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Tag Archives: Chinese

Amazon bought cameras from Chinese company on U.S. blacklist to screen for coronavirus

April 29, 2020   Big Data
 Amazon bought cameras from Chinese company on U.S. blacklist to screen for coronavirus

(Reuters) — Amazon has bought cameras to take temperatures of workers during the coronavirus pandemic from a firm the United States blacklisted over allegations it helped China detain and monitor the Uighurs and other Muslim minorities, three people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

China’s Zhejiang Dahua Technology Co. shipped 1,500 cameras to Amazon this month in a deal valued close to $ 10 million, one of the people said. At least 500 systems from Dahua — the blacklisted firm — are for Amazon’s use in the United States, another person said.

The Amazon procurement, which has not been previously reported, is legal because the rules control U.S. government contract awards and exports to blacklisted firms, but they do not stop sales to the private sector.

However, the United States “considers that transactions of any nature with listed entities carry a ‘red flag’ and recommends that U.S. companies proceed with caution,” according to the Bureau of Industry and Security’s website. Dahua has disputed the designation.

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The deal comes as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned of a shortage of temperature-reading devices and said it wouldn’t halt certain pandemic uses of thermal cameras that lack the agency’s regulatory approval. Top U.S.-based maker FLIR Systems has faced an up to weeks-long order backlog, forcing it to prioritize products for hospitals and other critical facilities.

Amazon declined to confirm its purchase from Dahua, but said its hardware complied with national, state and local law, and its temperature checks were to “support the health and safety of our employees, who continue to provide a critical service in our communities.”

The company added it was implementing thermal imagers from “multiple” manufacturers, which it declined to name. These vendors include Infrared Cameras Inc, which Reuters previously reported, and FLIR, according to employees at Amazon-owned Whole Foods who saw the deployment. FLIR declined to comment on its customers.

Dahua, one of the biggest surveillance camera manufacturers globally, said it does not discuss customer engagements and it adheres to applicable laws. Dahua is committed “to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19” through technology that detects “abnormal elevated skin temperature — with high accuracy,” it said in a statement.

The U.S. Department of Commerce, which maintains the blacklist, declined comment. The FDA said it would use discretion when enforcing regulations during the public health crisis as long as thermal systems lacking compliance posed no “undue risk” and secondary evaluations confirmed fevers.

Dahua’s thermal cameras have been used in hospitals, airports, train stations, government offices and factories during the pandemic. IBM placed an order for 100 units, and the automaker Chrysler placed an order for 10, one of the sources said. In addition to selling thermal technology, Dahua makes white-label security cameras resold under dozens of other brands such as Honeywell, according to research and reporting firm IPVM.

Honeywell said some but not all its cameras are manufactured by Dahua, and it holds products to its cybersecurity and compliance standards. IBM and Chrysler’s parent Fiat Chrysler did not comment.

The Trump Administration added Dahua and seven other tech firms last year to the blacklist for acting against U.S. foreign policy interests, saying they were “implicated” in “China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, and high-technology surveillance against Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other members of Muslim minority groups.”

More than one million people have been sent to camps in the Xinjiang region as part of China’s campaign to root out terrorism, the United Nations has estimated.

Dahua has said the U.S. decision lacked “any factual basis.” Beijing has denied mistreatment of minorities in Xinjiang and urged the United States to remove the companies from the list.

A provision of U.S. law, which is scheduled to take effect in August, will also bar the federal government from starting or renewing contracts with a company using “any equipment, system, or service” from firms including Dahua “as a substantial or essential component of any system.”

Amazon’s cloud unit is a major contractor with the U.S. intelligence community, and it has been battling Microsoft for an up to $ 10 billion deal with the Pentagon.

Top industry associations have asked Congress for a year-long delay because they say the law would reduce supplies to the government dramatically, and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last week that policies clarifying the implementation of the law were forthcoming.

Face detection and privacy

The coronavirus has infected staff from dozens of Amazon warehouses, ignited small protests over allegedly unsafe conditions and prompted unions to demand site closures. Temperature checks help Amazon stay operational, and the cameras – a faster, socially distant alternative to forehead thermometers – can speed up lines to enter its buildings. Amazon said the type of temperature reader it uses varies by building.

To see if someone has a fever, Dahua’s camera compares a person’s radiation to a separate infrared calibration device. It uses face detection technology to track subjects walking by and make sure it is looking for heat in the right place.

An additional recording device keeps snapshots of faces the camera has spotted and their temperatures, according to a demonstration of the technology in San Francisco. Optional facial recognition software can fetch images of the same subject across time to determine, for instance, who a virus patient may have been near in a line for temperature checks.

Amazon said it is not using facial recognition on any of its thermal cameras. Civil liberties groups have warned the software could strip people of privacy and lead to arbitrary apprehensions if relied on by police. U.S. authorities have also worried that equipment makers like Dahua could hide a technical “back door” to Chinese government agents seeking intelligence.

In response to questions about the thermal systems, Amazon said in a statement, “None of this equipment has network connectivity, and no personal identifiable information will be visible, collected, or stored.”

Dahua made the decision to market its technology in the United States before the FDA issued the guidance on thermal cameras in the pandemic. Its supply is attracting many U.S. customers not deterred by the blacklist, according to Evan Steiner, who sells surveillance equipment from a range of manufacturers in California through his firm EnterActive Networks.

“You’re seeing a lot of companies doing everything that they possibly can preemptively to prepare for their workforce coming back,” he said.

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CHINESE WU-FLU KUNG-FLU PHUNNIES

March 31, 2020   Humor

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ANTZ-IN-PANTZ ……

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CHINESE WU-FLU CHUCKLES

March 22, 2020   Humor

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ANTZ-IN-PANTZ ……

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Baidu open-sources NLP model it claims achieves state-of-the-art results in Chinese language tasks

March 21, 2019   Big Data
 Baidu open sources NLP model it claims achieves state of the art results in Chinese language tasks

Baidu, the Beijing conglomerate behind the eponymous Chinese search engine, invests heavily in natural language processing (NLP) research. In October, it debuted an AI model capable of beginning a translation just a few seconds into a speaker’s speech and finishing seconds after the end of a sentence, and in 2016 and 2017, it launched SwiftScribe, a web app powered by its DeepSpeech platform, and TalkType, a dictation-centric Android keyboard.

Building on that and other previous work, Baidu this week detailed ERNIE (Enhanced Representation through kNowledge IntEgration), a natural language model based on its PaddlePaddle deep learning platform. The company claims it achieves “high accuracy” on a range of language processing tasks, including natural language inference, semantic similarity, named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, and question-answer matching, and that it’s state-of-the-art with respect to Chinese language understanding.

The source code and pretrained models are available on Github.

“In recent years, unsupervised pre-trained language models have made great progress on various NLP tasks,” Baidu explained in a blog post. “[But] early work in this field focused on context-independent word embedding. [T]hese models mainly focused on the original language signals, not on semantic units in the text … We considered that if the model can learn the implicit knowledge from texts, its performances on various tasks will be further improved.”

Toward that end, the character-based ERNIE was architected to learn the semantic representation of concepts by ingesting paragraphs containing partially masked words. It’s a versatile approach — Baidu says that unlike systems that rely on word-level modeling to suss out relationships among parts of speech, ERNIE is able to comprehend the “compositional meaning” of sequential characters like “红色,蓝色, 绿色,” which means red, blue and green, respectively.

Furthermore, ERNIE uses a dialogue language model to tackle question-answer scenarios, along with a technique called dialogue response loss. Essentially, it takes two adjacency pairs — two utterances by two speakers, one after the other — and encodes them mathematically to identify the speakers’ roles and learn implicit relationships in the exchange.

To validate ERNIE’s design, the researchers fed it with online encyclopedia articles, news clippings, and forum threads, and had it infer knowledge omitted from sample paragraphs. It managed to correctly fill in prompts like “Relativity is a theory about space-time and gravity, which was founded by _________” (ERNIE’s answer: “Einstein”) and “The surface area of the Earth is 510 million square kilometers, which of 71 percent are ________, 29 percent are land” (ERNIE: “ocean.” And far more impressively, when tested on a benchmark devised by Facebook and New York University researchers (XNLI), it outperformed Google’s BERT on Chinese data.

Baidu says it plans to integrate ERNIE with “a variety of products.” One likely beneficiary is DuerOS, a suite of software developer kits (SDKs), APIs, and turnkey solutions that enable original equipment manufacturers to build Baidu’s voice platform into smart speakers, refrigerators, washing machines, set-top boxes, and more. To date, more than 200 companies have launched 110 DuerOS-powered products, and Baidu announced in November that DuerOS is installed on over 150 million devices and has more than 35 million monthly active users.

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Convert Chinese character into a list of lines

November 10, 2018   BI News and Info
 Convert Chinese character into a list of lines

For a puzzle I want to list pairs of Chinese cities. Once a line is drawn between each pair of cities the resulting lines will spell out a phrase in Chinese which is the answer to the puzzle.

I’ve loaded and visualized the geodata using:

cities=CityData[{Large,"China"}];
coords=Map[CityData[#,"Coordinates"]&,cities]
Graphics[Map[Point[Reverse[#]]&,coords]]

I can’t work out how to convert a Chinese character into a series of lines (I realise not all strokes in a character are straight but can they be approximated by one). I’ve tried rasterizing the character and using ImageLines to pick out the strokes but couldn’t get it to work.

Once I have the data points for the end points of each line in the character I plan to get mathematica to search through linear transformations to find suitable transform between the end points of the lines to the coordinates of the cities and minimize the error.

So my question is how can I convert a Chinese character into an list of lines?

E.g. 水 into {{{.15,.25},{.4,.65}},{{.15,.65},{.4,.65}},{{.35,.22},{.49,.22}},{{.49,.22},{.49,.85}},{{.49,.65},{.8,.22}},{{.6,.55},{.75,.7}}}

(Note this was just my rough approximation done by hand)

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U.S. could scrutinize Corporate America’s connections with Chinese companies around AI

April 29, 2018   Big Data
 U.S. could scrutinize Corporate America’s connections with Chinese companies around AI

(Reuters) — The U.S. government may start scrutinizing informal partnerships between American and Chinese companies in the field of artificial intelligence, threatening practices that have long been considered garden variety development work for technology companies, sources familiar with the discussions said.

So far, U.S. government reviews for national security and other concerns have been limited to investment deals and corporate takeovers. This possible new expansion of the mandate — which would serve as a stop-gap measure until Congress imposes tighter restrictions on Chinese investments — is being pushed by members of Congress, and those in U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration who worry about theft of intellectual property and technology transfer to China, according to four people familiar with the matter.

Artificial intelligence, in which machines imitate intelligent human behavior, is a particular area of interest because of the technology’s potential for military usage, they said. Other areas of interest for such new oversight include semiconductors and autonomous vehicles, they added.

These considerations are in early stages, so it remains unclear if they will move forward, and which informal corporate relationships this new initiative would scrutinize.

Any broad effort to sever relationships between Chinese and American tech companies — even temporarily — could have dramatic effects across the industry. Major American technology companies, including Advanced Micro Devices Inc, Qualcomm Inc, Nvidia Corp and IBM, have activities in China ranging from research labs to training initiatives, often in collaboration with Chinese companies and institutions who are major customers.

Top talent in areas including artificial intelligence and chip design also flows freely among companies and universities in both countries.

The nature of informal business relationships varies widely.

For example, when U.S. chipmaker Nvidia Corp — the leader in AI hardware — unveiled a new graphics processing unit that powers data centers, video games and cryptocurrency mining last year, it gave away samples to 30 artificial intelligence scientists, including three who work with China’s government, according to Nvidia.

For a company like Nvidia, which gets a fifth of its business from China, the giveaway was business as usual. It has several arrangements to train local scientists and develop technologies there that rely on its chips. Offering early access helps Nvidia tailor products so it can sell more.

The U.S. government could nix this sort of cooperation through an executive order from Trump by invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Such a move would unleash sweeping powers to stop or review informal corporate partnerships between a U.S. and Chinese company, any Chinese investment in a U.S. technology company or the Chinese purchases of real estate near sensitive U.S. military sites, the sources said.

“I don’t see any alternative to having a stronger (regulatory) regime because the end result is, without it, the Chinese companies are going to get stronger,” said one of the sources, who is advising U.S. lawmakers on efforts to revise and toughen U.S. foreign investment rules. “They are going to challenge our companies in 10 or 15 years.”

James Lewis, a former Foreign Service officer with the U.S. Departments of State who is now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said if the emergency act was invoked, U.S. government officials including those in the Treasury Department could use it “to catch anything they want” that currently fall outside the scope of the regulatory regime.A White House official said that they do not comment on speculation about internal administration policy discussions, but added “we are concerned about Made in China 2025, particularly relevant in this case is its targeting of industries like AI.”

Made in China 2025 is an industrial plan outlining China’s ambition to become a market leader in 10 key sectors including semiconductors, robotics, drugs and devices and smart green cars.

Last month, the White House outlined new import tariffs that were largely directed at China for what Trump described as “intellectual property theft.” That prompted Chinese President Xi Jinping’s government to retaliate with sanctions against the United States.

Those moves followed proposed legislation that would toughen foreign investment rules overseen by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), by giving the committee — made up of representatives from various U.S. government agencies — purview over joint ventures that involve “critical technology”.

Republican and Democratic lawmakers who put forth the proposal in November said changes are aimed at China.

Whereas an overhauled CFIUS would likely review deals relevant to national security and involve foreign ownership, informal partnerships are likely to be regulated by revised export controls when they come into effect, sources said.

To be sure, sources said the Trump administration could change its mind about invoking the emergency act. They added that some within the Treasury Department are also lukewarm about invoking the emergency act as they preferred to focus on passing the revised rules for CFIUS.

Focus on AI

Chinese and U.S. companies are widely believed among analysts to be locked in a two-way race to become the world’s leader in AI. While U.S. tech giants such as Alphabet Inc’s Google are in the lead, Chinese firms like Internet services provider Baidu Inc have made significant strides, according to advisory firm Eurasia Group.

As for U.S. chipmakers, few are as synonymous with the technology as Nvidia, one of the world’s top makers of the highly complex chips that power AI machines.

There is no evidence that Nvidia’s activities represent a threat to national security by, for instance, offering access to trade secrets such as how to make a graphics processing unit. Nvidia also said it does not have joint ventures in China.

In a statement, Nvidia said its collaborations in China — including training Chinese scientists and giving Chinese companies such as telecom provider Huawei Technologies Co Ltd early access to some of its latest technology — are only intended to get feedback on the chips it sells there.

“We are extremely protective of our proprietary technology and know-how,” Nvidia said. “We don’t give any company, anywhere in the world, the core differentiating technology.”

Qualcomm did not respond to requests for a comment, while Advanced Micro Devices and IBM declined to comment.

Nvidia is far from being the only U.S. tech giant, much less the only chipmaker, that lends expertise to China. But it is clearly in the sights of the Chinese. When the country’s Ministry of Science and Technology solicited pitches for research projects last year, one of the listed objectives was to create a chip 20 times faster than Nvidia’s.

“Five years ago, this might not be a concern,” said Lewis. “But it’s a concern now because of the political and technological context.”

(Additional reporting by Diane Bartz in Washington; Editing by Lauren LaCapra and Edward Tobin)

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Chinese Used Goods Platform Cooperates With Foxconn For iPhone Recycling

September 19, 2017   Mobile and Cloud

Used goods trading platform Zhuanzhuan announced a strategic deal with Foxconn, aiming to promote the standardization of the trading of used phones.

Under the deal, Zhuanzhuan and Taiwan-based Foxconn will work together in phone quality inspections, supervision and guidance by assigning staff for quality inspections to promote the standardization of used phones. Financial terms of the deal were not released.

Meanwhile, for iPhones recycled in Apple’s offline retail stores, Foxconn will also begin quality checks and select those suitable for online sales to sell them via Zhuanzhuan’s platform. Foxconn is an original equipment manufacturer for Apple.

Huang Wei, chief executive officer of Zhuanzhuan, told local media that China’s used goods market has a great potential; however, the industry lacks standards and is “in chaos”. Zhuanzhuan would like to bring revolution to the industry by standardization.

In August 2017, Zhuanzhuan’s trade volume reached CNY2.48 billion, of which 31% was contributed by the second-hand mobile phone business. During the second quarter of 2017, the trading of mobile phones on Zhuanzhuan reached 2.1 million units.

Foxconn said that they decided to cooperate with Zhuanzhuan to improve the standardization within the used mobile phone industry. With the strategic cooperation, the two parties will establish a used mobile phone quality inspection system which is in line with Apple’s official standards and then sell used iPhones on Zhuanzhuan.

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MediaTek Takes Hit As Chinese Smartphones Migrate To Qualcomm

August 22, 2017   Mobile and Cloud

The financial report from Taiwan-based semiconductor firm MediaTek for the second quarter of 2017 shows the company’s net profit declined over 60%.

MediaTek’s operating revenue in the second quarter of 2017 was NTD58.079 billion, which was about CNY12.912 billion and marked a year-on-year decrease of 19.9%. Its net profit was NTD2.21 billion, which was about CNY491 million and marked a year-on-year decrease of 66.5%. The company’s performance reportedly hit a new quarterly low point since its listing.

As a major IC designer focusing on smartphone chips, MediaTek’s smartphone business operating revenue only accounted for 40% of the company’s total operating revenue during the reporting period.

With Qualcomm’s enhancement in the middle- and low-end markets, MediaTek’s former major clients Oppo and Vivo have reportedly turned to Qualcomm starting at the end of 2016. This cost MediaTek many orders. Though Meizu recently used MediaTek’s HelioX30 on its PRO7 smartphone, it still cannot make up the Taiwanese company’s sales losses in the high-end market.

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Alipay Brings Chinese Money Services To Malaysian JV

July 28, 2017   Mobile and Cloud

CIMB Group Holdings Bhd, Malaysia’s second largest bank by asset scale, said that its subsidiary Touch n Go, in which the bank holds a 52.22% stake, has reached an investment agreement with Alipay to set up a joint venture entity in Malaysia.

According to CIMB, Touch n Go will hold a majority stake in the joint venture, while Alipay will hold a minority stake. The joint venture will launch a new payment and related financial services mobile platform in Malaysia.

CIMB also said that it is expected that the establishment of this new joint venture will not have major influence on CIMB’s profit or net asset value in 2017. If calculating by assets, CIMB is the fifth largest bank in Southeast Asia.

Chinese Internet finance enterprises like Ant Financial and WeChat payment are actively expanding overseas recently. Earlier this month, a representative from WeChat payment overseas business revealed that they already applied for a payment license in Malaysia. If approved, users in Malaysia would be able to bind their local bank accounts with WeChat payment to complete payments for products and services in Malaysian currency.

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U.S. Payments Start-up Teams With Alipay, WeChat To Reach Chinese Consumers

July 12, 2017   Mobile and Cloud

Silicon Valley start-up company Stripe has reached deals with Chinese digital payment service providers Alipay and WeChat payment to enable global vendors to accept payments from Chinese consumers via its platform.

Stripe said that starting from July 10, 2017, the cooperation allows online vendors to accept payments via Alipay and WeChat payment by using Stripe.

In China, payments with credits cards only account for a small part of online payments. Stripe hopes to explore China’s massive consumer market by integrating payment services, which will increase its revenue for providers. At present, Alipay has over 520 million users, while WeChat payment has over 600 million users.

John Collison, president and co-founder of Stripe, said during an interview that this will help unlock a large consumer group for Internet companies not based in China. Meanwhile, Chinese consumers will gain more shopping options.

Founded in 2010, Stripe helps vendors from 25 countries to accept online payments with its technologies. They will charge vendors for each transaction completed via its platform.

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