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In this bonus, episode (the second of a two-part conversation), Socialstack Co-founder and CEO Andrew Berkowitz joins African Tech Roundup Co-founder and Executive Producer Andile Masuku to discuss some of the technicalities of the $ATRU launch.
They discuss the merits of launching the token on the Celo blockchain and share details about how you can ready yourself to earn the token in the coming weeks.
PART 1: Unpacking the $ATRU Token with Andrew Berkowitz Part 1: Re-imagining Media Ownership (https://www.africantechroundup.com/unpacking-the-atru-token-part-1/)
CREATE A CELO ACCOUNT: https://celowallet.app
PRESS RELEASE: www.africantechroundup.com/atru-token/
RESOURCES ON SOCIAL TOKENS AND THE CELO BLOCKCHAIN:
Social Tokens: Get Ready for the Next Massive Crypto Trend by William White for Nasdaq (https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/social-tokens%3A-get-ready-for-the-next-massive-crypto-trend-2021-04-29)
Exploring the social token revolution by Andrew Steinwold for ZIMA RED (https://andrewsteinwold.substack.com/p/-exploring-the-social-token-revolution)
Social Tokens: A Potential Growth Opportunity For Your Brand by Loomly Blog (https://blog.loomly.com/social-tokens/#:~:text=Social%20tokens%20%E2%80%93%20also%20known%20as,cryptocurrencies%20like%20Bitcoin%20or%20Ether.)
You had me at “Celo” — Why build on the Celo blockchain by Celo (https://medium.com/celoorg/why-build-on-the-celo-blockchain-9ceab3d11b70)
SUPPORT US: Back our independent media-making efforts by becoming a Patreon (www.africantechroundup.com/patreon/).
Photo credit: Ilias Chebbi
Adam Kovacevich is the CEO of the Big Tech-funded Chamber of Progress. The former Google policy executive joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss the origins of his organization and why Big Tech would rather fund him vs. stick their own necks out. Tune in for a revealing conversation of what happens behind the scenes in Big Tech's battle against regulation.
A multi startup founder, Eric Futoran has always focused in on being a family man. He considers himself a multi-hat wearing person, and though most entrepreneurs say that.. Eric really means it. He has 4 degrees... no really, four - Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Juris Doctor and MBA. He REALLY likes to learn, and is constantly reading and learning from people, books, other sources, and of course, his family.
He has found that his JD has really helped him understand the legal world, as it applies to the startup world, specifically SPAC's (special purpose acquisition group). He is digging into what the implications will be in the future withSPAC's, and the potential legal tension with their structures.
He has 2 young boys, 5 and 8, and has felt the pains of many parents through the pandemic with kids being home. Other than startups and school, he likes to get outdoors as much as he can, doing some hiking or spending time at the beach.
During his past successes at Scopely, one of the largest game builders in the world, he realized in the early innings of mobile that there was no mobile first data source, enabling businesses to capture all mobile session data... and more.
Cloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.
We’ve all had a family dinner, Netflix binge, or otherwise relaxing moment ruined by a telemarketer trying to sell you something you didn't need – a magazine subscription, insurance, you name it! But recently, people have been getting calls that are much more sinister in nature; people claiming to be employees of Microsoft, or Apple, or Amazon, have been calling unsuspecting victims and urging them to pay the caller in exchange for cleaning their computer of viruses. Viruses that don’t exist. None of these people work for the companies they claim to, but rather are a small cog in a larger machine working to defraud the public.
On this episode of Security Unlocked, hosts Natalia Godyla and Nic Fillingham kick off a three-episode arc discussing tech support scams. To get started, they speak with Anup B Kumar, Microsoft’s Digital Crime Unit’s Asia lead of investigation and analytics, to get a better sense of who is behind these scams, what their motivations are, and some ideas on how to stop them.
In This Episode You Will Learn:
Who these scammers target and why
How the scammers trick victims into trusting them.
Why working with law enforcement is crucial to stopping the problem
Some Questions We Ask:
Do the scammers know that they are scamming?
How pervasive is this scam?
Can we stop the scam by helping to facilitate legitimate employment?
When Jette was studying mathematics in the early 2000s, his focus was on computational biology, and more specifically, phylogenetic trees, and DNA sequences. He wanted to understand the evolution of certain traits and the forces that explain why our bones are a certain length or our brains a certain size. As it turned out, the algorithms and techniques he learned in this field mapped very well to the emerging discipline of automatic speech recognition, or ASR.
During this period, Montreal was emerging as a hotbed for artificial intelligence, and Jette found himself working for Nuance, the company behind the original implementation of Siri. That experience led him to several positions in the world of speech recognition, and he eventually landed at Rev, where he founded the company’s AI department.
Jette describes Rev as an “Uber for Transcription.” Anyone can sign up for the platform and earn money by listening to audio submitted by clients and transcribing the speech into text. This means the company has a tremendous dataset of raw audio that has been annotated by human beings and, in many cases, assessed a second time by the client. For someone looking to build an AI system that mastered the domain of speech to text, this was a goldmine.
Jette built the earliest version of Rev’s AI, but it was up to our second guest, Josh Dong, to productize and scale that system. He helped the department transition from older technologies like Perl to more popular languages like Python. He also focused on practical concerns like modularity and reusable components. To combine machine learning and DevOps, Dong added Docker containers and a testing pipeline. If you’re interested in the nuts and bolts of keeping a system like Rev’s running at tremendous scale, you’ll want to check out this part of the show.
We also explore some of the fascinating future and promise this technology holds in our time with Jenny Drexler. She explains how Rev is moving from a hybrid model—one that combines Jette’s older statistical techniques with Dong’s newer machine learning approach—to a new system that will be ML from end-to-end. This will open up the door for powerful applications, like a single system that can convert speech text across multiple languages in a single piece of audio.
“One of the things that's really cool about these end to end models is that basically, whatever data you have, it can learn to handle it. So a very similar architecture can do sequence to sequence learning with different kinds of sequences. The model architecture that you might use for speech recognition can actually look very similar to what you might use for translation. And you can use that same architecture, to say, feed in audio in lots of different languages and be able to do transcription for any of them within one model. It's much harder with the hybrid models to sort of put all the right pieces together to make that happen,” explains Drexler.
If you’re interested in learning more about the past, present, and future of artificial intelligence that can understand our spoken language and learn how to respond, check out the full episode. If you want to learn more about Rev or check out some of the positions they have open, you can find their careers page here.
Marshall Kosloff and Saagar Enjeti host The Realignment, an excellent podcast about politics and tech in our fast-changing world.
I joined the show his week to talk about the new set of bills in Congress aimed at Big Tech and asked them if we could air the show here on the Big Technology feed as well. Graciously, they agreed!
So this week, we'll run this episode as a bonus on a Tuesday, and then we’ll be back on Thursday with our regularly scheduled show, with Adam Kovacevich, who runs a big-tech funded organization called the Chamber of Progress.
