Just what i find

Technology can help or hinder. There's a growing evidence base indicating that overprotective parenting is leading to decreased ability for young adults to manage risk or respond to uncertainty in an inherently chaotic and increasingly fast paced world (and as a result, the pushback against protective playgrounds which sanitise  risk is also growing e.g. https://rethinkingchildhood.com/2018/04/19/risk-dangerous-playwork-adventure-conventional-playground/), so I'm interested when I see vendors offer technology which panders to what many consider to be moral panic; overall, I worry that applying technology in this way elevates fears, rather than reducing them. https://www.zdnet.com/article/kt-launches-nb-iot-based-child-monitoring-service/ South Korean telco KT has launched a child monitoring service that… Continue reading →

I find my Amazon Echo devices useful in a range of situations – getting travel and weather information quickly while i'm trying to get the kids out the door, converting units or setting timers while i'm cooking, playing music while i get on with tasks, even controlling the lights and heating – but i've also never ordered anything from it. I'm not sure why – this report asserts that users "don't trust" the devices with payment info, but Amazon already has all that, so it must be something else. I guess it just feels unusual to order something without even… Continue reading →

I've always found IntelliSense to be amazingly useful, and i miss it when i have to use an IDE or language which doesn't include it, so these AI-based improvements look like they'll only improve things. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2018/05/07/introducing-visual-studio-intellicode The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team Continue reading →

Waymo (Google/Alphabet) is finally launching fully automated vehicles. 52 cars will be deployed around their Mountain View offices and will only be able to operate in and arouund that area. Of note however is a second applicant – China's JingChi which has requested a licence for a single car with a remote person overseeing the vehicle and able to stop or control it in case of emergency.  Waymo assert that their vehicles already operate at SAE-Level 4, which includes automatically stopping in case of system failure (https://dryve.com/glossary/what-are-the-sae-automation-levels/), and so there's no way for staff remotely monitoring the car to take control… Continue reading →

Recordings of calls between Google Duplex and a hairdresser and restaurant are amazing. The AI interacts just like a human – adding ums and hesitation, and even successfully recovering the conversation when the restaurant staff misunderstood the request. I think this is what most people think of when they imagine a virtual, digital assistant, and I'm certainly looking forward to trying it out. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-44045424 The search giant unveils an experimental tool that can make appointments by calling businesses. Continue reading →

The most likely reason Uber’s self driving car killed a pedestrian is because of settings designed to increase passenger comfort. While I’m sure Uber would agree that in this case they went too far, it reminds us that autonomous vehicles (and robots in general) live only to the moral code we provide them. An interesting side note in this article highlights Dara Khosrowshahi’s vision that Uber is at the centre of the network of autonomous vehicles – rather than designing specific end nodes, Uber expects to work with others to be the one ring to binding them all together. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/uber-finds-deadly-accident-likely-caused-by-software-set-to-ignore-objects-on-road… Continue reading →

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 base for effective educational practices. https://www.economist.com/news/britain/21739671-third-its-schools-have-taken-part-randomised-controlled-trials-struggle-getting?frsc=dg A third of its schools have taken part in randomised controlled trials. The struggle is getting teachers to pay attention to the evidence Continue reading →

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 the flames of a large bonfire, or how topography affects weather formations. Researchers at the University of Maryland have proven that they can train a machine learning model on the existing time-series data, and the model was able to predict future states approximately 8 times… Continue reading →

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 Lang, Software Engineers, Google Research People are remarkably good at focusing their attention on a par… Continue reading →

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 code to their site, without having to deal with… Continue reading →