Technology can help or hinder. There's a growing evidence base indicating that overprotective parenting is leading to decreased ability for young adults to manage risk or respond to uncertainty in an inherently chaotic and increasingly fast paced world (and as a result, the pushback against protective playgrounds which sanitise  risk is also growing e.g. https://rethinkingchildhood.com/2018/04/19/risk-dangerous-playwork-adventure-conventional-playground/), so…

I find my Amazon Echo devices useful in a range of situations – getting travel and weather information quickly while i'm trying to get the kids out the door, converting units or setting timers while i'm cooking, playing music while i get on with tasks, even controlling the lights and heating – but i've also…

I've always found IntelliSense to be amazingly useful, and i miss it when i have to use an IDE or language which doesn't include it, so these AI-based improvements look like they'll only improve things. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2018/05/07/introducing-visual-studio-intellicode The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team

Waymo (Google/Alphabet) is finally launching fully automated vehicles. 52 cars will be deployed around their Mountain View offices and will only be able to operate in and arouund that area. Of note however is a second applicant – China's JingChi which has requested a licence for a single car with a remote person overseeing the…

Recordings of calls between Google Duplex and a hairdresser and restaurant are amazing. The AI interacts just like a human – adding ums and hesitation, and even successfully recovering the conversation when the restaurant staff misunderstood the request. I think this is what most people think of when they imagine a virtual, digital assistant, and…

The most likely reason Uber’s self driving car killed a pedestrian is because of settings designed to increase passenger comfort. While I’m sure Uber would agree that in this case they went too far, it reminds us that autonomous vehicles (and robots in general) live only to the moral code we provide them. An interesting…

Over 10% of all randomised controlled trials in education ever, anywhere in the world, have been funded by the UK government. Following the evidence is hard, especially when it challenges the status quo, common practice, or established “knowledge”, so its good to see the UK government putting this money in to establishing a solid evidence…

Why is weather unpredictable? The natural world is governed by thousands of factors, and their relationships are intrinsically chaotic, making them hard to model and so to predict – at least for humans. In most systems the number of variables is so massive that even identifying them is impossible – think about the flickering of…

Very interesting approach by Google’s researchers to the “cocktail party problem”. The team trained a CNN to determine which person is speaking in a video with multiple overlapping sounds, and to amplify that speech while reducing other noise. Applications include better automated subtitles, and improved hearing aids. https://research.googleblog.com/2018/04/looking-to-listen-audio-visual-speech.html https://research.googleblog.com/2018/04/looking-to-listen-audio-visual-speech.html Posted by Inbar Mosseri and Oran…

Stripe's advances in AI, based on hundreds of billions of data points, have been able to reduce fraud by 25% without materially affecting non-fraud acceptance rates. https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2018/04/18/stripes-ai-fraud-detector-crazy-smart/ I’m loath to use the term, but Stripe is a revolutionary product. It allows pretty much anyone to accept card payments just by adding a few lines of…