An anonymous reader shares a report: Uber faced a blow on Monday when London regulators refused to renew the ride-hailing company’s operating permit because of safety concerns. The biggest issue lawmakers cited was drivers using false identities as they ferried unsuspecting passengers. At least 14,000 trips were made by unauthorized drivers, according to city regulator Transport for London. The way it worked is this: A number of drivers would share one account, and whenever one of them went out to drive, they’d upload their own photo to fool passengers. The unauthorized drivers were able to pose as vetted, licensed and insured, when often they weren’t. Turns out, the issue of fraudulent Uber drivers isn’t isolated to London.

Instances of unauthorized drivers, including convicted felons, being on the Uber app have surfaced in other cities, including San Francisco, Houston and Boston. Sometimes drivers reportedly used another person’s license and Social Security number to sign up for the ride-hailing service. Other times they used fake names. And on some occasions they bought bogus identities on the internet. “For bad actors, it’s not hard to circumvent Uber’s signup process since it’s designed to get drivers onboarded as quickly as possible and with as little hassle as possible,” said Harry Campbell, a ride-hail driver who runs the popular Rideshare Guy blog. “From time to time, Uber uses a ‘selfie check’ to verify the driver, but it’s not clear how accurate this method is.”

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Source: Slashdot – Some Uber Drivers Use Bogus Identities and Shared Accounts

Wang Xuepu, vice president of Chinese online video streaming company iQiyi, says that artificial intelligence has enhanced the company’s efficiency in all aspects of the business. From a report: “Now we can cut thousands of hours of work to just hours,” Wang said in Mandarin at CNBC’s East Tech West conference in the Nansha district of Guangzhou, China. He said that the company is using AI across its business like adding subtitles or integrating multimedia more quickly. Wang added AI has increased efficiency in the company’s operations in many ways, including content creation, approval processes and market distribution. “iQiyi embodies the culture of Silicon Valley and culture of Hollywood. We really put an emphasis on technology development. More than half of our employees work in the technical side. We have invested in AI significantly. More than 60% of our patent submissions this year were related AI,” said Wang. Wang said, for example, iQiyi has been able to predict the popularity of films and TV shows before taking them online by using big data. “We can use AI to help forecast film and TV series’ viewer numbers before they are aired. With the data, we can predict the traffic and for TV series and that accuracy rate is 88%, with films we can reach near 90% accuracy,” he said, according to a CNBC translation.

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Source: Slashdot – Chinese Online Streaming Service iQiyi Says AI Has Enhanced Efficiency Throughout Its Business