Statuses

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 never ordered anything from it. I'm not sure why – this report asserts that users "don't trust" the devices with payment info, but Amazon already has all that, so it must be something else. I guess it just feels unusual to order something without even seeing it?
https://rob.al/2ItslxN
When Amazon released the first smart speaker in 2014 and Google released its own two years later, we assumed it was to facilitate purchases through their…

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://rob.al/2k6T9oQ
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 vehicle and able to stop or control it in case of emergency.  Waymo assert that their vehicles already operate at SAE-Level 4, which includes automatically stopping in case of system failure (https://rob.al/2KzoBaL), and so there's no way for staff remotely monitoring the car to take control of it.
https://rob.al/2k6nMLn
California’s DMV has also received an application from the startup JingChi to test fully autonomous vehicles

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 I'm certainly looking forward to trying it out.
https://rob.al/2IrUW5O
The search giant unveils an experimental tool that can make appointments by calling businesses.

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 side note in this article highlights Dara Khosrowshahi’s vision that Uber is at the centre of the network of autonomous vehicles – rather than designing specific end nodes, Uber expects to work with others to be the one ring to binding them all together.
https://rob.al/2FTnD6g
Uber has determined that the likely cause of a fatal collision involving one of its prototype self-driving cars in Arizona in March was a problem with the software that decides how the car should…

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 base for effective educational practices.
https://rob.al/2HGdWdQ
A third of its schools have taken part in randomised controlled trials. The struggle is getting teachers to pay attention to the 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 the flames of a large bonfire, or how topography affects weather formations. Researchers at the University of Maryland have proven that they can train a machine learning model on the existing time-series data, and the model was able to predict future states approximately 8 times further to the future than a human.
https://rob.al/2KmIRwI
In new computer experiments, artificial-intelligence algorithms can tell the future of chaotic systems.

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 Lang, Software Engineers, Google Research People are remarkably good at focusing their attention on a par…

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://rob.al/2FsfhCj
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 code to their site, without having to deal with…

A fascinating set of guidelines for making complex work which we typically say "has" to be done face to face (like designing) effective when the team works remotely. I particularly like the emphasis on using a spectrum of tools to support "stepping up" the "bandwidth" of a conversation from asynchronous text (e.g. email, slack) to synchronous, real-time, visual methods (e.g. video chat). Others, such as drop in sessions for constructive feedback on work items, look equally useful, and i look forward to testing some of these out with the team.
https://rob.al/2JJoYQa
More and more companies are seeing the benefits of remote work for productivity in the workplace. As Director of Design at Zapier, I frequently get asked the question of how the design process works…