Category: linkedin cross-post

In a major breakthrough, researchers from Deep Mind have improved the accuracy of AI lip reading, with half the error rate of previous methods, and over 50% accuracy. If embedded in to smart devices, it could make lip reading accessible to anyone with a smartphone – both helping the many people who struggle in noisy and crowded environments, and putting at risk the privacy of many others.
https://rob.al/2vAYNF1
A new algorithm silences its competition

One obvious use case for autonomous cars is to ferry people on the "last mile" between their starting point (e.g. home, office etc.) and public transport, and Google's Waymo has started a pilot programme in Phoenix to help evaluate the model.
https://rob.al/2KqJRPd
Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that spun out to become a business under Alphabet, is launching a program in Phoenix next month that will focus on delivering people to bus stops and…

One of the questions we often ask in interviews is for a candidate to talk about a piece of data they've seen recently which surprised or interested them – an interest in data journalism is (for my team) an indicator of a person interested in numbers, a prerequisite for a successful career in data and analytics. These sorts of data are going to become more accessible as Google News starts to include them in search results to help quash "fake news"
https://rob.al/2LNnMQu
Google is shining its Search spotlight on useful news data.

Perhaps further evidence that "fitting to a curve" can produce syntactically and mathematically correct prose (e.g. which rhymes, has the correct pace and tone), without truly understanding the meaning of the content that's being generated, the emotion is missing. I'm sure simulation will continue to improve, but without true understanding of the causal link between words and the emotions they invoke, it's hard to see how truly creative, emotionally evocative content will ever be generated.
https://rob.al/2LXqiTv
A deep learning model trained on 2,700 of William Shakespeare’s sonnets is giving poetry fans fits trying to tell the AI-generated poems from the real

Tesla claims its custom AI chips are capable of processing 10x frames per second compared to their current off the shelf NVIDA chips – opening up a wide range of future development opportunities.
https://rob.al/2vCPmoC
Elon Musk said Tesla has been working on a self-driving chip for three years.

I've never considered before what's missed when faces are "blurred" to provide anonymity – of course, you lose facial expression and so emotions. A new technique allows faces to be anonymised without losing that expressive motion.
https://rob.al/2naccQX
Researchers have devised a way to replace the use of ‘blurring’ faces in news reports when anonymity is needed. The team’s method uses artificial intelligence (AI) techniques that aim to improve…

The Large Hadron Collider generates more data per second than Facebook collects in an entire year – even after compression, it's far too much to store. Through clever use of AI and machine learning, applied in real time, the data can be analysed almost as it's generated, and the system decides for itself what dat to keep and what to chuck. More recently, the teams have started deploying deep learning with networks many, many layers deep. But there's more to come.
https://rob.al/2vy69cr
Experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest particle accelerator at the European particle physics lab CERN, produce about a million gigabytes of data every second. Even after…

In an interesting piece reminding us that "it's not their fault, it's yours" if people can't follow your user interface to access features they want or could find useful, Fredric Paul argues that, without more and better thought on usability and proper reconsideration of user interfaces for functionality not just to make it "sexy", IoT "for seniors" will end up no-where, and the potential for devices to help with elder care will never realise their full potential.
https://rob.al/2ABYbVJ
Senior citizens are often touted as a huge potential market for the Internet of Things (IoT), but progress may be slower than a retiree with a bad hip.

We hear a lot about the biases and problems inherent in AI development and use – but this is an interesting approach to solving some societal problems using AI. A piece of software scans news articles and scientific citations to try and identify scientists who are notable but not represented in existing Wikipedia articles, creating draft biographies for human editors to review and publish. So far 40,000 summaries have been produced for both men and women. The article includes a description of the development and training approach taken by the developers.
https://rob.al/2n8EZVO
A software program from Primer scours news articles and scientific journals for women scientists who don’t have entries in the online encyclopedia.

The ACLU and nearly 70 other civil rights oranisations have pressed Amazon to stop selling facial recognition technology to governments over fears of misuse. Microsoft has also asked the government to step in and regulate the technology, and others are calling it "the most uniquely dangerous surveillance mechanism ever invented".
https://rob.al/2vxzeF9
It’s easy to accept an outwardly compelling but ultimately illusory view about what the future will look like once the full potential of facial recognition technology is unlocked. From this…