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The Morning Download: Shell Expands AI Training Program
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Good morning, CIOs. Royal Dutch Shell is expanding an online program that teaches its employees artificial-intelligence skills—working with online-education company Udacity Inc. on courses aimed at reinforcement learning, computer vision and other subfields of AI. CIO Journal’s Sara Castellanos has the story.
The Anglo-Dutch oil company said about 2,000 employees have expressed interest in or have been approached by management about taking AI courses. The initiative expands a 2019 pilot program that included about 250 Shell data scientists and software engineers.
The education push parallels Shell's broader strategy to embed AI across its operations, a move that has helped the oil giant lower costs and avoid downtime. “Artificial intelligence enables us to process the vast quantity of data across our businesses to generate new insights which can keep us ahead of the competition,” said Yuri Sebregts, Shell’s chief technology officer.
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Note to subscribers: The Morning Download won't be published Monday in observance of the Presidents Day holiday in the U.S.
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In this June 2017 photo, President Trump, from left, with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. PHOTO: ALEX BRANDON/ASSOCIATED PRESS
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Federal judge orders temporary halt to Pentagon cloud contract. A federal judge ordered the Pentagon to halt work on the JEDI cloud-computing contract, handing Amazon a win in its efforts to overturn the award to Microsoft. The Wall Street Journal's John D. McKinnon has more.
Some background. Amazon’s cloud unit, AWS, was long considered the favorite to win the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract, which is valued at as much as $10 billion over the next decade. The company’s bid was clouded by conflict-of-interest allegations, however.
Trump factor. Amazon filed suit to block the contract award in December, contending that the Pentagon’s choice of Microsoft was improperly influenced by President Trump’s public complaints about Amazon. The company, which recently sought to depose the president, said in its motion that Mr. Trump “made crystal clear—both to the public at large, and by clear implication to senior [Pentagon] officials (including his political appointees)—that he did not want his administration to award the contract to [Amazon].”
Meanwhile... In a statement, Microsoft said it was confident it would ultimately prevail and retain the contract.
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Oracle’s chief Washington lobbyist Kenneth Glueck. PHOTO: ANDREW KELLY/REUTERS
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Oracle’s man in Washington. Long eclipsed in size by consumer-facing giants such as Google, Amazon and Facebook, the corporate-database pioneer still punches above its weight in Washington, the Journal's James V. Grimaldi, Brody Mullins and John D. McKinnon report.
Meet Kenneth Glueck. Oracle’s top Washington lobbyist has become a major force in spurring government scrutiny of leading technology companies. He also is spotted often in Brussels.
Fingerprints everywhere. He has pushed federal antitrust regulators to investigate whether Google is violating competition laws. He lobbied Congress to curb legal protections tech firms enjoy for the information on their networks. He also unearthed conflict-of-interest allegations that may have prevented Amazon from winning a huge cloud-computing contract from the Defense Department.
Case study. The WSJ reports on one strategy Mr. Glueck employed to support a federal lawsuit Oracle filed in December 2018 challenging the Pentagon’s cloud contracting process. Mr. Glueck designed a one-page flow chart, “A Conspiracy To Create A Ten Year DoD Cloud Monopoly,” which featured pictures of two men President Trump considered enemies: Jeff Bezos, the Amazon CEO, and Jim Mattis, the former defense secretary.
Last year, on July 18, Mr. Trump told reporters: “I’m getting tremendous complaints about the contract with the Pentagon and Amazon.”
More Trump factor. Unlike many tech firms, Oracle’s top executives have strong ties to the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers. Two top Oracle executives—Larry Ellison and CEO Safra Catz—are longtime Republican donors. Mr. Glueck was a Democrat during the Obama administration before changing his affiliation to Republican.
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"[Oracle is] the poster child for much of what’s wrong with tech advocacy in the U.S. ... It amounts to using government as a weapon to delay, annoy and extract value from other entities.”
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— Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor and a former Federal Trade Commission official
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Nvidia gave a positive outlook for the current quarter, which ends in April. PHOTO: TYRONE SIU/REUTERS
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Nvidia earnings recover on surging gaming, data center demand. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip maker on Thursday said fiscal fourth-quarter sales rose 41% to $3.11 billion. Adjusted earnings per share more than doubled to $1.89, ending a streak of four quarters of weaker year-over-year results.
Coronavirus factor. The outbreak of the coronavirus in China, the company said, was difficult to estimate. It resulted in a $100 million reduction to expected sales in the current quarter, the company said.
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Tara Chklovski, founder and CEO of Technovation / PHOTO: TECHNOVATION
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Reporter's Notebook: Coding movement hasn't moved the needle on diversity, nonprofit leader says. The movement to diversify the coder workforce hasn't brought more women and minorities into computer science, said Tara Chklovski, founder and CEO of tech-education organization Technovation.
The Los Angeles-based nonprofit teaches technology and problem-solving skills to people around the world. It has financial backing from Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google, as well as Nvidia, Intel and the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation.
Speaking to The Wall Street Journal this week at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence conference in New York, Ms. Chklovski cited data from a 2019 National Science Foundation report showing that the share of computer science degrees attained by women and African-Americans in particular has declined over the years.
The report found that 18.7% of computer science degrees were awarded to women in 2016, down from 20.7% in 2006. For African-Americans, the share fell to 8.7% from 11%.
The share of such degrees earned by Latinos increased to 10.1% from 7% over the same period. Ms. Chklovski pointed to the fast population growth within that group as a likely factor. Overall, she said, the needle hasn't moved much for women and minorities, despite millions of dollars invested over the past decade in U.S. coding programs targeting girls and underrepresented ethnic groups.
"What has 10 years of coding got us?" she asked.
Ms. Chklovski offered three recommendations for coding organizations engaged in minority outreach and training:
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Focus more on helping students find purpose. That purpose is key to long-term interest in coding, she said, so programs should strive to help students find problems in their communities that they care about.
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Focus on engaging social support systems. It's a bit more difficult than hosting online coding tutorials, but engaging parents and mentors is important to help prevent participants from dropping out.
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Focus on problem solving. Teaching the mechanics of coding is fine, but showing students how to apply code to a real-world problem is better. "It's one thing to follow a tutorial. It's a whole other thing to create a minimum viable product and break down a complex, messy real-world problem into parts that your coding can make an impact on," she said.
—Jared Council
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China’s Huawei Technologies faces new federal charges in New York. PHOTO: GEERT VANDEN WIJNGAERT/BLOOMBERG NEWS
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Huawei charged with racketeering. Federal prosecutors said the charges related to an effort by Huawei Technologies and its subsidiaries to steal intellectual property, including from six U.S. technology companies. Prosecutors said Huawei’s efforts resulted in the company obtaining nonpublic intellectual property about robotics, cellular antenna technology and internet router source code. (WSJ)
Superfast 5G rollout hits slow patch. Industry officials say there is no common cause for the slowdown seen across multiple markets, with various countries affected by different dynamics. In some cases, the equipment makers say, telecom providers want certainty that the investments made will reap returns before plowing more money into further infrastructure. (WSJ)
Nevada’s Democrats settle on a new system after Iowa debacle. Nevada’s Democratic Party will use iPads, Google web forms and telephone hotlines to report results in next week’s caucuses, a process devised in the 10 days since the party ditched an app similar to the one that failed in Iowa. Nevada initially planned to use a similar app developed by the same company, Shadow Inc. (WSJ)
Alibaba takes a hit from coronavirus. Alibaba Group said the coronavirus outbreak that has locked down residents across China is hampering the online-retail giant and may result in slowed growth as employees stay home from work and packages go undelivered. The company said it could ultimately benefit in the future as the lockdowns encourage consumers to shift more purchases online. (WSJ)
Russia fines Twitter and Facebook. The fines of nearly $63,000 were handed down for failure to comply with a Russian law requiring that tech companies keep servers in Russia for storing personal information. Last year the two companies were fined $47 each for violating the same law. (AP)
Walmart to end Jetblack shopping service. The New York City-based unit, which offers fast product delivery on orders placed through text message, was launched publicly in 2018 as part of an innovation arm at Walmart. The retailer aimed to use Jetblack’s human agents to train an AI system that someday would power an automated personal-shopping service. (WSJ)
Facebook delivers 1 billion gigabytes of data to researchers. The initial round of projects approved for grants and data access include a study of Russian disinformation in German’s 2017 election, an analysis of Facebook’s influence on Taiwanese civic participation and more general investigations into how fake news stories travel across Facebook’s platform. (WSJ)
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Everything Else You Need to Know
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New cases of the coronavirus rose sharply after Chinese authorities changed the criteria for diagnosing the illness, raising concerns about how soon the outbreak will hit its high point. (WSJ)
Attorney General William Barr said President Trump’s tweets and public statements make it “impossible” for him to do his job. (WSJ)
The Trump administration is moving to repurpose $3.8 billion in military funds for building barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border. (WSJ)
The 3-point line has become the most powerful incentive in sports. But previously unreported documents from its birth in the 1960s show how different basketball could have been. (WSJ)
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