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…

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…

Choosing an effective loss function is a critical part of training ML models. This thought provoking article reminds us to be critical in the choice of this function, especially as in many models the reward function itself is unclear – does a recommendation system (e.g. promoting new articles, or songs) simply create an echo chamber,…

While at first Intel appears to be catching up in the race to develop chips optimised for AI, looking deeper reveals a broader, longer term strategy to develop open code allowing any competing or complimentary framework (Tendorflow, Caffe, MXNet, etc.) to run at optimum efficiency on their hardware. Back to those chips (and the dodgy…

A practical example of the importance of appearance: “appearing tall … is linked to increased social status across cultures, which researchers hypothesize has an evolutionary origin: If you were a taller caveman, you were probably better at taking down megafauna.” https://www.inverse.com/article/43535-mark-zuckerberg-booster-seat-explanation Sitting tall gives him the confidence boost he needs.

Pouring resources in to Alexa, AWS and experiments like Amazon Go, Amazon invested nearly $23bn on R&D last year, nearly 1/3 of the total spend of the top 5 (next come Alphabet, Intel, Microsoft, and Apple). https://www.recode.net/2018/4/9/17204004/amazon-research-development-rd Tech companies claimed the top five spots again this year.

IBM's 5 properties of effective AI? 1 Managed (durable infrastructure, effective data pipelines, data and model governance) 2 Resilient (automatic alerts when model drift is excessive) 3 Performant (runs in reasonable time on cost effective infrastructure) 4 Measurable (model accuracy, data volume, value released) 5 Continuous (evaluate and retrain models as needed) https://venturebeat.com/2018/04/21/ibm-outlines-the-5-attributes-of-useful-ai/ A few…