There's a nice breakdown of the usability and scaling challenges the Google Photos team went through with the redesign of their app. Creating a "scrubbable" infinite scrolling page, maximising screen real estate, while maintaining photo aspect ratio, with instant loading and rendering, with libraries of 250,000 photos or more. The compromises and engineering challenges they…

Although it was first to market, Siri is so awful that i hardly ever use it. But with the reorganisation to bring Core ML and Siri under the same part of the company within Apple, and with a new "chief of machine learning and AI strategy", perhaps we'll see some improvement. https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/11/17559358/apple-new-ai-chief-john-giannandrea-siri-machine-learning John Giannandrea is…

All 4 of the "big players" personal assistants – Apple's Siri, Google Assistant, Amazon's Alexa and Microsoft's Cortana started off female (although they now have male voices). LivePerson CEO, Robert LoCascio, "believes the male-dominated AI industry brings its own unconscious bias to the decision of what gender to make a virtual assistant".  Are the tech giants…

There's a massive ethical problem here – people expecting medical notes, receipts with personal data, or their emails to only be "read" by a machine may not have given that consent if it was clear a human would read that they ordered takeaway for 2 to their hotel room while on that business trip without…

TNW has a brief summary of the ways that machine learning is being used to improve authentication and authorization, with a rundown of a number of approaches used by different companies. https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2018/07/13/authentication-cybersecurity/ To some, the future of authentication might look a little creepy. But the explosion of data and connectivity will provide plenty of ways…

First, deepfakes swapped our faces (https://medium.com/huia/live-deep-fakes-you-can-now-change-your-face-to-someone-elses-in-real-time-video-applications-a4727e06612f), now a US company is developing the technology to recreate voices. The therapeutic uses are clear – there are dozens of situations which can lead to a person losing their voice (https://www.entnet.org/content/common-problems-can-affect-your-voice) – and clearly having a computer sound like me as well as speak my words will help…

The search for "generalisation" in AI is somewhat hindered by an inability to test for it, so a recent paper by Google's Deep Mind team provides an interesting insight in to the thought process of teams pursuing this goal. The team generated a number of tests which contain patterns with abstract relationships between elements in…

while an interesting use case for sure, i'm not sure that I would pay $1,000 for a dustbin unless it automatically managed the inventory in my kitchen cupboards for me… https://www.digitaltrends.com/home/oscar-ai-trash-can-sorts-recyclables-garbage/ Autonomous, an ergonomic office furniture company, announced a Kickstarter campaign for Oscar, a smart home appliance. The AI-based device sorts recyclables and garbage. Environmentally-conscious…

In a very interesting and wide ranging talk on the history (including a very early mechanical perceptron) of AI, Carlos Guestrin outlined 4 trends he sees in the future: 1. shift from parallelism (e.g. spark) to HPC (e.g. deep learning on massive GPU clusters) workloads driving insights from huge (rather than "massive") data 2. a…

In a couple of short but interesting videos, researchers at Honda show us how they're designing robots to be tolerant of physical risks, such as knocks, which may cause the robot to topple over and sustain damage to itself or others, by hopping or "running" (several fast steps), depending on the direction of the push.…