Just what i find

We make a lot of use of our Alexa at home, and i'm interested to see how it can help in hotels. Being able to order important but not time-critical services ("alexa, have someone pick up my laundry"), or get information ("alexa, what floor is the gym on") come to mind. But is it going to be more than a gimmick? I still occasionally visit hotels with those massive Bose speakers with an iPhone 30 pin connector on them. Even when that was the right connector, who ever used them?? I know i just unplugged them to plug my laptop… Continue reading →

I've long found the sustainability Oracle's business model questionable – and their latest move to hide (lack of?) cloud revenue growth in their financials further reinforces my view that they are a company on the way down. https://www.ft.com/content/a4fc61c6-740f-11e8-aa31-31da4279a601 Shares slide as analyst worries it may be ‘obfuscating weakness’ Continue reading →

Humans are good at tasks which require dexterity and manipulation of flexible materials (like thin tubes or fabric), but often these detailed tasks are associated with big, heavy "chunks" of other things (such as wiring up a heavy car dashboard before dropping it in to place). Typically, people and industrial robots are kept separate to avoid catastrophic injuries, but a new class of robot which is "aware" of its working environment and can react accordingly (e.g. slow down when a human moves closer) promises to make robots even more useful, taking control of the heavy lifting and allowing humans to… Continue reading →

The move to a cashless society is making steady progress across most of the world. In the UK, for example, more than 50% of transactions were completed cashlessly last year (https://www.ft.com/content/18e3eb92-7201-11e8-aa31-31da4279a601), while in China, UnionPay's rapid push in to new markets (as diverse as Malaysia, DRC, and Kazakhstan https://www.ft.com/content/a67350fa-1f6f-11e7-a454-ab04428977f9) demonstrates the sheer scale of the opportunity, with the pace of change hardly altered by the introduction of a new competitor (NetsUnion https://www.ft.com/content/9e8e4f50-63ea-11e8-90c2-9563a0613e56). But there's rightly growing concern about those being left behind (https://gkstrategy.com/cashless-revolution-leaving-people-behind/) and the solutions for that problem are yet to be discovered. https://www.ft.com/content/18e3eb92-7201-11e8-aa31-31da4279a601 UK spending on debit cards… Continue reading →

Recognising AI as a "general-purpose machine", rather than a distinct and immediately implementable tool or technique, can help explain why the anticipated gains are not yet being seen. With the introduction of other general-purpose machines, like the electric motor, the computer, the steam engine, it took decades for companies and industries to identify how they needed to change – simply automating an existing business process is unlikely to give massive benefits. Rethinking how an organisation achieves outcomes independent of the existing process or tooling is – but it'll take many more years to materialize. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611482/the-productivity-paradox The mission of MIT Technology… Continue reading →

Novel new approaches to the use of AI – highlighting its use as an augmentation to human judgement, not a substitute – are welcome, but still fall far short of addressing the elephant in the room – most machine learning or AI today is still pure statistical inference, often without even implicit acknowledgement of the path of causation (grass grows when the sun shines – but which causes which?). Until this problem question is addressed, even the new approaches outlined in this article will just be fitting data to a curve. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/technology/deep-learning-artificial-intelligence.html A branch of A.I. called deep learning has… Continue reading →

It's an often overlooked problem, but although electric vehicles produce zero emissions at point of use, and can be powered entirely with emission free fuel (e.g. renewable power sources), they still contain a lot of rare materials, often mined or produced under somewhat questionable ethical standards, so it's great to see how the world is starting to respond. https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/611518/a-freshly-funded-battery-startup-aims-to-ease-the-cobalt-crunch Conamix, a little-known startup based in Ithaca, New York, has raised several million dollars to accelerate its development of cobalt-free materials for lithium-ion batteries, the latest sign… Continue reading →

Although i was aware of the benefits of sparsely connected neural networks, this paper outlines an additional, slightly counter-intuitive property – scale-freeness through a method they call "Sparse Evolutionary Training). Starting from a sparse network, the model randomly adds new connections and drops weaker ones, "evolving" in to a more model which is more complex to define, but ultimately simpler, with fewer "hubs" (scale-freeness), and this less densely connected end state is quicker to stabilise (as it requires fewer calculations) and to maintain and train than a traditional statically connected network. https://phys.org/news/2018-06-ai-method-power-artificial-neural.html An international team of scientists from Eindhoven University… Continue reading →

As Sweden turns to an increasingly cashless society, criminals are having to find other ways to line their pockets. Last year a high profile string of robberies of moving trucks of Apple merchandise (https://web.archive.org/web/20180604083500/http://digg.com/2017/sweden-truck-heist) were finally bought to an end by a police sting, but now criminals have started catching and selling endangered species – some can go for around $120,000 per animal. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/stealing-owls/559136/ As the country ditches cash, some criminals turn to stealing owls. Continue reading →

Uber plans to launch a flying car service ("Uber Elevate"), predicting it'll be ready around 2025 – progress is being further accelerated by a $20M investment in a dedicated Research and Development site in Paris, Uber's first technology centre outside the US, focusing on research in to airspace management and overcoming the legal and practical issues this brings up (do you really want hundreds of flying cars zooming over your home?) https://www.thelocal.fr/20180524/uber-to-invest-20-million-to-build-flying-taxis-in-france Ride hailing app Uber wants to build flying taxis in France and announced on Thursday it would invest €20 million to develop the project. Continue reading →