Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., is requesting New York-based artificial intelligence technology maker Clearview AI to ensure transparency in the company’s use of data obtained from its facial-recognition offering intended for COVID-19 contact tracing.

Markey wrote a letter to Clearview CEO Hoan Ton-That on April 30 detailing the former’s concerns over the firm’s marketing of its AI offering which may result in ethical biases amidst COVID-19 patient tracking efforts.

According to Markey, Clearview is yet to subject its technology to “rigorous accuracy and bias testing” and address privacy concerns with regards to image deletion in cases of false matches and other errors.

He noted that media reports discovered inaccuracies in Clearview’s claims that an independent review panel reviewed the firm’s technology in line with American Civil Liberties Union standards. ACLU also disproved the company’s claims and “exposed serious flaws with the panel’s assessment,” said Markey.

The senator urges Clearview to identify all government entities that deployed the company’s product and submit the tool for independent assessments by facial recognition experts.

Raytheon Technologies will continue to research advanced radio frequency mixed-mode circuit designs, under Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Technologies for Mixed-mode Ultra Scaled Integrated Circuits (T-MUSIC) program, the company reported on Tuesday.

“Radio frequency bands are increasingly cluttered, and we need to be able to ‘hear’ through all of the noise,” said Art Morrish, vice president of Advanced Concepts and Technologies at Raytheon Intelligence and Space, a Raytheon Technologies company. “If someone is yelling at you, it’s easy to miss what someone else is whispering. But imagine if you had a way to hear both at the same time. That’s what our multi-function system with mixed-mode electronics seeks to achieve.”

Raytheon Technologies has noted that the systems operate similarly to humans, where the front end of the system is comparable to eyes and ears, and the back end is like the brain. The brain will process what the eyes see and ears hear. In order for the back end to provide actionable information, the front end has to discriminate between the noise and the signals of interest.

The company has stated that the demand for multi-function systems with mixed-mode electronics at the front-end of the system will convert the RF signal into bits. The bits will integrate vital pieces of data that the back-end processes. The conversion will improve the user’s ability to distinguish between the noise, interference and signals of interest across a broad range of frequencies.

Raytheon Technologies has described the overall benefit of its continued research. The company has stated that the technology will not just be small in size, weight and power, but it will enhance it’s the performance.

The solution will be able to detect the faintest of signals amongst a broad range of frequencies and noise. It will then process the noise with precision and speed, enabling the identification of the object emitting the signal, even if it’s slow-moving or very small.

The potential designs will be collectively researched by Raytheon, commercial, aerospace and defense companies and universities. The designs could form the foundation out of future Department of Defense-relevant capabilities, including communication links, multi-function RF systems and next-generation electronic warfare and radars.

“What’s different here is all of this could happen on a single chip,” said Morrish. “Nobody has done this type of mixed composition before.”

About Raytheon Intelligence & Space

Raytheon Intelligence & Space delivers the disruptive technologies our customers need to succeed in any domain, against any challenge. A developer of advanced sensors, training, and cyber and software solutions, Raytheon Intelligence & Space provides a decisive advantage to civil, military and commercial customers in more than 40 countries around the world.

Headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, the business generated $15 billion in pro forma annual revenue in 2019 and has 39,000 employees worldwide. Raytheon Intelligence & Space is one of four businesses that form Raytheon Technologies Corporation.

BlackBerry Limited has announced that BlackBerry Radar will expand its distribution reach with more than 12 new channel partners having signed on in the past six months to grow the company’s monitoring solutions, the company reported on Tuesday.

“We continue to open up new business and sales channels for BlackBerry Radar that were previously untapped and we are confident that each will serve as growth engines for our business, fueled by demand for asset-monitoring technologies that provide transportation business owners with the most aggregate view of their operations,” said Christopher Plaat, SVP and GM, BlackBerry Radar.

With the expansion, BlackBerry will have significant growth opportunities for its Radar offering and the company’s intelligent, data-driven asset monitoring devices, BlackBerry will improve business automate operations and improve utilization of trailers, containers and chassis.

Of the partners, AttriX, A provider of telematic solutions for the transportation industry, will join BlackBerry. AttriX has integrated its offerings to provide fleet owners visibility to all the company’s assets. With its partnership with BlackBerry Radar, AttriX customers can manage their trucks, driver performance and now their trailers within this partnered all-in-one fleet and asset management solution.

Big Wheel Strategies, another announced partner, has worked with carriers from 50 trucks to mega-fleets. The company has helped carriers implement solutions to better utilize information to improve utilization, fuel economy, risk, compliance, and turnover. The addition of BlackBerry Radar to its toolkit now allows Big Wheel Strategies to offer tethered and untethered tracking.

Gray Box Solutions, a company that has specialized in data and system integrations with a focus on telematics, has integrated BlackBerry Radar data into Transportation Management Systems (TMS), with a view to providing clients with full visibility of their assets.

Additionally, Inroute México has partnered with BlackBerry Radar to now provide customers with trailer tracking capabilities, enabling fleet owners to have previously unavailable visibility into their operations and allowing them to better optimize their assets and improve utilization.

Sitrack, based in Mexico, will be BlackBerry Radar’s first ever international distributor. The company will now offer customers in the Mexican market the ability to track and monitor assets, giving customers comprehensive transparency into their vehicles, trailers and freight.

Targipsum, in partnership with BlackBerry, will offer end-to-end tracking solutions for customers looking to optimize fleet performance, and the Owl Solutions will work with BlackBerry Radar to give its customers access to trailer and asset data to complement its existing solution.

BlackBerry Radar will serve as an asset monitoring solution that provides information, including location, motion, mileage, temperature, humidity, door open/close status, and cargo status on an intuitive on-line dashboard.

The solution will collect data than conventional GPS-based track and trace solutions and uses this information to build a 360-degree visualization of a customer’s assets. All data will be transmitted and stored securely on a cloud platform, which will maintain the privacy of user information at all times.

About BlackBerry

BlackBerry (NYSE: BB; TSX: BB) provides intelligent security software and services to enterprises and governments around the world. The company secures more than 500M endpoints including 150M cars on the road today.

Based in Waterloo, Ontario, the company leverages AI and machine learning to deliver innovative solutions in the areas of cybersecurity, safety and data privacy solutions, and is a leader in the areas of endpoint security management, encryption, and embedded systems.  BlackBerry’s vision is clear – to secure a connected future you can trust.

IBM has announced a broad range of new AI-powered capabilities and services to help CIOs automate IT infrastructures, achieve resiliency against future disruptions and to help reduce costs, the company reported on Tuesday.

“In this new era of remote work, securely sharing and accessing files anytime, and across all your apps, is more important than ever before,” said Aaron Levie, CEO of Box. “We’re thrilled to expand our partnership with IBM to deliver content and collaboration across Watson AIOps, enabling IT organizations and businesses to get work done faster, simpler, and more securely.”

IBM will launch IBM Watson AIOps, a new offering that will integrate AI to automate how enterprises self-detect, diagnose and respond to IT anomalies in real time. The solution will also enable organizations to introduce automation at the infrastructure level and will help CIOs better predict and shape future outcomes, focus resources on higher-value work and build more responsive and intelligent networks.

The offering will be built on the latest release of Red Hat OpenShift to run across hybrid cloud environments and will work with technologies within distributed work environments. It also will collaborate with providers of traditional IT monitoring solutions, such as Mattermost and ServiceNow.

In addition to Watson AIOps, IBM has also released Accelerator for Application Modernization with AI, within IBM’s Cloud Modernization service. The capability will help clients reduce the overall effort and costs associated with application modernization.

It will also provide a variety of optimization tools to enhance the end to end modernization journey and accelerate the analysis and recommendations for various architectural and microservices options.

The accelerator leverages continuous learning and interpretable AI models to adapt to the client’s preferred software engineering practices and stays up-to-date with the evolution of technology and platforms.

“Working with IBM to apply its Watson AI technologies has helped us accelerate how we modernize our Data Science Tool Landscape. We use AI to automate processes that result in benefits such as highly responsive customer care and operational topics. In this way, we are making an important contribution to a solid start after the crisis,” said Roland Schuetz, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer of the Lufthansa Group.

In addition to automating IT operations, IBM is announcing a series of new and updated capabilities designed to give CIOs a playbook for operating in this new environment, including Automate Business Planning, Automate Business Operations and Automate Call Centers.

IBM’s fully-integrated data and AI platform, Automate Business Planning, has been updated with a host of new capabilities designed to help business leaders automate the access to critical business-ready data.

The company’s Automate Business Operations has introduced an update to IBM Cloud Pak for Automation, software for designing, building and running automation apps, enables clients to more easily create AI “digital worker” automation solutions.

Automate Call Centers, which has utilized IBM Watson Assistant, an AI-based conversation platform, has also been updated to help intelligently automate the most complex, knowledge-intensive interactions and drive improved customer satisfaction while reducing operating costs.

“IBM Cloud Pak for Data brings together disparate databases from across our company and enables us to test and develop analytics models for projects ranging from inventory replenishment to transportation optimization, sales forecasting, customer return predictions, and supply chain optimization. Now, we can go from idea inception to delivery to business users much quicker,” said Erdem Eskigun, Director, Supply Chain Data Analytics and Operations Research, T-Mobile.

About IBM Think Digital

At Think Digital 2020, IBM will discuss the state of business and the role of critical technologies, such as AI and Cloud, as clients accelerate recovery and digital transformation in the wake of COVID-19.

The U.S. Air Force (USAF) has aligned all the elements of its digital modernization strategy and Bill Marion, the service’s former deputy chief information officer, said the roadmap will help his successor speed up the pace of modernization, Federal News Network reported Monday.

“Continuing along that roadmap line, all of the enterprise IT-as-a-service and related IT and digital modernization efforts are very front and center. We have to keep accelerating them and keep driving them,” Marion told the network’s Ask the CIO program. “I think we will accelerate 5G even more, and I think COVID-19 will drive unified collaboration even more. And the journey we are with the chief data officer where data is a strategic asset is another key one.”

Marion, who stepped down from his role on April 30, also discussed the Digital U program as part of the service’s digital workforce training initiative and offered updates on the service’s network modernization effort, including the Platform One and Cloud One initiatives.

“We are continuing to move forward with our bring-your-own-device program and accelerating that option,” he said. “Network-as-a-service has had some challenges, but we are seeing some good progress specifically on the Microsoft side in the work they are doing and looking at how they are starting to transform our network.