreakThrough Awards and are now double finalists in another prestigious awards program
  • Take a look under the hood of this Kiwi success story and find out what makes them shine

AUCKLAND, New Zealand, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — For many businesses, 2021 was a wild ride, but despite the challenges, some companies shone. Popular NZ fruit tech company Hectre (pronounced Hectare) was a definite sparkler, winning at the global AgTech BreakThrough Awards and gaining a reputation for best in class among the US apple growing industry.

The clever simplicity of the Hectre Orchard Management App on show. Jason Woodworth, CEO of Lamont Fruit Farms uses Hectre and says the bilingual capability and ease of use has been a huge plus for their company. Harvest data, labor tracking and quality control are all captured in real time, flowing through to yield and labor reporting, and auto generating payroll data. Hectre customers can print waterproof bin tickets right in the field, straight off a mobile printer.
The clever simplicity of the Hectre Orchard Management App on show. Jason Woodworth, CEO of Lamont Fruit Farms uses Hectre and says the bilingual capability and ease of use has been a huge plus for their company. Harvest data, labor tracking and quality control are all captured in real time, flowing through to yield and labor reporting, and auto generating payroll data. Hectre customers can print waterproof bin tickets right in the field, straight off a mobile printer.

Extremely high tech, but so very easy to use. Hectre’s Spectre for Apples app detects and sizes apples straight off a photo on an iPad, in the field or in the packhouse, with results served up in seconds. Early fruit sizing has never been simpler.
Extremely high tech, but so very easy to use. Hectre’s Spectre for Apples app detects and sizes apples straight off a photo on an iPad, in the field or in the packhouse, with results served up in seconds. Early fruit sizing has never been simpler.

It’s time to take a look under the hood to discover how this innovative company, built with buckets of “Kiwi” work ethic and a huge passion to deliver “better”, has gone on to become one of the most exciting agritech companies on the global stage.

Last week, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Hectre were named finalists in two categories at the prestigious NZ Hi-Tech Awards. How did they arrive at this point?

It all started with an apple. It was 2016 and Hectre was a team of three visionary co-founders, who upon learning of the daily struggles faced by apple growers, set out to find a better way. In consultation with a group of growers, they created the design for the Hectre Orchard Management App and importantly, growers backed them.

Simon Easton, co-owner of Wairepo Orchards, grows apples near Nelson, in NZ’s South Island, and still remembers when one of the founders, Menilik Dyer, turned up at his orchard with a large notebook and asked, “As a grower, what is it that you need that we could help with?” Easton was sick to death of writing out bin tickets – the labels that must go with each full fruit bin detailing the immense amount of origin data that growers have to capture (it’s even greater now).

Easton is a numbers man and is driven by continually improving the performance of his orchard. He wants to get his hands on data so he can hone in on what’s working well and identify opportunities to perform even better. He’s enjoyed seeing the journey of the Hectre app from those early days to where it is now. “Being able to get cost info out of Hectre is awesome. To know that picking cost me this amount and pruning cost me that amount…I just love all of that.” 

“We’ve always been keen to roll up our sleeves, get alongside growers and learn everything we can from them. I think they respect the fact that we genuinely value their insights, their skills and their extraordinary commitment to what has to be one of the hardest industries to be in. When you consider that fruit growers only get one chance each year to make money (after harvest), and the rest of the time they’re slogging their guts out and pouring in funds. It takes bravery and an immense amount of care and hard work to survive and thrive. Our team is continually in awe of the growers we work with,” says Hectre Co-founder and CEO, Matty Blomfield.

In the first few years, Hectre built out the Hectre Orchard Management App, an app that enables fruit growers to digitise their orchards, removing all the double and triple handling of paper they traditionally deal with and the wasted time that goes with it. Growers can manage all their labour through the app, including auto calculation of piece rates, plus integration with payroll programs. The ability to gain insights on the performance of pickers and fruit quality, delivers direct benefits as growers continue to battle the challenges rising from the pandemic and environmental factors.

Those early relationships formed with NZ fruit growers, led to invaluable introductions to growers in one of the world’s apple growing meccas, Washington, USA. “I remember one of our first US trips. We had recognised how important it was to have boots on the ground. So, with no appointments in place, we booked a flight to the US and then glued ourselves to the phone, calling up every grower we could and telling them we’d be in their area next week and could we meet,” reflects Blomfield.

The app now covers numerous fruit types such as apples, pears, high value cherries, kiwifruit and more. And the Hectre app is currently being used by fruit growers and packers in 11 countries, including US industry giants Washington Fruit & Produce and Borton Fruit.

“The platform and tools they’ve built support fruit growers of all sizes, from small family farms, to large integrated global fruit institutions. We believe Hectre’s dedication to constant innovation provides a significant competitive advantage and aligns well with our own approach to business,” says Byron Borton, Chief Visionary Officer at Borton Fruit.

Hectre’s innovation approach has centred on what they term, “clever simplicity”. Creating leading edge tech for fruit growers and packers, with user simplicity at the forefront. Kylie Hall, Marketing Manager at Hectre, says that focus on clever simplicity has created a unique market advantage and one Hectre has become known for. “We recognise that it’s not enough to just create awesome technology. We’ve got to be fully focused on who will be using that tech and how we can make it as simple as possible. That way, users can learn quickly, and our customers can optimise their tech investment, gaining full benefit from their spend.”

In Waterport, New York, Lamont Fruit Farms are using Hectre’s Orchard Management App. CEO Jason Woodworth says the insights are excellent. “Hectre is now the tool we use to evaluate all of our blocks in the true sense of real time. You can track each and every project and monitor costs from the start of pruning until the end of harvest. The staff are fantastic with support and are always thinking forward.”

Two years ago, Hectre launched Spectre for Apples, a computer vision AI app that helps fruit growers and packers assess the size of their fruit, from the very first pick. In an industry where size really does matter, it’s a crucial piece of information, enabling improved decision-making regarding storage and packing, and empowering growers and packers to secure sales orders earlier than ever before.

Spectre works straight off an iPad or iPhone and serves up sizing information within seconds. Users simply take a photo on their iPad and Spectre will detect and size more than 100 pieces of fruit from the fruit bin. Mobile, fast and simple. “We’ve since developed Spectre models to meet the needs of citrus packers too and are working with pilot customers this US harvest for Spectre for Cherries,” notes Hectre R&D Manager, Luke Butters. The pilot was quickly oversubscribed.

The upcoming US apple harvest will see yet another leading-edge innovation delivered by Hectre, this time focused on providing insights for huge US apple packhouses. It will be another world first piece of fruit tech, developed by a Kiwi company shining brightly. “We’ll share more about that later,” grins Butters.

Today, Hectre now has the collective talents of a team of 34, spread across NZ, the US and Vietnam. “Our tech is delivering huge benefits for both growers and packers, but it’s our people that really make the difference. Our people uncover the needs. They build our tech. They help growers learn our tech and they support the success of our customers. Each of them is humble, caring, hard working and hugely supportive of each other. They are our secret ingredient, and we value them highly,” adds Hall.

David Downs, Chair of the NZ Hi-Tech Trust which organises the NZ Hi-Tech Awards program, says the standard of entries continues to grow each year. “This year’s finalists span the full spectrum of the hi-tech sector, and the level of innovative tech products and solutions continues to astound us all.” Hectre has been named a finalist for both the Most Innovative Hi-Tech Agritech Solution and for Hi-Tech StartUp Company of the Year.

About Hectre

Hectre is an award winning startup empowering fruit growers and packers with the world’s simplest to use orchard technologies. Originating in New Zealand, with teams in the US, NZ and Vietnam, Hectre creates simple to use, leading edge orchard management and mobile fruit sizing apps. With the Hectre app fruit growers can digitise their orchard management processes, saving time and money, and getting more of their fruit to market, enhancing their financial sustainability. Fruit packers can increase their early size sample rates by up to 3000%, gaining access to sizing data as soon as the fruit is picked, enabling better decision making, reduced costs and achieving greater sales. To learn more about Hectre, please visit www.hectre.com

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PR Newswire

Bairong Inc. Achieves Record Revenues and Adjusted Net Profit in 2021

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BEIJING, April 2, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Bairong Inc. (“Bairong” or “the Company”, 6608.HK), a leading independent AI-powered technology platform in China, has released its 2021 Annual Report with new records in revenues and adjusted net profit. Its total revenues and adjusted net profit reached RMB1.623 billion and RMB141 million in 2021, representing year-on-year growth of 43% and 76%, respectively.

Highlights of the Annual Report for the year ended December 31, 2021:

  • Revenues for smart analytics and operation services, its largest business segment, increased 38% year-on-year to RMB737 million, the best result in the past four years.
  • Revenues from the other two segments also set new records. Revenues for precision marketing services increased by 60% year-on-year to RMB422 million.
  • Revenues from insurance distribution services increased by 37% year-on-year to RMB464 million, of which life insurance and health insurance premiums accounted for the vast majority, with an average policy period exceeding 10 years and a renewal rate exceeding 95%.
  • The net cash flow from operating activities rose to RMB265 million, a year-on-year increase of 27%. Cash equivalents and financial assets totaled RMB3.95 billion.

Expanding client base and strengthening relations with key clients

Bairong’s client base includes the majority of state-owned banks, more than 900 regional banks, substantially all of China’s consumer finance companies and major insurance companies. By the end of 2021, the Company had provided services to 5,700 financial services provider(FSP) clients in China, including over 3,300 paying FSP clients, an increase of 28% year-on-year. Average revenue per user(ARPU) of key FSP clients increased by 25% year-on-year to RMB5.12 million. The retention rate of key FSP clients reached 92%, and a net dollar expansion rate of 118% for KSP clients was achieved.

Bairong also strengthened its relations with key clients. Take a key state-owned bank as an example. Bairong completed methodological research for a bank-wide retail business growth project in mid-2021. It also successfully embedded an AI-enabled voicebot service function into the smart operations of the retail business line of the bank, which included “Interactive Voice Response(IVR) + manual” mode and IVR mode. Compared with previous purely manual working conditions, these two modes can help the bank reduce costs by approximately 50% and 90% respectively.

Besides organic growth, Bairong also acquired leading domestic management consulting and digital marketing cloud platforms. Last year, its largest M&A was the acquisition of Beijing All Union Technology Corp. (“All Union”).

Investing in R&D to reinforce technology innovation

Last year, Bairong’s total R&D investment reached RMB252 million, representing 16% of its total revenues. Its R&D focuses on innovation in vertical fields, including machine learning, AI-enabled voicebot and privacy computing.

Bairong won five national invention patents last year. To date, it owns over 150 software copyrights and patents. In 2022, the Company plans to expand its technological advantages in machine learning, cooperate in research and development, optimize the application of ORCA, an automatic learning platform for financial scenarios, improve clients’ ROI and other business objectives, and strengthen its competition barriers.

Undervalued by the market

Compared with its benchmark fintech and SaaS companies listed in US and HK, the Company believes that it is significantly undervalued by the market. At present, Bairong’s P/B ratio is about 0.8, lower than the median P/B ratio of the SaaS sector by 150%. The cash assets of Bairong alone are currently equivalent to 108% of its current market value. The current PS ratio of Bairong is also much lower than the average of the SaaS sector in the Hong Kong stock market.

The Annual Report demonstrated that Bairong maintained its robust growth in 2021. With its innovative technologies, profound insights and rich experience, Bairong believes it will continue to contribute to and benefit from the digital transformation of the banking industry in China.

About Bairong Inc.

Founded in March 2014, Bairong is a leading independent AI-powered technology platform in China serving more than 5,700 financial services provider clients. Bairong was the largest independent financial big data analytics solutions provider in China. Adhering to the mission of empowering every financial services provider in China with smart and comprehensive data analytics, Bairong has built a cloud-native technology platform that supports the full business cycle of FSP clients, including smart analytics, decision-making support, smart consumer operation and wealth management solutions, enabling them to improve risk management ability, promote user activity and operational efficiency. Bairong also provides precision marketing and insurance distribution services that enable FSP clients to reach and serve their target customers more effectively.

For more information, please visit Bairong.

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Source: Bairong Inc.

PR Newswire

VisionNav Robotics debuts at the MODEX 2022 with the Innovative AGV/AMR Forklifts

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ATLANTA, March 31, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — VisionNav Robotics, a global supplier of industrial automated vehicles, attends the MODEX show held in Atlanta from 3/28 to 3/31, 2022, begins its appearance in the North American market. VisionNav has displayed the representative automated industrial vehicle forklift of the industry to drive intralogistics automation with intelligent technology.

MODEX is one of the largest material handling or supply chain equipment and technology exhibitions in North America. This exhibition focuses on “next-generation technology and equipment”, attracting nearly 1,000 companies. For now, MODEX has become an important communication platform in the field of global logistics automation.

At the MODEX 2022 site, VisionNav demonstrated the applications of the VNP15 counterbalanced automated forklift in the stacking scenario of multi-layer material frames, and the material handling operation of the SLIM series forklifts in a dense narrow aisle scenario. “Many companies talked to us about the shortage of forklift operators and the possibility of introducing automated forklift operations affected by the epidemic. Our products have plenty of experience based on a large number of applications in complex scenarios and have unique advantages in terms of efficiency, flexibility, and storage capacity.” Said Robert Tang, Head of Sales USA at VisionNav. It should be noted that multi-layer frame stacking is an innovative solution launched by VisionNav for irregular parts storage, which can currently deal with stacking scenarios of up to 7 layers

Based on VisionNav® control algorithm and perception technology, VNP15 and SLIM series can adaptively fork pallets and material frames for horizontal and vertical operations. “We have also developed a variety of clamps to meet the material handling demand of customers in different industries, from simple pallets to bales, paper rolls, machinery, cables, and so on.”

Founded in 2016, VIsionNav® is committed to providing AGVs/AMRs and Automation Solutions for intralogistics by integrating 5G Communication, AI, Environmental Perception, Deep Learning, and Servo Control technology. At present, VisionNav has developed 8 series of products including auto forklifts and tractors for various scenarios. Meanwhile, VisionNav has made significant breakthroughs such as achieving up to 9.4m(30ft) material storage, up to 2m(6.5ft) narrow aisles transmitting, automated truck loading and unloading, multi-layer materials stacking. VisionNav Sold 1500+ products globally implemented 350+ projects and reached cooperation with 50+ Fortune 500 companies.

CONTACT: Robert Tang, Head of Sales in the USA, +1 404 509 4040, robert@visionnav.com

PR Newswire

ViewSonic’s myViewBoard Sens Brings UK’s First AI-powered Classroom to Smestow Academy

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Creating An Optimal Learning Environment with Better Wellness and Safety

BREA, Calif., March 22, 2022 — ViewSonic Corp., a leading global provider of visual solutions, has partnered with the Smestow Academy in Wolverhampton, England, as the first school in the UK to deploy the AI-powered myViewBoard Sens analysis tool in the classroom. Through the real-time insights generated by the intelligent sensor, the school can ensure the classroom follows the wellness compliance, increase students’ engagement, and facilitate a safe and active learning environment for the best possible learning outcome.

ViewSonic's myViewBoard Sens brings UK's first AI-powered classroom to Smestow Academy, facilitating a safe and active learning environment for the best possible learning outcome.
ViewSonic’s myViewBoard Sens brings UK’s first AI-powered classroom to Smestow Academy, facilitating a safe and active learning environment for the best possible learning outcome.

"In the last few years, we had looked for a total Edtech solution to improve the overall learning experience of our students. In 2021, we started working with ViewSonic to implement over 100 ViewBoard interactive displays in our classrooms. Harnessing the power of myViewBoard Sens is our latest step in this journey," said Jonathan Stokes, Assistant Headteacher, Smestow Academy. "myViewBoard Sens offers students and teachers reassurance of a safe and engaging learning environment so we can deliver the best education possible. It is an exciting piece of EdTech innovation that we are proud to be trialing and rolling out in our classrooms."

"ViewSonic is passionate about providing comprehensive educational technology solutions for schools to drive better learning outcomes and attainments," said Peter Claxton, Senior Director of EdTech Solutions, ViewSonic. "We are incredibly pleased to be working with Smestow Academy to implement myViewBoard Sens in a real-world setting, helping the schools to adapt to the new era, and creating a highly engaged and safe learning environment. Through this pioneering project, we plan to introduce this next-gen technology to more schools around the world, opening up new learning opportunities for students, teachers, and schools."

In this project, myViewBoard Sens was installed on the ViewBoard, which sits at the front of a classroom, to analyze the wellness compliance of the indoor space. The school and teachers can get an instant view of the status through a dashboard app. The embedded sensor detects and evaluates the airborne transmission risk according to five indicators – temperature, humidity, occupancy rate, audience masked, and close contacts between students. If the rating of wellness compliance decreases, it means the wellness level is at risk and the myViewBoard Sens would suggest actionable insights on the dashboard in real-time for the school and teachers to take action. This makes sure the social distancing in the classroom follows the government’s protocol, reducing the risk of virus growth.

From the dashboard, the teachers can also get insights into student engagement at a group level to foster an active learning environment. From sensing the room’s temperature, color temperature, ambient lighting, to analyzing students’ attentiveness through articulated human pose estimation, the insights indicate the factors that may affect students’ focus. Teachers can look back and see how students responded to the class and make changes to their lesson plans or teaching approaches if necessary. Moreover, all data are generated and processed within the sensor locally without using individual profiles and without relying on the cloud, ensuring the highest levels of security and anonymity.

As a future-proof education solution, myViewBoard Sens helps the school evolve with the changing world and helps educators achieve the best educational outcomes in an optimal learning space. Moving forward, ViewSonic will continue to work with Smestow Academy to gather more feedback on the use of technology and explore more possibilities to provide greater benefits in education.

On March 23, day 1 of BETT Show 2022, Peter Claxton, Senior Director of EdTech Solutions, ViewSonic will deliver a keynote speech – The Art of the Possible (Innovation and AI) at 4pm, and on March 24, day 2 of BETT Show, Peter will host the EdTech Talk with the Smestow Academy at 3pm.

ViewSonic at BETT 2022
When
Wednesday 23rd March: 10:00am-6:00pm
Thursday 24th March: 10:00am-8:00pm
Friday 25th March: 10:00am-5:00pm

Where
ExCeL London, South Hall, Booth SF40

To find more information, please visit https://www.viewsonic.com/uk/bett2022. 

About Smestow Academy  
Located in Wolverhampton, the Smestow Academy is part of the University of Wolverhampton Multi-Academy Trust. Through the school’s curriculum, they aim to build people through the development of key skills, knowledge and understanding. This intent to provide an excellent education for all students is rooted in a desire to bring out the best in every student and prepare them for success in life.

About ViewSonic
Founded in California, ViewSonic is a leading global provider of visual solutions and conducts business in over 100 countries worldwide. As an innovator and visionary, ViewSonic is committed to providing comprehensive hardware and software solutions that include monitors, projectors, pen displays, commercial displays, All-in-One LED displays, ViewBoard interactive displays, and myViewBoard software ecosystem. With over 35 years of expertise in visual displays, ViewSonic has established a strong position for delivering innovative and reliable solutions for education, enterprise, consumer, and professional markets and helping customers "See the Difference." To find out more about ViewSonic, please visit www.viewsonic.com.  

PR Newswire

Infosys Recognized as one of the 2022 World’s Most Ethical Companies for the Second Consecutive Year by Ethisphere

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Recognition honors companies demonstrating exceptional leadership and a commitment to business integrity through best-in-class ethics, compliance, and governance practices

BENGALURU, India, March 21, 2022 — Infosys (NSE: INFY) (BSE: INFY) (NYSE: INFY), a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting, today announced that it has been recognized by Ethisphere Institute, a global leader in defining and advancing the standards of ethical business practices, as one of the 2022 World’s Most Ethical Companies, for the second consecutive year. Through this recognition, Infosys has become the only company in India, and one of the four honorees globally, in the software & services industry.

In 2022, 136 honorees were recognized from 22 countries and across 45 industries. These companies were evaluated based on the Ethisphere Ethics Quotient® across multiple categories, including culture, environmental and social practices, ethics and compliance, governance, diversity, and initiatives to support a strong value chain.

"Today, business leaders face their greatest mandate yet to be ethical, accountable, and trusted to drive positive change," said Timothy Erblich, Chief Executive Officer, Ethisphere. "We continue to be inspired by the World’s Most Ethical Companies honorees and their dedication to integrity, sustainability, governance, and community. Congratulations to Infosys for earning the World’s Most Ethical Companies designation."

Salil Parekh, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, Infosys, said, "Being ethical is at the heart of everything we do, and one of the core values on which Infosys has built its success over the years. We are honored to receive this recognition from the prestigious Ethisphere Institute. Receiving this recognition for the second consecutive year is a testament to our excellence in ethical practices and our commitment to operate with utmost integrity and transparency as articulated in our C-LIFE values."

The complete list of 2022 World’s Most Ethical Companies can be found at:  https://worldsmostethicalcompanies.com/honorees

Methodology & Scoring

Grounded in Ethisphere’s proprietary Ethics Quotient®, the World’s Most Ethical Companies assessment process includes more than 200 questions on culture, environmental and social practices, ethics and compliance activities, governance, diversity, and initiatives to support a strong value chain. The process serves as an operating framework to capture and codify the leading practices of organizations across industries and around the globe.

About Ethisphere

Ethisphere® is the global leader in defining and advancing the standards of ethical business practices that fuel corporate character, marketplace trust and business success. Ethisphere has deep expertise in measuring and defining core ethics standards using data-driven insights that help companies enhance corporate character and measure and improve culture. Ethisphere honors superior achievement through its World’s Most Ethical Companies recognition program and provides a community of industry experts with the Business Ethics Leadership Alliance (BELA).

More information about Ethisphere can be found at: https://ethisphere.com.

About Infosys

Infosys is a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting. We enable clients in more than 50 countries to navigate their digital transformation. With over four decades of experience in managing the systems and workings of global enterprises, we expertly steer our clients through their digital journey. We do it by enabling the enterprise with an AI-powered core that helps prioritize the execution of change. We also empower the business with agile digital at scale to deliver unprecedented levels of performance and customer delight. Our always-on learning agenda drives their continuous improvement through building and transferring digital skills, expertise, and ideas from our innovation ecosystem.

Visit www.infosys.com to see how Infosys (NSE, BSE, NYSE: INFY) can help your enterprise navigate your next.

Safe Harbor

Certain statements in this release concerning our future growth prospects, financial expectations and plans for navigating the COVID-19 impact on our employees, clients and stakeholders are forward-looking statements intended to qualify for the ‘safe harbor’ under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, which involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties relating to these statements include, but are not limited to, risks and uncertainties regarding COVID-19 and the effects of government and other measures seeking to contain its spread, risks related to an economic downturn or recession in India, the United States and other countries around the world, changes in political, business, and economic conditions, fluctuations in earnings, fluctuations in foreign exchange rates, our ability to manage growth, intense competition in IT services including those factors which may affect our cost advantage, wage increases in India, our ability to attract and retain highly skilled professionals, time and cost overruns on fixed-price, fixed-time frame contracts, client concentration, restrictions on immigration, industry segment concentration, our ability to manage our international operations, reduced demand for technology in our key focus areas, disruptions in telecommunication networks or system failures, our ability to successfully complete and integrate potential acquisitions, liability for damages on our service contracts, the success of the companies in which Infosys has made strategic investments, withdrawal or expiration of governmental fiscal incentives, political instability and regional conflicts, legal restrictions on raising capital or acquiring companies outside India, unauthorized use of our intellectual property and general economic conditions affecting our industry and the outcome of pending litigation and government investigation. Additional risks that could affect our future operating results are more fully described in our United States Securities and Exchange Commission filings including our Annual Report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2021. These filings are available at www.sec.gov. Infosys may, from time to time, make additional written and oral forward-looking statements, including statements contained in the Company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and our reports to shareholders. The Company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements that may be made from time to time by or on behalf of the Company unless it is required by law.

  

PR Newswire

Appen provides data solutions featuring unique advantages for the entire AI lifecycle in the Chinese market

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SHANGHAI, March 18, 2022 — IDC recently analyzed the status quo of enterprises in the development and construction of AI applications, and summarized the characteristics of data services required for current AI model training in rising to data service challenges and needs. To tackle the development trend of AI data services, Appen, a world-leading AI training data service provider, now provides data solutions featuring unique advantages for the entire AI lifecycle in the Chinese market.

  1. AI is being employed and implemented across a wide range of industries with the rapid development of AI market in China.
  2. Enterprises find their data service needs are changing dramatically as they need to handle privacy concerns, the lack of data, and other challenges in adopting AI.
  3. To accelerate the process, they are attaching increasing importance to AI data, as well as the quality, efficiency, and safety of AI data services rendered.
  4. As a world-leading AI training data service provider boasting unique advantages in the Chinese market, Appen furnishes enterprises with full-stack acquisition and annotation services and solutions for images, texts, voice, audio, and video in the AI lifecycle. It provides OTS dataset products and intelligent data annotation On-Promise/SaaS/Hybrid platforms to be more responsive to the various needs of customers, manifesting outstanding advantages in the fields of foreign languages and autonomous driving data services.

AI Market in China

In recent years, the AI data service market has been fueled by the increasing need for rich and high-quality data sources brought by the rapid development of AI market in China. As shown in the figure below, IDC predicts that in 2021, the overall size of AI market in China will reach 8.22 billion US dollars (about one-fifth of the counterpart in the United States), and it’s expected to reach 16.3 billion US dollars by 2025. IDC forecasts that the five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of the AI market in China will surpass that of the United States and the rest of the world in the post-pandemic era.


Enterprises are shifting their exploration of artificial intelligence technologies from single applications to multiple business scenarios and evolving from informatization to intelligentization, a more advanced stage, as the digital transformation enters "deep-water areas". Enterprises begin to employ AI-generated audio content, knowledge graphs, multi-modal interactions, and other technologies in their production environments. The application scenarios of such technologies have been expanded from simple identity authentication and intelligent customer services to intelligent process automation, meeting assistants, intelligent writing, virtual assistants for employees, AI digital humans, and so on. In terms of business effects, the business value of AI applications is becoming clearly visible and even assessable.

With a predominant value-added effect, AI has promoted the intelligent transformation of all walks of life, yet the implementation process is fraught with challenges. Problems occur in strategies, talents and teams, data, skills, processes, and many other areas. In a survey conducted in 2021, IDC found that the top three challenges faced by enterprises worldwide when adopting AI were high upfront costs, the lack of machine learning operations (MLOps) expertise, and the lack of data science expertise. Privacy concerns and the lack of training and testing data were also too serious to be ignored.


The widespread introduction of deep neural networks into industry applications has raised massive data needs, yet business effects cannot be significantly improved by continuing to optimize the model codes after such models are relatively mature. Therefore, optimizing the training data has become an important means for greatly improving the accuracy of AI models.

In this context, enterprises are devoting more resources to the acquisition of high-quality training data, not just model training, in their AI R&D. IDC found that, of the global enterprises that have been interviewed, 85% believe they spent more than half of their AI development investment to data preparation.

Appen China MatrixGo Data Annotation Platform

The MatrixGo high-precision data annotation platform is a platform product that Appen independently developed after entering the Chinese market. It includes Appen’s overseas practical experience, yet also fits the characteristics of the local market. Integrating rich and efficient annotation tools, it has powerful workflow scheduling capabilities and can support various annotation projects in rich scenarios with massive data by incorporating resources from its teams, supplier teams, and millions of crowdsourcing personnel. The platform can be delivered through private deployment, software as a service (SaaS), or hybrid cloud deployment, where SaaS can be integrated with privately deployed file service to further ensure compliance of data flow and strengthen data security management.

As a professional segmented solution-level product platform, it can provide functions for all core scenarios in the project execution process, including data requirement proposal and strategy formulation, data collection, high-precision annotation/classification, progress tracking and quality control, and full data delivery. It effectively integrates AI and model capabilities, enables large-scale man-machine coordination, and supports massive data acquisition, multilingual and multi-scene speech transcription and translation, complex content relevance evaluation, computer vision target recognition and tracking, and 3D object tracking in point clouds, semantic segmentation, and other functions to provide customers with high-quality AI training data in e-commerce, online social networking, content services, smart healthcare, smart hardware, autonomous driving, and other fields.


Appen’s MatrixGo platform has delivered the acquisition and annotation services for various AI applications, supporting and serving more than 130 customers and 700 projects in China in 2021.

Best Practices

  1. It’s a Chinese listed company specialized in intelligent voice and AI. As a typical representative of AI technology providers, it enjoys substantial shares in AI voice and semantics markets in China. It has a large demand size for data services, and about half of its expenditure is spent on external services in the form of integrated acquisition and annotation. The other half of demand is processed internally, for example, through its internal crowdsourcing platform.
    Why they chose Appen: 1) The efficiency of communications on the standards of data acquisition and annotation services is high; 2) Appen responds quickly during the project cooperation. 3) The quality evaluation results are good.
  2. As a typical representative of Chinese smartphone manufacturers, it reported that the number of global monthly active users of its mobile operating system and content ecosystem was about 400 million in 2021. With the expansion of business scenarios, it found that the needs for data services were growing rapidly. As its internal annotation team could not meet the business needs, it began to cooperate with Appen in 2021. Data annotation services it purchased have covered four domains, namely NLP content understanding, AI assistant voice recognition, computer vision (CV) picture or video taking, and the Internet of things (IoT) device sensors.
    Why they chose Appen:1) The high-quality annotation could meet project progress requirements. 2) Appen’s relatively comprehensive business coverage could meet the requirements of NLP, CV, automatic speech recognition (ASR), and other businesses. 3) Appen has demonstrated a good service attitude. It worked actively to solve new problems after the process for new projects was established and strove to improve project delivery quality.

The demand for data resources in AI development is driving the evolution of the data service market and bringing many opportunities. Nowadays Appen is providing tens of millions of data per month. It serves autonomous driving, technologies and the Internet, healthcare, finance, and other industries in the Chinese market, and features unique advantages for the entire AI lifecycle in the market.

PR Newswire

Breakthrough Study Validates Artificial Intelligence as a Novel Biomarker in Predicting Immunotherapy Response – Published in Journal of Clinical Oncology

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  • Lunit’s latest study provides evidence for Lunit SCOPE IO’s ability to predict immunotherapy response
  • This is the first study that adopted AI technology to define the tumor immune phenotype and to demonstrate its ability in predicting treatment outcomes of anti-PD-L1 therapy

SEOUL, South Korea, March 16, 2022 — Lunit, a leading startup in AI-based cancer solutions, announced today the publication of its study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO). Findings from the study validate the effectiveness of Lunit’s AI biomarker, Lunit SCOPE IO, in predicting clinical outcomes of immunotherapy in patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

The JCO is an international, peer-reviewed medical journal published by the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), with an impact factor (IF) of 44.54. This is the first time that research on AI biomarkers has been published in an international SCI-grade journal of JCO’s prestige.

"Immune phenotyping of tumor microenvironment is a logical biomarker for immunotherapy, but objective measurement of such would be extremely challenging," said Professor Tony Mok from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, co-senior author of the journal. "This is the first study that adopted AI technology to define the tumor immune phenotype, and to demonstrate its ability in predicting treatment outcomes of anti-PD-L1 therapy in two large cohorts of patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer."

Lunit's AI biomarker platform, Lunit SCOPE IO
Lunit’s AI biomarker platform, Lunit SCOPE IO

Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI) are a standard therapy method for advanced NSCLC with programmed death ligand-1 (PD-L1) expression. However, outcomes vary depending on the patient’s tumor microenvironment.

Assessing the PD-L1 tumor proportion score (TPS) can bring predictive benefit for patients with high expression (over 50%), who show superior response to ICI therapy over standard chemotherapy. However, ICIs lose their potency in patients with PD-L1 TPS between 1% and 49%, showing outcomes similar to chemotherapy. Therefore, the development of an accuracy-enhanced biomarker to predict ICI response in NSCLC patients with low PD-L1 expression is highly warranted.

While tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL) are promising biomarkers for predicting ICI treatment outcomes apart from PD-L1, clinical application remains challenging as TIL quantification involves a manual evaluation process bound to practical limitations of interobserver bias and intensive labor. Employing AI’s superhuman computational capabilities should open new possibilities for the objective quantification of TIL.

To validate immune phenotyping as a complementary biomarker in NSCLC, researchers divided 518 NSCLC patients into three groups based on their tumor microenvironment: inflamed, immune-excluded, and immune-desert. As a result, clinical characteristics based on each immune phenotype group showed statistically significant differences in progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS).

Furthermore, analysis of NSCLC patients with PD-L1 TPS between 1% and 49% based on their immune phenotype found that the inflamed group showed significantly higher results in objective response rate (ORR) and progression-free survival (PFS), compared to the non-inflamed groups. This shows Lunit SCOPE IO’s ability to supplement PD-L1 TPS as a biomarker by accurately predicting immunotherapy response for patients with low PD-L1 TPS.

"Lunit has demonstrated through several abstracts the credibility of Lunit SCOPE IO as a companion diagnostic tool to predict immunotherapy treatment outcomes," said Chan-Young Ock, Chief Medical Officer at Lunit. "This study is a proof-of-concept that compiles all of our past research that elucidates Lunit AI’s ability to optimize cancer treatment selection."

Last year, Lunit announced a strategic investment of USD 26 million from Guardant Health, Inc., a leading precision oncology company. Following this major collaboration intended to reshape and innovate the precision oncology landscape, Lunit continues to refine its global position by validating the effectiveness of its AI technology through various studies.

PR Newswire

Crowdfunding Campaign of CR-Scan Lizard Coming to an End with Creality’s Continuous Trend Leading

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SHENZHEN, China, March 12, 2022 — In February, Creality launched the crowdfunding campaign for 3D scanner – CR-Scan Lizard on Kickstarter. The campaign made a stir among users with 1000 units in 17 minutes, and 1 million dollars in 4 hours. Till now, Creality has received more than 2550 comments and over one thousand media articles given reports to it.

CR-Scan Lizard is placed in the first page on Kickstarter.
CR-Scan Lizard is placed in the first page on Kickstarter.

Epilogue for the Well-liked 3D Scanner

The crowdfunding campaign will end on March 12th, 2022.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/3dprintmill/creality-cr-scan-lizard-capturing-fine-details-of-view?ref=3yertz

Media like ALL3DP and Tom’s Hardware gave detailed reports to CR-Scan Lizard:
https://all3dp.com/1/creality-cr-scan-lizard-3d-scanner-review-specs/

Inspired by the 3D scanner, two users Don Barton and Sébastien collaborated and successfully produced a play named Global Treasure Hunt via 3D modeling, which will be unveiled soon.
https://www.facebook.com/OfficialCreality3d/photos/a.614035582135190/1786283281577075/

Industrial Grade to Consumer Grade, Leading Multi-scene 3D Printing via Technology Innovation

CR-Scan Lizard with an affordable price (minimum $300) is featured by its 0.05mm unmatched precision. Compared with the industrial-grade scanners (around $10,000), CR-Scan Lizards satisfies consumers with both its quality and affordability, vastly reducing the burden for innovators.

Combined utilization of 3D scanner and 3D printers will provide a better experience.

Stand by You, Heading for Healthy Development

Creality will celebrate the 8th anniversary on April 9th. Users have always been the most valuable asset. Creality not only cares the needs of the creator group, but also continue to gain insight into the needs of non-creator groups with products continuously upgraded. Through communication with users, they found that non-creator groups have different pain points in model creation, slicing, printing (including special environments), and post-processing.

In order to solve these problems, Creality will announce strategies on the 8th anniversary for better information accessing and pain points solving (product innovation, Creative Cloud 4.0, Creative Ecology, etc.) voices listening and choose & buy, etc. Stay tuned!

 

PR Newswire

Prototype enables new synergy – how Artosyn helps their customers succeed

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SAN JOSE, Calif., March 10, 2022 — Artosyn Microelectronics, a leading provider of AI SoCs for drones and other sophisticated applications finds itself at the intersection of hardware architecture and software development. "Our customers are advancing the state of AI programming every day," said Shen Sha, Senior R&D Manager of Artosyn’s AI Chip Department. "They need early access to the hardware to develop their software. It’s imperative."

Since 2015, Artosyn has specialized in Image Signal Processors (ISPs) and Neural Processing Units (NPUs), highly advanced ASIC devices that must meet the demanding requirements of low-power and high-performance. These systems represent the most advanced generation of controllers today, employing artificial intelligence for such tasks as object detection, object classification, and object tracking. Artosyn’s chips are at the heart of the latest generation of UAVs (drones), as well as being used in smart surveillance systems, robots, autonomous vehicles, and more.

These are designs of enormous size and complexity, and verifying their correct operation presents its own challenges. "We’ve used many of S2C’s FPGA development systems including their single and dual Prodigy VU440 and UV19P systems," explains Sha. "We were able to successfully complete the validation of several complex chips in the hundred-million gate range quickly and efficiently."

But validating hardware still leaves millions of lines of code to test and verify. As a company dedicated to the customer experience, Artosyn looks for creative ways to help: "In some cases we’ve used the large capacity FPGA-based systems from S2C to directly built a prototype for the customer’s evaluation," said Sha. "This really accelerates their software development process."

Sharing the power of S2C’s Prodigy VU440 enabled both companies to leverage a unique form of cooperation – Artosyn was able to swiftly validate their 100-million gate design, and their customer gained access to the hardware critical to furthering their development schedule. Moreover, Artosyn benefits from additional insight by working so closely with their customer; knowledge that helps drive improvements in their own designs. It’s a win for both firms.

S2C specializes in providing leading-edge prototyping platforms for a broad range of design sizes and applications. Built around the world’s largest and fastest FPGAs – such as the Xilinx UltraScale+ VU19P, and the Intel Stratix 10 – S2C’s Prodigy series can scale up to accommodate the largest designs in the hyperscale class. With a rich library of memories, daughter cards, and interface modules, Prodigy systems can be quickly adapted and configured for any purpose. If you’re facing the challenge of large-scale design validation, let us help.

About S2C

S2C is a global leader of FPGA prototyping solutions for today’s innovative SoC/ASIC designs. S2C has been successfully delivering rapid SoC prototyping solutions since 2003. With over 500 customers and more than 3,000 systems installed, our highly qualified engineering team and customer-centric sales team understands our users’ SoC development needs. S2C has offices and sales representatives in the US, Europe, Israel, mainland China, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. www.s2ceda.com

Amy GONG
amyg@s2ceda.com