frost on red acer leaves with the sun shining behind them

Just what i find

  • The Push For A Gender-Neutral Siri

    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 Continue reading →

  • The rise of ‘pseudo-AI’: how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots’ work

    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 Continue reading →

  • AI could soon clone your voice

    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 Continue reading →

  • AI is finding out when the person using your account isn’t you

    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 Continue reading →

  • Google’s DeepMind developed an IQ test for AI models

    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 Continue reading →

  • Oscar the A.I. trash can sorts your garbage and recyclables

    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… Continue reading →

  • Apple’s Carlos Guestrin cautions AI leaders to think very carefully about how they use their data

    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 Continue reading →

  • Asimo Still Improving Its Hopping and Jogging Skills

    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. Continue reading →

  • We Grew Algae and Asked Spectrum Editors to Taste It

    I still believe that we have to change the way we're consuming the earth's resources if we want to leave to our children anything like the planet we inherited from our parents. But the products like this need to work on the marketing. Who wants to eat algae 🙂 https://spectrum.ieee.org/video/green-tech/conservation/we-grew-algae-and-asked-spectrum-editors-to-taste-it Algae could be the environmentally-friendly Continue reading →

  • Facebook and Apple Disagree on How to Curb Fake News for U.S. Midterms

    It's interesting to see how Apple and Facebook are approaching the problem of "fake news" differently. Facebook is sticking to it's "algorithmic" approach, which i guess would be far more scalable if (and it's a big if) it can be demonstrated to work. Apple's employing more people to review the news that's presented through the Continue reading →

About me

I’m rob. I spend my time exploring the world, playing board games with my family, solving complex technical problems, and learning new things. Sometimes i write about them here, or code them on GitHub. I believe a few things that guide what I do and how I do it:

  • Hard things are hard. It takes time, effort and practice to be good at them.
  • Everybody can learn something new every day. When we’re born we know how to eat and cry and that’s about it. Everything else we’ve learnt, and we can keep doing that all our lives.
  • Great teams are fun to work in, and great teams achieve great outcomes. The wider the range of people and perspectives in the room, the better the work.

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