Adobe is giving away free software for schools to foster creative problem-solving

More than half of the educators that don’t have access to creative problem-solving tools list school budgets as a reason — so Adobe is giving away student software for free. Beginning in April, Adobe Spark Premium will be available to schools and universities without a paid subscription. The news comes after Adobe shared details of a study on creative problem-solving during a technology and education exhibition in Europe on January 24.

Adobe Spark is a design program for graphics, web pages, and video. The basic version is free to use, but the premium option, which removes the Adobe Spark logo from the graphics and allows for more custom color and other options, costs $10 a month. Beginning this spring, Adobe will offer the premium options free to schools.

Along with making Spark Premium free for students, Adobe is now adjusting their licensing so that kids under 13 can use the Creative Cloud, another change that will also launch in April. Currently, Adobe IDs are only available to users age 13 and up, which means kids that wanted access to software like Photoshop, Lightroom, or InDesign had to use an adult’s account. Adobe says the change complies with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), a set of federal regulations designed to protect children online.

Youths who attend a school that subscribes to the Creative Cloud — which is offered to students, educators, and institutions at a discounted rate — will soon be able to use their school IDs to log in, and use the software on home computers.

Adobe says the change is designed to improve accessibility to creative tools for educators and students. In a recent study, Adobe found that 90 percent of educators and policymakers said creative problem-solving inside the curriculum needs improvement. Based on 2,000 survey participants from the U.S., U.K., Japan, and Germany, three quarters said they thought jobs requiring creative problem-solving skills were less likely to be replaced by computers, machinery, and other automation.

More than half said they didn’t have access to either the tools, training, or knowledge necessary to foster additional creative problem-solving skills. A lack of time to create is one of the biggest barriers, according to 79 percent of those surveyed.

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Facial recognition has a race problem — here’s how Gyfcat is fixing that

A couple years back, Google was embarrassed when its algorithms incorrectly labeled a black couple as “gorillas.” Unable to stop its image-recognition algorithms working in this way, Google recently “fixed” its them by removing “gorilla” as a classification altogether.

The maker of smart GIF search engine Gfycat recently took on a similar problem — but unlike Google, it did it in a way that didn’t just remove the image identification feature to pretend there was no problem. By training its image recognition on non-white faces, it has been able to develop facial-recognition software that is far better than its rivals at recognizing non-white individuals, specifically those of East Asian descent.

“We wanted to make sure we had content that appealed to East Asian consumers since they make up a big segment of our creators and users,” Richard Rabbat, CEO of Gfycat, told Digital Trends. “We were seeing a ton of K-pop content on our site, for instance. However, when we looked at our facial-recognition results for Asian celebrities, the open-source facial recognition A.I. we use mislabelled Asian celebrities far more often than it did white celebrities. This problem is incredibly common within facial-recognition A.I., and it usually means that the training data didn’t contain enough faces of people of color.”

After discovering that its existing facial-recognition project was unable to even to recognize iconic Asian actor Jackie Chan, Rabbat realized something needed to be done. “After we identified its limitations with the detection of Asian celebrities, we modified it heavily and retrained it to be much more accurate at recognizing Asian faces with a much higher threshold of certainty,” he said.

Having focused heavily on training the algorithm with images of people from East Asia, the system — which has 15,000 GIFs uploaded each day — is now able to differentiate between actresses Lucy Liu and Constance Wu. It was not previously able to do this.

As Rabbat points out, correctly identifying celebrities in GIFs isn’t a serious problem, but this issue is indicative of a much larger problem. “A.I. facial recognition is becoming increasingly important in day-to-day life,” he said. “It’s important that companies think about the impact that their technology has on society. Tech companies can invest more in making sure their technology is inclusive and addresses diversity on day one. We don’t think we can rely on A.I. initiatives by people of color to correct this problem. A.I. right now is dominated by tech giants, and those giants need to make sure they’re creating responsible products.”

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CNN is closing its doors on Beme, YouTube star Casey Neistat’s video company

YouTube star Casey Neistat’s video company Beme, is officially shutting down. After CNN purchased the company for $25 million dollars in November 2016, both Neistat and his Beme co-founder — Matt Hackett — are leaving.

The purpose of bringing Nesitat to CNN in the first place was to help the news network establish a media brand that would capture the attention of younger viewers. In the process, CNN had also acquired the Beme mobile app — which was an interactive video service that allowed users to share short clips which eventually disappeared.

After teaming up with CNN, Hackett took to a blog post to address the Beme app was shutting down as of January 31, 2017. Existing users were able to download their archive of videos and reactions over the two months that followed.

Even with the acquisition, Neistat was reportedly still supposed to have full creative control over the brand in order to build upon Beme’s existing format. But he was unable to figure out a workable strategy that would allow for “Beme News” to become a core part of CNN’s digital business.

By making the move to CNN, Neistat quit his job producing YouTube videos along with short-form videos — which also meant leaving behind the 5.8 million subscribers he managed to accumulate. His content — which garnered millions of views — mainly consisted of clips from his daily life, time on the road, and tech reviews.

But due to creative differences and slow progress, Neistat decided to go back to where he started — YouTube. He began distancing himself from the company and producing videos for his personal channel again. He also took to his channel to address the news in a video, where he explains the departure.

“I couldn’t find answers. I would sort of disappear and I would hide, and I would make YouTube videos for my channel because at least I would be able yield something,” Neistat told Buzzfeed News.

The Beme News YouTube channel will still live on under CNN, which has more than 200,000 subscribers and a small library of videos. CNN said it has plans to restructure Beme’s 22-member team, but that it will involve some layoffs.

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Prototype Windows 10 app eliminates the napkin by turning sketches into code

Quickly capturing an idea on a paper napkin can lead to lucrative results, but what if those doodles could turn into lines of code? That is what a group of Microsoft Garage Project interns set out to create: A Windows 10 app that enables app designers to draw wireframe sketches and export them into Visual Studio. Simply called Ink to Code, Xamarin funded the project and joined by five additional interns from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to join and help develop the first prototype app. 

“The sponsoring team and interns were both motivated by a desire to modernize the brainstorming and prototyping process from using napkin and whiteboard sketches, to an experience that is more automated and cohesive with the Visual Studio suite,” Microsoft ‎Product Marketing Manager Lainie Huston said. 

The app is based on Windows 10’s Smart Ink feature injected into the Universal Windows Platform for Microsoft’s Creators Update, which relies on artificial intelligence to improve ink recognition. Of course, that means you need a Windows 10 device that supports Windows Ink and touch-based input, but with this setup, you won’t need to sift through 30 sketches to compile your final code-based design. 

But Ink to Code isn’t meant to completely generate your app from scratch. It merely accelerates the initial layout process by recognizing common design symbols to get you started. According to Huston, the app currently supports buttons, images, labels, text fields, and text paragraphs. It’s a digital canvas where designers and programmers can merge to hammer out ideas and speed up the overall development process. 

“Ink to Code can be used as a more productive canvas in brainstorm meetings, or even more significantly, as a tool that can bridge the gap between collaborators with different levels of design or technical knowledge,” Huston adds. 

As stated, Ink to Code is just a prototype for now, and presumably only visible to Windows 10 devices with touch-based screens; the Microsoft Store didn’t display the linked app on our non-touch laptop. But as the demo video shows, you can use a supported stylus to roughly draw specific elements of the app, such as its rectangular border, an image placement box, a text input field, and so on. The app turns all hand-drawn shapes into perfect lines and circles for a clean look without any manual coding involved. 

Microsoft first introduced Smart Ink in May 2017. Part of the platform is Ink Analysis that recognizes shapes and understands composition, such as text residing inside a roughly drawn rectangle. Ink Presenter collects all the strokes, and Direct Ink deals with rendering the strokes with digital ink. 

“Our goal is to understand user intent and empower developers to turn it into rich digital constructs, as well as to leverage understanding from all parts of the system,” the company says. 

Microsoft introduced similar technology to Sticky Notes with the release of Anniversary Update (Redstone 1) in August 2016. 

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Prototype Windows 10 app eliminates the napkin by turning sketches into code

Quickly capturing an idea on a paper napkin can lead to lucrative results, but what if those doodles could turn into lines of code? That is what a group of Microsoft Garage Project interns set out to create: A Windows 10 app that enables app designers to draw wireframe sketches and export them into Visual Studio. Simply called Ink to Code, Xamarin funded the project and joined by five additional interns from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to join and help develop the first prototype app. 

“The sponsoring team and interns were both motivated by a desire to modernize the brainstorming and prototyping process from using napkin and whiteboard sketches, to an experience that is more automated and cohesive with the Visual Studio suite,” Microsoft ‎Product Marketing Manager Lainie Huston said. 

The app is based on Windows 10’s Smart Ink feature injected into the Universal Windows Platform for Microsoft’s Creators Update, which relies on artificial intelligence to improve ink recognition. Of course, that means you need a Windows 10 device that supports Windows Ink and touch-based input, but with this setup, you won’t need to sift through 30 sketches to compile your final code-based design. 

But Ink to Code isn’t meant to completely generate your app from scratch. It merely accelerates the initial layout process by recognizing common design symbols to get you started. According to Huston, the app currently supports buttons, images, labels, text fields, and text paragraphs. It’s a digital canvas where designers and programmers can merge to hammer out ideas and speed up the overall development process. 

“Ink to Code can be used as a more productive canvas in brainstorm meetings, or even more significantly, as a tool that can bridge the gap between collaborators with different levels of design or technical knowledge,” Huston adds. 

As stated, Ink to Code is just a prototype for now, and presumably only visible to Windows 10 devices with touch-based screens; the Microsoft Store didn’t display the linked app on our non-touch laptop. But as the demo video shows, you can use a supported stylus to roughly draw specific elements of the app, such as its rectangular border, an image placement box, a text input field, and so on. The app turns all hand-drawn shapes into perfect lines and circles for a clean look without any manual coding involved. 

Microsoft first introduced Smart Ink in May 2017. Part of the platform is Ink Analysis that recognizes shapes and understands composition, such as text residing inside a roughly drawn rectangle. Ink Presenter collects all the strokes, and Direct Ink deals with rendering the strokes with digital ink. 

“Our goal is to understand user intent and empower developers to turn it into rich digital constructs, as well as to leverage understanding from all parts of the system,” the company says. 

Microsoft introduced similar technology to Sticky Notes with the release of Anniversary Update (Redstone 1) in August 2016. 

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Oreo beta for Galaxy S8 ends, public build coming soon

The final Oreo build is just around the corner.

Ever since early November, Samsung’s been running a beta of Android Oreo on the Galaxy S8 to test out new features and squash early bugs ahead of a public release. A leaked non-beta build from earlier this month suggested that Oreo would soon be available for the general public, and now it’s been confirmed that the Oreo beta will end on January 26.

Samsung’s started sending out notices to those enrolled in the beta to announce this news, saying:

A big THANK YOU for your overwhelming response to the Samsung Experience 9.0 Beta. Your feedback about performance, reliability and usability has helped us to release more reliable, better performing software and provide an improved user experience to Samsung users.

From January 26 and onwards, Samsung will stop releasing updates to the beta and instead have its next update be for Oreo’s public release to all Galaxy S8 handsets. It’s unclear at this time when that’ll take place, but I’d imagine we see it pushed out on or around the time the Galaxy S9 is announced at MWC in February.

If you’ve been a beta tester for Oreo on the Galaxy S8, how have you been liking it so far?

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Lyft investigates claims staff abused access to customer data

A user posted on the anonymous app Blind claiming that Lyft employees abused their access to customer data, from gathering info on exes to acquiring Mark Zuckerberg’s personal info. A Lyft spokesperson confirmed to The Information that the company is investigating whether these incidents occurred.

The anonymous user, who claimed to have worked at Lyft, painted a lurid picture of how employees abused their unusually high access to customer data. Some would look up their ex-romantic partners, while others check whether their significant others were headed where they said.

This user claimed to have ‘seen employees’ do all this and more, including stalking attractive people they’d met while taking the multi-rider Lyft Line service. They’d even use the access to look up the ‘rider ratings’ and personal information of executives at Lyft and other companies — one bragged about snagging Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s phone number — as well as Hollywood actresses and porn stars, according to The Information.

Each query into the customer database is logged and attributed to a specific employee, according to a statement provided to The Information. All employees are trained in data privacy and responsible use policy, which prohibit abusing customer data for reasons other than required by that employee’s specific role. And, of course, they’re required to sign confidentiality and “responsible use” agreements barring them from accessing, using or disclosing customer data beyond their job needs.

At least these are standard expectations for responsibility for a company handling customer data. Uber got in trouble two years ago for giving employees similar access to its user information in its ‘God View’ program, but characteristically didn’t overtly restrict its workers from abusing it until the company was slapped with a $20,000 fine by the NY Attorney General’s office.

We’ve reached out to Lyft for comment and will include it when we hear back.

Source: The Information

Amazon adds single sign-on across select Fire TV apps

Amazon teased single sign-in across apps when it launched its new 4K Fire TV last September. It’s only now, though, that the company is making good on its promise. If you have a login from a cable TV provider that supports SSO authentication (like Dish, DirecTV, AT&T Uverse, Verizon FiOS and Cox Cablevision), you can sign in once and have access to a a ton of TV network apps. The new ability should roll out over the next several hours, according to an Amazon spokesperson.

So far, the apps that currently support this on Fire TV include Freeform, Syfy, USA, Bravo, E!, Telemundo, CNNgo, A&E, History, Lifetime, Turner TCM, HGTV, Food Network, DIY, Travel Channel, Cooking Channel, AMC, BBC and Hallmark. Along with other apps, those for TBS and TNT should also work in the coming weeks and months.

Microsoft Mixer will offer more ways to fund game streamers

Microsoft is making it easier to stream on Mixer for a living. The service has outlined plans for multiple ways to reward streamers, starting with Direct Purchases. If a Mixer Partner is playing a game (including DLC), you can buy that content directly from the stream, which gives them “a percentage” of the game price. The option will initially focus on games in Microsoft’s online store, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing when it means you can buy an Xbox One title knowing a favorite channel will get a cut. The feature is in testing now but should be available “soon.”

Mixer is also adding an option to tip directly through Mixer, rather than having to lean on a third-party service. And if you want to subscribe to a channel, you can soon make that commitment from your Xbox One instead of your phone or PC. More details are coming about these features in the weeks and months ahead.

In some ways, Microsoft didn’t have much choice but to do this — Twitch already has game purchases that split revenue with creators, for instance. If it’s going to make Mixer a viable source of income, one-time contributions like game purchases and tips have to be widely available and straightforward. This might not be the impetus you need to turn Mixer streaming into a job, but it could provide a welcome boost if you’re already a partner and want to capitalize on a hot new game or raise funds for a cause.

Source: Mixer

Apple Seeds First Beta of tvOS 11.3 to Public Beta Testers

Apple today seeded the first beta of an upcoming tvOS 11.3 update to its public beta testing group, one day after providing the beta to developers and a few days after the release of tvOS 11.2.5, a minor bug fix update.

The tvOS 11.2.5 public beta can be obtained by going to the Settings app on the Apple TV and navigating to the Software Updates section under “System.” “Get Public Beta Updates” will need to be toggled on, and once it is, the Apple TV will download the beta software.

tvOS 11.3 introduces support for AirPlay 2, allowing the Apple TV to be added to the Home app as part of a HomeKit setup.

With AirPlay 2, you can play music on multiple Apple TVs in different rooms, and when AirPlay 2 officially launches, that same functionality will extend to other AirPlay 2 devices like HomePod and AirPlay 2 compatible speakers.

Other new features in tvOS 11.3 include enhancements to Match Content support, automatic frame rate switching on the fourth-generation Apple TV, and automatic mode switching for AirPlay video sessions.

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