Technology

While brand safety and fraud prevention have been big topics in the online ad industry over the past couple years, Cheq CEO Guy Tytunovich argued that &first generation solutions for ad verification& aren&t good enough.

The problem, Tytunovich said, is that existing products use sampling to alert advertisers to issues &after the fact.& Compare this to credit card fraud — if the credit card company only alerted you long after the fraud had occurred, &You&re not going to be happy with that kind of answer.&

At Cheq, Tytunovich and his team have developed an approach that uses artificial intelligence to deliver what he calls &autonomous brand safety& — the idea is that when an ad is being served, Cheq can detect whether it might be a fraudulent impression that will only be seen by bots, or if it might show up next to content that a brand doesn&t want to be associated with. If therean issue, Tytunovich said, &We block [the ad] from being served in real time.&

Beforehand, advertisers set up their own ad placement guidelines, and afterwards, they can see the reason why individual ads didn&t get served.

Cheq is announcing that it has raised $5 million in Series A funding led by Battery Ventures . Tytunovich said that 80 percent of the Cheq team consists of developers, and that most of the funding will go towards further product development.

If the Cheq approach really is so much better, why aren&t bigger, better-funded companies doing the same thing Tytunovich pointed to his experience, and his teamexperience, in the Israel Defense Forces, where he said &they teach you to compensate for a lack of scale, of manpower, by focusing on automation and speed.&

Similarly, Tytunovich said that at Cheq, &the name of the game is speed.&

&A lot about our underlying technology lies around the speed of the data crunching,& he added. &We look at around 700 data parameters per impression … We need to be able to take all that data, analyze it and do it in real time.&

Cheq has offices in Tokyo, New York and Tel Aviv. Tytunovich said itcurrently focused on the American and Japanese markets — customers listed on the Cheq website include Coca Cola, Turner and Mercedes-Benz. Update: A spokesperson clarified that those companies are listed on the Cheq website because Cheq participated with them in The Bridge program.

We all know that in the near future humanity will come to a crossroads. With 99% of the worldpopulation currently tasked with creating memes and/or dank memes, what will happen when computers get better at it than humans Researchers may have just found out.

Using machine learning, a pair of Stanford researchers, Abel L. Peirson V and E. Meltem Tolunay, have created a system that automatically generates memes including the ones visible above. Their system, they&ve discovered &produces original memes that cannot on the whole be differentiated from real ones.&

You can read the report here.

The system uses a pre-trained Inception-v3 network using the long short-term memory model to produce captions that are applicable to a particular picture. Humans then assess the humor of the meme, rewarding the system for true LOLs.

The researchers trained the network with &400.000 image, label and caption triplets with 2600 unique image-label pairs& including funny memes generated by actual humans. The system then recreates memes in a similar vein.

Does it work Yes, it does, but I doubt it will replace human meme-workers any time soon. Humanity, it seems, is safe… for now.

We acknowledge that one of the greatest challenges in our project and other language modeling tasks is to capture humor, which varies across people and cultures. In fact, this constitutes a research area on its own, and accordingly new research ideas on this problem should be incorporated into the meme generation project in the future. One example would be to train on a dataset that includes the break point in the text between upper and lower for the image. These were chosen manually here and are important for the humor impact of the meme. If the model could learn the breakpoints this would be a huge improvement and could fully automate the meme generation. Another avenue for future work would be to explore visual attention mechanisms that operate on the images and investigate their role in meme generation tasks.

Sadly, however, we still cannot trust our robotic meme overlords not to be nasty.

&Lastly we note that there was a bias in the dataset towards expletive, racist and sexist memes, so yet another possibility for future work would be to address this bias,& wrote the researchers.

The UK High Court has granted a union permission to challenge Deliveroo opposition to collective bargaining for its couriers on human rights grounds.

The IWGB union argues that couriers for the restaurant food delivery company should beclassed as workers — who would then have basic employment rights such as the minimum wage, holiday pay and collective bargaining rights. Rights that gig economy business models are typically structured to avoid being saddled with.

Last year the union challenged Deliverooemployment classification of couriers. But a tribunal, the Central Arbitration Committee (CAC), ruled the couriers could not be considered workers — finding they were independent contractors on the grounds that they had a genuine right to find a substitute to do their job for them.

Today the High Court partially lifted a legal block by granting permission for the union to seek a judicial review of the CAC ruling on human rights grounds.

Although the judge only gave permission for a judicial review on &limited grounds&, relating to whether certain categories of self-employed individuals should have the ability to unionize.

&We have been given permission to argue that Deliveroo is breaching the human rights of our members. This is no longer an employment rights matter, this is a human rights matter,& a union rep said outside court after the ruling.

&The IWGB was granted permission on the basis of its human rights argument to the effect that Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights means the British collective bargaining laws need to be applied in a way which covers Deliveroo Riders. If won, the case will have massive ramifications for the so-called ‘gig-economy& and human rights in the UK,& the union added in a statement.

Collective bargaining rights for independent workers certainly could change the gig economy power game.

In 2016, for example, a group of Deliveroo couriers in London organized protests and strikes, after the company tried to impose a new pricing model. And Deliveroostepped back from doing soafter those protests.

Commenting on the High Court decision today, a Deliveroo spokesperson said: &The court has allowed a limited challenge on human rights grounds. Deliveroo has long argued that the self-employed should have access to greater protections, and we welcome any debate on how that can best be achieved.&

On the wider workers rights front, the union had argued the CAC erred in the facts and a matter of law whenit ruled that the substitution clause in Deliveroocontract was genuine and therefore sufficient to make the couriers independent contractors. Though the High Court judge was evidently not swayed.

The union has been crowdfunding its challenge to Deliveroovia the Crowdjustice platform— and has raised just under half of the £50k target so far. However it appears that thejudge also declined to put a cap on costsfor the case, as the union had hoped.

The union had also sought to challenge the tribunal judgement by making referral to the Supreme Courtdecision this week against Pimlico Plumbers— another gig economy platform rights case — but Deliveroo points out the judge deemed that ¬ arguable&.

&The decision was reached having considered the recent judgment of the Supreme Court in the Pimlico Plumbers case, and emphatically rejects the unionchallenge based on this judgment,& said a spokesperson.

&Todaydecision has clearly upheld the central finding of the CAC, which is that Deliveroo riders are self-employed. This is good news for Deliveroo riders who value the ability to choose when and where to work.&

In the UK a group of Uber drivers successfully challenged the companyclassification of them as self-employed at a tribunal in 2016, going on to defend the decision against Uberfirst appeal.

And, in that case, although Uber continues to appeal the tribunal ruling, the company has pretty steadily beenexpanding the insurance products it offers drivers in the region.

Meanwhile the UK government is conducting a review of employment lawto take account of tech-fueled shifts in work — and with the stated aim of expanding rights to more working people.