aims to plug into the specialized Funding Accelerator program of pitchINA vibrant and dynamic technology environment may be made possible by collaboration and nbsp.A partnership between Malaysian Research Accelerator for Technology & amp, Innovation( MRANTI ), a catalyst for commercialization in the technology and innovation ecosystem, and MANAn & nbsp( a…Continue Reading
The phase-out of third-party sweets is seen as a chance.64 % of consumers feel more at ease talking directly to businesses.According to recent research from Twilio, the user engagement platform that powers real-time, personalized experiences for today’s top brands, marketers in APAC are now more accepting of this impending change as…Continue Reading
Areas of integration include finance, decentralized assets, and funding.On October 1st, the second Africa x ASEAN Digital Economies and Fintech quarter begins.In order to promote electronic economies, Africa and ASEAN signed a partnership agreement that identified banking, decentralized assets, and funding as the convergence focus. Officials, organization leaders, and top finance…Continue Reading
The government-controlled Japan Investment Corporation ( JIC ) will acquire TOKYO – JSR, one of the top two photoresist manufacturers in the semiconductor industry, and delist it from the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
As Japan tightens its ties with US export restrictions on high-end chips and chip-making technology to China, the proper state purchase, valued at 909.3 billion yen( US$ 6.4 billion ), was announced on June 26.
Crucial elements in chip-making supply chains are photoresists, the light-sensitive materials used to type circuit patterns on silicon and other types of chips during the photo-lithographic approach.
A 20-day sweet give period should start by late December after receiving regulatory authorization, with JIC acquiring 100 % possession of JSR in first 2024. Mizuho Bank and the Development Bank of Japan may provide financing for the transaction.
Due to the bargain, investors’ preferences, information disclosure required to analyze market trends, and completely market economics are most likely to suffer.
At the same time, from Tokyo’s perspective, the possibility of a foreign invasion and” environmentalist” owners interfering in Chinese management decisions will be eliminated.
Semiconductors have been identified as a crucial strategic industry by the government as part of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s” fresh capitalism” initiative, an ambiguous strategy to promote economic growth, raise wages, and more fairly spread wealth.
In a statement to reporters last month, Kishida stated that” securing an industrial center of transistor technology in Japan is essential from both the standpoints of renewables and economic security.”
The sweet offer, according to JIC,” is designed to help JSR to smoothly and quickly market its bold, moderate – to long-term strategic investments without being constrained by the short – term impact on business efficiency ,” or without financial market discipline.
Additionally, the buy-out will allow JSR to” flexibly pursue structural reforms and restructuring” and” provide an opportunity for industry reorganization and private fund acquisition to strengthen the international competitiveness of[ Japan’s ] semiconductor materials industry ,” according to a company statement. & nbsp,
The transaction, in the opinion of JSR management,” reinforces our solid business foundation and accelerates green growth, and it’s the best strategic option at this point” for allJSR stakeholders.
What then is the real motivation behind the offer? Nearly 90 % of the global market for semiconductor photoresists is controlled by JSR, its main rival Tokyo Ohka Kogyo( TOK ), and three other Japanese companies, Shin – Etsu Chemical, Fujifilm, and Sumitomo Chemical.
The market share of JSR is already predicted to be between 30 and 35 %, while TOK’s share is probably only a few percentage points lower. This industry does not clearly need government support given its prominent position on the global market.
Additionally, JSR doesn’t seem to require any additional funding that JIC might be able to offer. The business has a strong balance sheet, and internal resources are used to cover cash expenditures. In the financial year that ends on March 2024, control hopes to achieve a 9.5 % operating margin.
However, a deep-pocked and like-minded state owner would be of great assistance if” strong strategic investments” entails doubling capital spending.
Mitsunobu Koshiba, chairman emeritus of JSR and an outside chairman of Rapidus, the business founded in 2022 to offer superior logic chip factory solutions in Japan, seems to be one website between federal policy and the buy-out. By 2027, Rapidus, which collaborates with IBM, hopes to achieve mass production at two nanometers( 2nm ).
The” Post 5G Information and Communication Systems Infrastructure Enhancement R & amp, D Project,” run by Japan’s state New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization ( NEDO ), also includes Rapidus. Additionally, it collaborates with IMEC, a global nanoelectronics R & amp, D center with its headquarters in Belgium.
JSR is the owner of Inpria, an Oregon-based business that specializes in metal-oxide photoresists( the majority are made of plastics ). By the end of the decade, Inpria‘s resists, which were created especially for EUV printing, are anticipated to pave the way for chip generation at 1nm and smaller.
The advanced cards will be essential to proper industries like quantum computing, automatic vehicles, neuro-morphic devices, and 6G telecommunications. JSR and Inpria collaborate attentively with leading device manufacturers like Intel, TSMC, Samsung Electronics, and SK Hynix.
JSR is more than just a producer of silicon materials. Additionally, compared to 29 % for semiconductor materials, its life sciences division is anticipated to produce 32 % of sales this fiscal year. Electronic components like display, integrated circuit packaging, and plastics are expected to make 11 % of the contribution, followed by other materials of 4 %.
The life sciences industry, which is centered on biopharmaceuticals, needs to invest in potential development, product development, advertising, and operational effectiveness. For a portion of JSR’s capital expenditure and management attention, it competes with electrical materials.
JSR control anticipates that JIC will help” a thorough expansion strategy and action plan” for the life sciences. It could be argued that dividing JSR into two companies, which would be easier to do without open shareholder disputes, would provide the most beneficial support.
An impartial electronic materials company could focus on overcoming obstacles from smaller Chinese, South Korean, American, German, and fresh Chinese competitors who are all vying for a larger market share while also staying ahead of TOK in photoresists.
The tender offer will be made for 4, 350 yen($ 30 ), a 34.5 % premium over the asking price just before the buy-out was revealed, and only 4 % below the all-time high set in December 2021.
JSR closed at 4, 110 hankering on June 30, a 27 % increase over the news of the deal. Over the same five days, TOK’s share price increased by 9 %.
For TOK or other material manufacturers, an intense rival with preferential financing would not be great news, but investors may soon have few options.
On the other hand, owners are currently profitable. As one trader stated in a private conversation, he was happy to accept the profit even though his account did not purchase JSR in anticipation of repurchase.
Policy-driven investments was, of course, refuse, as it did in the cases of Japan Display, which stood no prospect against the South Koreans and Chinese, and Elpida, a DRAM manufacturer that Micron bought for incredibly low prices after Chinese banks failed.
Or, coverage success may result in the acquisition and delisting of additional Chinese tech companies, which could be advantageous to current shareholders.
Eric Johnson, Director of JSR, referred to JIC as a” natural source of capital” while speaking on camera for investors and the media. However, the Development Bank of Japan and 24 major private sector companies make up the remaining 96.5 % of JIC, which is owned by the Chinese state.
According to a company speech, JIC defines its function as follows:” We, Japan Investment Corporation, provide risk investment to fields in which most secret owners are reluctant to invest.” While enhancing global fight, we want to encourage business and industry move.
Reluctance to spend, however, does not appear to be an issue in this instance. According to the bank’s website, JSR is followed by experts from 19 stocks companies. 54 % of its shares are owned by foreign buyers.
Additionally, JSR anticipates a transitional buy-out, stating in its” Highlights of the Transaction” statement that the” plan” will” relist” once continuous growth and expansion in corporate value is realized.
This suggests that JSR and JIC anticipate a dangerous and energetic time when the stock market’s short-termism will make it more difficult for the company to keep up with developments in the device market.
That’s in line with the viewpoint of JIC CEO Keisuke Yokoo.
Today, development is moving quickly across the globe, catalyzing contests and business restructuring that cross standard industrial and organizational boundaries, according to Yokoo. We are therefore dealing with a powerful change in the dynamic environment and the structure of business, he said.
However, only time will tell if JSR’s buy-out and withdrawal is the best course of action to safeguard both the future of the business and the objectives of Japan as a whole.
Follow this author on Twitter at @ ScottFo83517667.
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If mission is noble, product useful (and you’re not a horrible person), people will help
Stop obsessing over competitors, losing sleep when they raise $, focus on your journey
They say cats have nine lives. They explore, climb high things, fall frequently, but somehow always manage to land on their feet, and continue…Continue Reading
Numerous government agencies, including the FBI, Department of Defense, National Security Agency, Treasury Department, Defense Intelligence Agency, Navy and Coast Guard, have purchased vast amounts of US citizens’ personal information from commercial data brokers.
The revelation was published in a partially declassified, internal Office of the Director of National Intelligence report released on June 9, 2023.
The report shows the breathtaking scale and invasive nature of the consumer data market and how that market directly enables wholesale surveillance of people. The data includes not only where you’ve been and who you’re connected to, but the nature of your beliefs and predictions about what you might do in the future.
The report underscores the grave risks the purchase of this data poses, and urges the intelligence community to adopt internal guidelines to address these problems.
As a privacy, electronic surveillance and technology law attorney, researcher and law professor, I have spent years researching, writing and advising about the legal issues the report highlights.
These issues are increasingly urgent. Today’s commercially available information, coupled with the now-ubiquitous decision-making artificial intelligence and generative AI like ChatGPT, significantly increases the threat to privacy and civil liberties by giving the government access to sensitive personal information beyond even what it could collect through court-authorized surveillance.
The drafters of the report take the position that commercially available information is a subset of publicly available information. The distinction between the two is significant from a legal perspective. Publicly available information is information that is already in the public domain. You could find it by doing a little online searching.
Commercially available information is different. It is personal information collected from a dizzying array of sources by commercial data brokers that aggregate and analyze it, then make it available for purchase by others, including governments. Some of that information is private, confidential or otherwise legally protected.
The sources and types of data for commercially available information are mind-bogglingly vast. They include public records and other publicly available information. But far more information comes from the nearly ubiquitous internet-connected devices in people’s lives, like cellphones, smart home systems, cars and fitness trackers. These all harness data from sophisticated, embedded sensors, cameras and microphones. Sources also include data from apps, online activity, texts and emails, and even health care provider websites.
Types of data include location, gender and sexual orientation, religious and political views and affiliations, weight and blood pressure, speech patterns, emotional states, behavioral information about myriad activities, shopping patterns and family and friends.
This data provides companies and governments a window into the “Internet of Behaviors,” a combination of data collection and analysis aimed at understanding and predicting people’s behavior.
It pulls together a wide range of data, including location and activities, and uses scientific and technological approaches, including psychology and machine learning, to analyze that data. The Internet of Behaviors provides a map of what each person has done, is doing and is expected to do, and provides a means to influence a person’s behavior.
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The rich depths of commercially available information, analyzed with powerful AI, provide unprecedented power, intelligence and investigative insights. The information is a cost-effective way to surveil virtually everyone, plus it provides far more sophisticated data than traditional electronic surveillance tools or methods like wiretapping and location tracking.
Government use of electronic surveillance tools is extensively regulated by federal and state laws. The US Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, requires a warrant for a wide range of digital searches. These include wiretapping or intercepting a person’s calls, texts or emails; using GPS or cellular location information to track a person; or searching a person’s cellphone.
Complying with these laws takes time and money, plus electronic surveillance law restricts what, when and how data can be collected. Commercially available information is cheaper to obtain, provides far richer data and analysis, and is subject to little oversight or restriction compared to when the same data is collected directly by the government.
Technology and the burgeoning volume of commercially available information allow various forms of the information to be combined and analyzed in new ways to understand all aspects of your life, including preferences and desires.
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The Office of the Director of National Intelligence report warns that the increasing volume and widespread availability of commercially available information poses “significant threats to privacy and civil liberties.”
It increases the power of the government to surveil its citizens outside the bounds of law, and it opens the door to the government using that data in potentially unlawful ways. This could include using location data obtained via commercially available information rather than a warrant to investigate and prosecute someone for abortion.
The report also captures both how widespread government purchases of commercially available information are and how haphazard government practices around the use of the information are.
The purchases are so pervasive and agencies’ practices so poorly documented that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence cannot even fully determine how much and what types of information agencies are purchasing, and what the various agencies are doing with the data.
The question of whether it’s legal for government agencies to purchase commercially available information is complicated by the array of sources and complex mix of data it contains.
There is no legal prohibition on the government collecting information already disclosed to the public or otherwise publicly available. But the nonpublic information listed in the declassified report includes data that US law typically protects. The nonpublic information’s mix of private, sensitive, confidential or otherwise lawfully protected data makes collection a legal gray area.
Despite decades of increasingly sophisticated and invasive commercial data aggregation, Congress has not passed a federal data privacy law. The lack of federal regulation around data creates a loophole for government agencies to evade electronic surveillance law.
It also allows agencies to amass enormous databases that AI systems learn from and use in often unrestricted ways. The resulting erosion of privacy has been a concern for more than a decade.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence report acknowledges the stunning loophole that commercially available information provides for government surveillance:
“The government would never have been permitted to compel billions of people to carry location tracking devices on their persons at all times, to log and track most of their social interactions, or to keep flawless records of all their reading habits. Yet smartphones, connected cars, web tracking technologies, the Internet of Things, and other innovations have had this effect without government participation.”
However, it isn’t entirely correct to say “without government participation.” The legislative branch could have prevented this situation by enacting data privacy laws, more tightly regulating commercial data practices, and providing oversight in AI development.
Congress could yet address the problem. Representative Ted Lieu has introduced the a bipartisan proposal for a National AI Commission, and Senator Chuck Schumer has proposed an AI regulation framework.
Effective data privacy laws would keep your personal information safer from government agencies and corporations, and responsible AI regulation would block them from manipulating you.
Anne Toomey McKenna is Visiting Professor of Law, University of Richmond
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Malaysian financial bodies working to develop Future Skills Framework
Firms look to alternative ways to access ready talent apart from hiring
[Ed Note: Deputy Governor Jessica Chew (pic) gave the following Keynote Address at the 24th World Conference of Banking Institutes (WCBI) held in Kuala Lumpur with the theme, “Building a workforce…Continue Reading
NEW YORK – Microsoft has added about US$1.5 trillion to its market capitalization this year after the launch of ChatGPT. Nvidia has added about $640 billion. Overall, the market value of generative AI models has increased by several trillions of dollars. What is supposed to justify this kind of valuation?
Market research firms claim that the market for generative AI will reach $126.5 billion by 2031. That’s not a lot of revenue compared to the market valuation. Microsoft now sells at about 12 times sales, and that’s a natural monopoly.
Even if that estimate were correct, market valuations are three to five times higher than $126 billion of revenue would justify. And I don’t see how generative AI can throw off that level of revenue, not by an order of magnitude.
Just what is generative AI supposed to do? Supposedly it can answer customer queries, replace low-level programmers and produce better online search results. But how much revenue can that bring in?
Let’s do some back-of-envelope calculations.
Suppose that chatbots replaced every employee of every help desk in the United States. There are 38,808 help desk employees who earn on average $43,275 a year. Replace them all, and you save $1.68 billion a year. Of course, you can’t replace all of them, and chatbots cost something, so I’ll guess that potential savings are $1 billion a year, provided that the gizmo actually works.
Then there are computer programmers. ChatGPT can write basic code. There are 132,740 programmers in the US, so lets guesstimate that generative AI can replace the bottom quarter of them, or 33,185 programmers. The bottom quartile of programmers makes $34.84 an hour, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That would save $2.312 billion, minus the cost of the AI program.
So far we’ve wiped out two major areas of employment, and saved a bit over $3 billion in paychecks. I don’t know where the marketing surveys came up with a $125 billion number, but it seems as if they are off by an order of magnitude.
There are plenty of other generative AI applications, for example, for medical diagnostics. But we’ve heard that story before. AI was supposed to read X-rays faster and more accurately than a human radiologist, but that turned out to be a bust.
“Radiologists have more reason than most to be disappointed, because CAD [computer-aided detection] in medical imaging was more than an unrealized promise. Almost uniquely across the world of technology, medical or otherwise, the hype and optimism around second-era AI led to the widespread utilization of CAD in clinical imaging. This use was most obvious in screening mammography, where it has been estimated that by 2010 more than 74% of mammograms in the United States were read with CAD assistance. Unfortunately, CAD’s benefit has been questionable. Several large trials came to the conclusion that CAD has at best delivered no benefit and at worst has actually reduced radiologist accuracy, resulting in higher recall and biopsy rates,” according to one study.
This isn’t the first instance of AI hype ballooning stock valuations.
Remember autonomous vehicles? Ford put $1 billion into an AV startup called Argo AI, valued at $12.4 billion in 2021, and at zero in October 2022, when it shut down. Driverless cars are the technology of a future that won’t come anytime soon, at least not in the United States.
The dirty little secret of AVs is that they require an enormous amount of data with a very short transmission time (low latency). America’s so-called 5G network doesn’t have the low latency required for AVs. It’s only a hyped-up 4G with a slow response time.
China already has autonomous taxi services in some cities. China’s 5G network is not only the world’s largest, but also offers a nearly instantaneous response time made possible by the new technology. AVs are a great idea when you have broad and straight roads (as in some Chinese cities), but not in the jumble of American urban landscapes.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta put $100 billion into a virtual reality world that couldn’t find enough visitors willing to wear heavy and expensive headsets. Meta’s stock price collapsed in the wake of the metaverse fiasco, but soared along with other tech companies in the AI bubble.
The hypothetical calculations above really are beside the point. Chat GPT interacts very badly with real human beings. By the standards of a human 10-year-old, it’s really, really dumb. It can’t make the kind of mental connections that make humor possible. In a recent essay for Law&Liberty, I reported some less-than-satisfactory exchanges with OpenAI’s chatbot on the subject of self-referential humor.
Joking aside, generative AI simply can’t fathom how human beings think and talk. Mental associations that come naturally to human beings are incomprehensible to generative AI models, unless the models happen to have been trained on an identical case in the past.
They won’t replace help desk representatives any time soon, let alone radiologists. And the trillions of stock market valuations that mushroomed in anticipation of generative AI will vanish like the other AI bubbles of the past few years.
AI, to be sure, works wonders when it is applied to routine tasks, for example, picking defective items off a conveyor belt, or manipulating autonomous cranes and trucks at a port. America’s largest port at Long Beach, California, is one of the world’s least efficient (it ranks number 300 on the World Bank list). It takes roughly 48 hours to unload a large container ship.
At China’s most modern port, Tianjin, a 5G network using AI systems designed by Huawei can unload the same ship in 15 minutes. Smart cranes find bar codes on containers, move them to autonomous trucks and go on to the next.
AI is there to free humans from mechanical tasks, not to make machines imitate humans. That’s where AI will add economic value.
Follow David P Goldman on Twitter at @davidpgoldman
146 teams from 36 countries made it to the global final
Event attracted 120k students from 2k colleges and universities across 74 countries
The Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR) team secured third place in the Practice Competition – Cloud Track category of the Huawei ICT Competition 2022-2023 Global Final, which took place from 23 to 27…Continue Reading