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://rob.al/2v5sAZz
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://rob.al/2IEbJPA
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://rob.al/2HBelxs
A few weeks ago, a dejected CTO told me it took his team three weeks to build a machine learning model. I told him a model in just three weeks sounded great, and he agreed. So why the long face? Be…
As the cost of AI drops, things which aren't currently thought to be solvable through prediction will suddenly be viable – and this will primarily be complimented with human judgement. Computers predict better than people can, but then these predictions will be "handed off" to a human to use judgement to determine the response (such as whether or how to act, or to ignore). Ultimately, the authors recommend that companies develop a "thesis" outlining what you plan to "predict" (e.g. what is "best"), the time until AI becomes so embedded that investments without it are not viable, recognising that progress towards that point will be exponential.
https://rob.al/2FoXBaU
Rotman School of Management professor Ajay Agrawal explains how AI changes the cost of prediction and what this means for business.
The demise of the retail store may have been (greatly) exaggerated. Yes, many big box stores are disappearing, being unable to compete on cost or selection with online vendors, many companies are turning to technology to survive the change by inviting themselves directly in to customers' homes, or optimising their supply chain and product ranges using AI and small, local, relevant locations. Others are making the retail store the place you go to try out a physical product which you then buy online, creating "showroom destinations" for customers. One thing's clear – this battle is not yet lost.
https://rob.al/2jdFThS
We discuss the technologies and trends, from supply chain software to in-store AR technology, that are helping today’s brick-and-mortar retailers stay competitive as e-commerce continues to grow.
“That some big-name apps have removed their Apple Watch apps isn’t a sign that the Apple Watch is failing as a platform: It’s a sign that the platform is evolving [as developers learn what the new form factor is truly useful for]”
https://rob.al/2GIN140
It joined Twitter, Amazon, Google Maps, and Slack, among others.
An innovative saving product: “With myAgro’s Mobile Layaway platform, farmers save for seeds, fertiliser and specialised training via scratchcards – in the same way they might buy phone credit”
https://rob.al/2uTaXwb
Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship winner: Anushka Ratnayake, myAgro
An interesting concept – obvious when explained, but of course, many of the good ones are: “While paradigms like imperative or functional programming characterize certain underlying aspects of our mental model of program, gradual programming describes a process by which a mental model is formed”
https://rob.al/2qd2krk
Programming is a fundamentally incremental (or gradual) process, and our programming languages should reflect that. I show several ways in which program models transition over time and discuss how…
A fascinating tool to support developers. I'm proud to say they had only a few recommendations and findings from my code/repositories (although i have subscribed, so i'll get notifications for others in future too) – and i can see how a tool like this could really help developers to produce better, more supportable, more secure code.
https://rob.al/2FpzVTH
Zurich-based DeepCode claims that their system — essentially a tool for analyzing and improving code — is like Grammarly for programmers. The system, which uses a corpus of 250,000 rule…
While IBM's latest figures show that perhaps the elephant can't dance after all (https://rob.al/2Kn2HrS), Microsoft's pivot from a software to cloud services company is really starting to pay off – reporting revenue nearly $1bn higher than market expectations last year. Changing the direction has clearly been hard (e.g. disbanding the Windows Engineering team, previously the core of the company), and it's hard to see how a company of that size, and with that number of highly passionate people, can successfully adapt so quickly, but it seems to be well on track.
https://rob.al/2KlrI6N
Revenue boost from cloud business and upbeat forecast add to stock price confidence