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Tag: Einstein

  • Salesforce Dreamforce 2019: Update on Einstein and AI’s Role

    Salesforce Dreamforce 2019: Update on Einstein and AI’s Role

    Salesforce executives took the stage at Dreamforce 2019 to provide an update on Salesforce Einstein and the tremendous success it has been.

    Marco Casalaina, Vice President Products, Einstein, opened it up by discussing how far AI has come in the business world. When Einstein’s capabilities first started coming to light in 2017, only one in five businesses were using any kind of AI. Fast-forward to 2019 and nearly half of companies have integrated AI in their operations. Despite AI’s increased usage, not all companies are seeing the benefits they would like. In fact, seven out of ten companies report little to no impact from deploying AI.

    This is one of the ways in which Salesforce’s Einstein is designed to be different. It’s goal is to be simple, providing a voice interface to the data in Salesforce Customer 360. Einstein is already available in Sales, Service, Marketing and Commerce clouds. Soon, Einstein search will be taking over the Search bar, giving customers the ability to perform natural language searches using their voice.

    Yakaira Núñez, Director User & Product Insights, AI & Analytics talked about the work her team has been doing.

    “We’ve been focusing our work on voice ad nauseam.”

    She also highlighted three areas of concern for customers.

    1) Data Privacy and Security is of tantamount importance to customers, and Salesforce is committed to protecting that data.

    2) Guidance, specifically the importance of voice guidance. Salesforce recognizes that voice-controlled systems aren’t always the easiest to use. As a result, they worked to make Einstein as easy as possible.

    3) More diverse use cases, beyond just sales.

    Núñez also showed off Einstein Voice Skills. Any admin or developer can use the tool to build custom voice apps. These voice apps can be deployed on the desktop, mobile or smart speakers.

    Few would argue that AI represents a fundamental shift in technology, commerce and more. Companies like Salesforce are demonstrating how it can be a useful tool, providing new functionality and making customers’ lives easier.

    https://youtu.be/rPm–W0qeRs

  • Big Bang Waves Discovered by Scientists

    In 1916, Albert Einstein published his theory of general relativity. This theory, working with the underpinnings of the big bang, postulated that massive objects “bend” space-time and that this curvature is directly proportional to the energy and acceleration of the object itself.

    While many scientists of the time and since have felt that Einstein’s theory of general relativity was and is most certainly true, there were still untested aspects of the theory that scientists had not been able to prove… until now.

    Yesterday, scientists running the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (BICEP) 2 experiment at the South Pole discovered a key piece of evidence that not only supports and confirms Einstein’s theory of relativity, but also affirms the “inflation” theory of the big bang.

    The theory of inflation was first postulated in 1980 by Alan Guth and was an update to the traditional big bang theory, which pictured the universe as a rapidly expanding gas ball. If this traditional version of the big bang was true, however, space-time should have been more curved and more chaotic in nature.

    Instead, Guth’s theory of inflation hypothesized that the universe began as a single point smaller than an electron and expanded at a rate faster than the speed of light; This growth occurred in 10 to the minus 35 seconds after the birth of the universe, or in one trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second.

    While the theory of inflation would explain why the universe was so “flat” and uniform in structure, no scientist had yet been able to prove that the universe did expand in such a way until yesterday’s discovery.

    What the scientists running the BICEP2 experiment discovered was a unique polarization of light known as Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMB) – light from 380,000 years after the beginning of the universe. This polarization, known as “B-mode” polarization, is a curling of the CMB that can only be caused by gravitational waves.

    And these gravitational waves could have only been caused by a massive and extremely rapid explosion, such as the one put forth by the big bang theory.

    “This is really exciting. We have made the first direct image of gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time across the primordial sky, and verified a theory about the creation of the whole universe,” stated Chao-Lin Kuo, co-leader of the BICEP2 experiment from Stanford.

    Perhaps most importantly, however, the discovery of these gravitational waves and the subsequent verification of the “inflation” model of the universe supports a multiverse theory, something scientists have been working toward now for decades:

    “It’s hard to build models of inflation that don’t lead to a multiverse. It’s not impossible, so I think there’s still certainly research that needs to be done. But most models of inflation do lead to a multiverse, and evidence for inflation will be pushing us in the direction of taking [the idea of a] multiverse seriously,” stated Guth.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • New Einstein Archives Website Catalogs Over 80,000 Documents

    The Hebrew University of Jerusalem announced yesterday the launch of a newly updated and expanded Einstein Archives website, a joint project between the university’s Library Authority and the Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology with the support of Princeton University Press. The website contains a catalog of more than 80,000 documents, including over 40,000 of Einstein’s personal papers and 30,000 additional documents discovered since the 1980s.

    Improvements in the site’s search technology will enable users to look for documents by subject, and, in the case of letters, by author and recipient. The first line or title of each document will also be displayed, alongside information on date, provenance and publication history. Interested parties can then contact the Hebrew University’s Media Relations Department (at pressoffice@savion.huji.ac.il) in order to obtain images of the archived documents (Photos will need to be credited to The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.)

    Originally launched in 2003, the archive’s previous site contained 43,000 records of documents and 900 manuscripts in Einstein’s own hand. The expanded site will initially feature a visual display of about 2,000 selected documents amounting to 7,000 pages related to Einstein’s scientific work, public activities and private life up to the year 1921. These documents are sorted according to five categories: scientific activity, the Jewish people, the Hebrew University, public activities and private life.

    ”The renewed site is another expression of the Hebrew University’s intent to share with the entire cultural world this vast intellectual property which has been deposited into its hand by Einstein himself,” said Professor Hanoch Gutfreund, former Hebrew University president and current academic head of the Einstein Archive.

    Einstein was a founder of the Hebrew University and one of its most loyal supporters. He bequeathed all of his writings and intellectual heritage, including the rights to his likeness, to the university in his will.