QUIC Interim

This week's program is the IETF QUIC working group's interim meeting that we are hosting in Kista. QUIC is a new, efficient and secure transport protocol that promises to deliver content on your screens a tiny bit faster and more reliably than TCP. And, perhaps more importantly, once defined, it can be changed much more easily than previous protocols. My colleague Zahed writes more about it in his blog post.

So far the meeting has been about hacking implementations of QUIC, later we'll get to the actual WG meeting part. And, we will be at this even on Wednesday despite it being the Swedish national day; hopefully we can acquire some flags to celebrate the occasion though :-)

Photos (c) 2018 by Jari Arkko. All rights reserved.

Google Duplex

This is cool and impressive:

Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone

In particular I liked how they added human imperfections to make the calls sound more natural and flow better. I can already see the applications, although I suspect they are more on the service provider side than on the consumer side. Restaurants answering their phones etc. Or telling your washing machine what to do; Alexa on steroids.

There's also some potential for misuse in robocalls, real-world denial-of-service (call all hairdressers in the country and make a reservation), and spam/scams.

(When will AI research result in a reduction of human labour on repetitive and inhuman tasks, like participating in conference calls?)