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AI Helps Cruise Line Market Better; EU Agency Calls for Stronger Facial Recognition Rules; Driverless Trucks Coming
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The Celebrity Solstice in Sydney. Celebrity has more than 550 cruises a year, meaning that tracking the success of each ad type across regions and channels creates hundreds of thousands of data points. PHOTO: BRENDON THORNE/BLOOMBERG NEWS
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Celebrity using AI to adjust marketing, drive sales. Celebrity Cruises is using artificial intelligence to better market its cruises, resulting in more bookings and higher revenue, reports WSJ Pro AI.
Celebrity is using Outlier AI Inc.’s automated-business-analysis tool, also called Outlier. Before Celebrity began using Outlier, it could take Celebrity days and sometimes weeks to judge how well its marketing efforts were working. Part of the reason was the sheer amount of data it collects. Celebrity can have several different social-media, print and radio campaigns running at one time. The ads can be designed to fill any of its 30 to 40 stateroom categories, depending on the ship, for more than 550 annual cruises. Tracking the success of each ad type across regions and channels creates hundreds of thousands of data points.
Spotting opportunities. The Outlier tool plugs into a company’s systems for marketing, sales, payments and more. It uses machine learning to search through historical data to find patterns and relationships, and then determines an expected range for any number of business metrics. Once the system knows what to expect, it can spot outliers.
Celebrity recently tweaked the pricing on one of its promotions. After the program launched, Outlier spotted that the campaign caused bookings to quadruple. Matt Maule, Celebrity’s associate vice president of business intelligence, declined to provide more details, but said the company “doubled down” on the promotion to drive even more bookings.
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Facial recognition technology in use in Leicester Square, London, in December 2017. PHOTO: KIRSTY O'CONNOR/ZUMA PRESS
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Europe not ready for facial recognition, EU agency warns. The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights said last week that the European region needs stronger rules governing facial recognition, reports Bloomberg. European law enforcement is increasingly testing the technology in cities, including Berlin, Nice and London, and at airports in Amsterdam, Dublin and Paris, according to the report. Said the EU agency in a report: “Given the novelty of the technology as well as the lack of experience and detailed studies on the impact of facial recognition technologies, multiple aspects are key to consider before deploying such a system in real life applications.” Meanwhile, Chinese tech
companies are proposing new international standards in the U.N.’s International Telecommunication Union for facial recognition and video monitoring, according to documents obtained by the Financial Times. Standard writing gives manufacturers an advantage by lining up global specification with their own technology, according to the FT report.
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“You know, this is really amazing, the great, collective ‘We’ have produced intelligence in ways that we would never have dreamed possible.”
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— Pamela McCorduck, author of a book on AI titled “This Could Be Important,” speaking to ZDNet.
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Driverless truck hits the road. An autonomous truck was scheduled to run on Chicago’s Jane Addams Tollway, the Chicago Tribune reports. The truck is powered by technology from Autobon AI, which tested the rig’s capabilities on Chicagoland Speedway track in Joliet. A driver, however, stays behind the wheel. A recent CNBC report said that self-driving trucks were likely to be on the roads before autonomous cars, with lower labor cost and better fuel-efficiency being among the key drivers.
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Advanced Navigation, a robotics and AI sensor technology startup, raised $13 million in Series A financing. (WSJ)
The NFL’s Seattle Seahawks signed a deal with Amazon Web Services for cloud services and AI tools. (TechRepublic)
The Massachusetts State Police recently tested Boston Dynamics’ four-legged robot. (CNN International)
Machine-learning systems now do most of Facebook’s moderation. (MIT Technology Review)
China is using AI to help manage its trash. (Fortune)
Australia's National Roads and Motorists' Association is teaming up with telecoms company Telstra to retrofit 300 roadside assistance vans with AI sensors. (ZDNet)
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