Boston Dynamics has finally started to pivot from research towards manufacture of commercial products, with the following uses as priority:

- entertainment - the first and easiest scenario

- emergency response - eg search and rescue, surveillance

- Security - think about automating property line walks etc.

Longer term, they see their devices:

- warehouse logistics - although not clear why a wheeled robot isn’t a better fit

- parcel delivery - jumping from the back of a truck to deliver a parcel

In a clear message to publishers (“We are not interested in talking to you about your traffic…That is the old world and there is no going back”), Facebook has reminded them both of the power it wields, and of their responsibilities - it’s not Facebook’s job to revive the business model of old school publishing, and deceptive practices like getting users to sign up for a monthly subscription without telling them up front the ongoing cost (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/subscribe/), or making them call you on the phone during restricted hours to cancel (https://login.thetimes.co.uk/links/terms), seem like the desperate throws of a dying beast.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/08/facebooks-message-to-media-we-are-not-interested-in-talking-to-you-about-your-traffic-that-is-the-old-world-and-there-is-no-going-back/That firehose isn’t opening up again anytime soon.

At $10,000 for the top end card, NVIDA is clearly aiming these at professional video editing suites, but the addition of built in Tensor Core units aims to speed up end to end editing of film and game graphics - perhaps automating the removal of guide wires from shots, or removing artefacts or entire actual objects from scenes. I just wish the name (“Turing Architecture”) had been saved for a truly self-aware device :)
https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/13/nvidias-new-turing-architecture-is-all-about-real-time-ray-tracing-and-ai/In recent days, word about Nvidia’s new Turing architecture started leaking out of the Santa Clara-based company’s headquarters. So it didn’t come as a major surprise that the company today announced…

AI models are complex and take time and compute power to generate - meaning they’re expensive and valuable. IBM has been developing a way to “watermark” deep learning models by embedding specific information in to the model during training such that it’s impossible (or very hard) to remove later, allowing definitive identification of model theft.
https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2018/07/20/ibm-came-up-with-a-watermark-for-neural-networks/How can you tell if someone stole your AI models? IBM proposes a watermarking technique to protect AI developers and their intellectual property.

HBR’s list of steps to making your AI projects more likely to be successful:

- ensure your purpose is clear. AI only adds value in the context of your business model and processes.

- chose carefully what you automate - the value is in expanding human effectiveness, not replacing humans entirely

- pick the right data - more data isnt necessarially better - you need the right data.

- finally, move people to higher value tasks - AI doesn’t really reduce labour costs or headcount, it allows you to better use those people.
https://hbr.org/2018/07/how-to-make-an-ai-project-more-likely-to-succeedStart by having a clear sense of its goals.

Indian researchers have created a solution capable of detecting motorcycle drivers riding without a helmet. When linked to existing surveillance systems and the police, the technology could identify riders and then alert police teams further up the road to intercept them. Hopefully, it’ll be used to improve road safety.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/software/iit-hyderabad-develops-artificial-intelligence-to-catch-bikers-without-helmets/articleshow/65109382.cmsIIT researchers have developed a solution for the automatic detection of those riding without helmets.

In a scary development, China expects to deploy AI powered submarines capable of executing weapon strikes on targets within the next 2-3 years.
https://www.artificialintelligence-news.com/2018/07/23/china-sea-power-unmanned-ai-submarines/China is planning to upgrade its naval power with unmanned AI submarines that aim to provide an edge over the fleets of their global counterparts.

Although some are pitching it as “replacing” human call centre workers, a more likely scenario is that mundane or routine interactions can be completely automated, allowing human workers to spend more time on more meaningful, complex or sensitive activities. Yes, this will probably lead to individual call centres hiring fewer people, it could well pan out the same way as ATMs (http://www.aei.org/publication/what-atms-bank-tellers-rise-robots-and-jobs/) - it made the cost of banking cheaper, meaning banks could extend their reach further and open more branches.
https://bgr.com/2018/07/24/google-ai-call-centers-focus-of-software/This is the second time in a matter of just a few weeks we’re back writing about how Google is working on artificial intelligence software to replace human call center workers.

Planning how to deploy people and resources (like water and fertiliser) to make the best use of yield is critical to optimising costs in highly volatile industries like wine making. Using drones to survey vineyards (which takes just 15 minutes), and analysing the results using AI, produces faster and more accurate results - the system can even identify grapes which have been too close to bushfires (which would taint the wine with a smokey taste), and can predict with high accuracy when grapes are at their optimal time for harvesting, ensuring that the exact ratio of sugars, mature and just ripe grapes is ready for picking.
https://www.opengovasia.com/articles/artificial-intelligence-and-machine-learning-to-improve-australias-winemaking-industryJul 27, 2018 - by Teresa Umali - Winemakers can see in real time which grapes are ready to pick using handheld device that uses near-infrared wavelengths. - opengovasia.com

Although (in theory) any randomly scrambled Rubik’s Cube can be solved in 20-26 moves, current solutions are basically based on brute force searches. Given the massive number of combinations (4.3 × 10^19), one major challenge to training a system is the sparse reward mechanism - DeepMind’s paper outlines the use of a new algorithm - “Autodidactic Iteration” - using 2,000,000 iterations over approximately 8 billion cubes in just 44 hours.
https://www.hpcwire.com/2018/07/25/new-deep-learning-algorithm-solves-rubiks-cube/Solving (and attempting to solve) Rubik’s Cube has delighted millions of puzzle lovers since 1974 when the cube was invented by Hungarian sculptor and

Driving increased “data gravity” means customers are less likely to divert new data workloads to alternative platforms, and SalesForce’s two recent acquisitions - MuleSoft (a data integration and transformation company) for $6.5 billion in March (https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/03/23/salesforcecom-makes-a-transformative-move-for-the.aspx) and Datorama (cloud AI for marketing) for $800 million (https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/07/27/salesforce-strengthens-its-ai-capabilities-with-an.aspx) further highlight their desire to make it as easy as possible for customers to get data on to their platform and process it there.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/07/27/salesforce-strengthens-its-ai-capabilities-with-an.aspxThe relationship management software company has announced its fourth acquisition this year.

Recent advances in AI mean that it would now be possible to develop autonomous weapons - systems which are capable of making automated decisions to take human life. Elon Musk, DeepMind and others have signed a pledge never to create AI weapons:

“We the undersigned agree that the decision to take a human life should never be delegated to a machine. It goes on to warn “lethal autonomous weapons, selecting and engaging targets without human intervention, would be dangerously destabilizing for every country and individual.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/samshead/2018/07/18/elon-musk-deepmind-founders-and-others-promise-not-to-make-lethal-ai-weapons/#165c8a1b7269The signatories have promised to “neither participate in nor support the development, manufacture, trade, or use of lethal autonomous weapons.”

A big step towards making devices like Alexa or Siri (or more likely Google Assistant, given that this research comes from DeepMind) better understand humans is the development of “theory of mind”. By around 4 years old, human children can understand that their beliefs may diverge from those of others, and that understanding that divergence can help predict likely future behaviour of others - applying this to human interaction might make the experience more natural. A first step, DeepMind’s algorithm is able to analyse the behaviour of AI systems which are otherwise too complex for people to understand and to try to predict their behaviour.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/computer-programs-can-learn-what-other-programs-are-thinkingAlgorithms achieve a machine theory of mind

Among many promising applications for AI in medicine, cardiology is one with the greatest potential. Current clinical practice calls for manual analysis of a wide range of complex diagnostic imagery, and this analysis is time consuming and error prone, even for the most experienced doctors. Advances in the technology are hampered by ethical concerns that augmenting human decisions with AI violates the relationship between doctor and patient.
https://www.news-medical.net/health/Artificial-Intelligence-in-Cardiology.aspxThe continuous development of the technological sector has enabled the industry to merge with medicine in order to create new integrated, reliable, and efficient methods of providing quality health…

Following the controversy around (and expiration of) Google’s $15 million contract with the US Department of Defense (https://mashable.com/2018/06/02/google-defense-department-project-maven-contract-not-renewed/?europe=true#ebCfKFgiPPqN), the US government has now signed an $885 million contract with Booz Allen - and i’m willing to bet that there will be far less public debate around the ethics of the applications of technology under this contract than with Google.
https://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2018/07/30/pentagon-signs-885-million-artificial-intelligence-contract-with-booz-allen/The U.S. Department of Defense will for the first time be using large-scale AI systems that could automate mundane tasks and augment the work of military members. The contract also will go toward…

Yet another example of the value of simulated training, researchers at OpenAI trained a robotic hand using hundreds of years of  object manipulation inside a computer simulation. The resulting hand movements are significantly more dexterous than anything developed so far.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611724/artificial-intelligence-driven-robot-hand-spends-a-hundred-years-teaching-itself-to-rotate/A reinforcement-learning algorithm allows Dactyl to learn physical tasks by practicing them in a virtual-reality environment.

In an interesting piece of research intended to highlight the biases embedded in AI systems and training data, a team at the University of Melbourne produced a system capable of making assessments of physical attributes and the emotional state of people in a photo. Hidden in the assessments are a range of biases - gender is assumed to be a binary state, there are only five ethnicities, and emotional judgement or “responsibilities” are clearly highly subjective.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/biometric-mirror-judges-your-looks/Would you be freaked out if a facial recognition mirror started making judgments about your age, gender, race, attractiveness, and even trustworthiness? Get ready to meet the Biometric Mirror, a…

Two years after the unveiling of the original Tensor Processing Unit, Google’s announced “Edge TPU” - tiny AI accelerator chips designed to be embedded in IoT devices. Models will be trained on large, server clusters like today, and then embedded in edge devices in factories or workshops - perhaps analysing samples for quality control, processing movement of objects around a plant, etc.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/26/17616140/google-edge-tpu-on-device-ai-machine-learning-devkitThe hardware is destined for enterprise applications, not your phone

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.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/lip-reading-artificial-intelligence-could-help-deaf-or-spiesA 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://techcrunch.com/2018/07/31/waymo-partners-with-phoenix-to-connect-people-to-public-transit/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://www.engadget.com/2018/08/01/google-search-data-journalism/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://www.datanami.com/2018/08/01/deep-speare-emulates-the-bard-with-ai/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://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/01/elon-musk-says-tesla-ai-chip-project-is-finally-coming-to-fruition.htmlElon 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://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180801131551.htmResearchers 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://phys.org/news/2018-08-particle-physicists-team-ai-toughest.htmlExperiments 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://www.networkworld.com/article/3294198/internet-of-things/why-iot-for-seniors-is-a-lot-tougher-than-it-looks.htmlSenior 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://www.wired.com/story/using-artificial-intelligence-to-fix-wikipedias-gender-problem/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://medium.com/s/story/facial-recognition-is-the-perfect-tool-for-oppression-bc2a08f0fe66It’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…

eBay describes 5 key approaches which have helped them drive incremental sales of more than $1 billion per quarter i.e. generating sales which otherwise wouldn’t have happened “quarter after quarter, and year after year”.:

1. deep learning has valuable use cases today

2. there are potential applications right across the business, many invisible to users but with tangible benefits (e.g. “right pricing”, improving advertising, predicting delivery windows)

3. “big data” isn’t new - what’s new is crossing the cost inflection point

Apparently the global market for AI was $2.65 billion, mainly focused on a few core suppliers. The US is the biggest single spender at over 35%, and although text processing was the most common used application in 2017, this is clearly expected to move towards video and other media over the coming years.
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/ai-software-market-to-hit-78b-by-2025-here-are-the-top-applications-for-the-technology/The market for AI software is exploding, with IBM and Google leading global suppliers, according to QY Research.

Looking for useful top tip to tune your resume? Dont list your job title, describe your achievements. In particular, what projects did you do? How did data inform the outcome? What skills did you demonstrate that show complexity or breadth?
http://uk.businessinsider.com/tips-for-resume-amazon-jobs-2018-7Your résumé is a recruiter’s first impression of you during the job search. To impress recruiters like Celeste Joy Diaz, a recruiting manager at Amazon…

As if to back up concerns that grocery retailers should be scared of Amazon’s entry to the segment, Whole Foods customers are reporting mainly positive improvements since the purchase by Amazon last year, including higher quality merchandise, and of course, the promised lower costs.
https://www.512tech.com/technology/survey-says-whole-foods-customers-have-liked-changes-since-amazon-takeover-but-have-they-been-enough/jZVnZbZDCbW07wAqnUdc0I/According to a new survey released by market research firm Morgan Stanley, Whole Foods customers indicated they have had a better overall experience at the grocer since Amazon took over last fall.