Just what i find

It's only September, and already people are thinking about Christmas shopping, or so Amazon would have us believe. In what's pitched as an example of data science at scale, but which a cynic might refer to as a solid marketing campaign, Amazon's published their "Top 100 toys" to put under the Christmas tree, apparently based Continue reading →

Sometimes the code i write doesn't work 6 months later – so I was incredibly impressed to read about the NASA team who reprogrammed the Voyager 1 space probe some 37 YEARS after the code was last changed. I can't imagine what the 40 hour wait between sending the commands and receiving the response was Continue reading →

Although we're all used to resetting our smartphones before we sell them, I have to admit that i often forget to wipe the memory of the carplay-enabled hire cars I used over the summer before returning them to the hire company. The Register highlights growing concern among a range of stakeholders – but not car Continue reading →

In their 2018 Salary Survey, Stack Overflow reveals a global increase in Software Engineer salaries, with some locations like London and San Francisco seeing rises in median salary of around 25%, with DevOps engineers commanding the highest pay. Check out how your salary compares here – https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/salary – and read the explanatory blog here: https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/09/05/developer-salaries-in-2018-updating-the-stack-overflow-salary-calculator/ Continue reading →

In a push to increase collaboration between the UK and Canada on industrial uses of AI, the UK government has teamed up with Canadian aircraft manufacturer Bombardier to offer a prize for ideas which solve an interesting problem – an optimal, self managing de-icing strategy for aircraft. De-icing causes extra fuel burn – either to Continue reading →

In what must have been a fun project, creative agency redpepper has built a robot which can play Where's Wally (Waldo in the US) using Google's AutoML Machine vision service. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i7HMPpxB-Y We built a little robot called “There’s Waldo” to test the capabilities of Google’s new AutoML Vision service. We’ve found that technologies can be Continue reading →

As more and more teams work with the Arcade Learning Environment to train RL models on Atari games, it becomes more important to a) ensure that comparisons are truly like-for-like and reproducible, and b) find ways to speed up and simplify model iteration. Google has developed a Tensorflow framework, called Dopamine, allowing researchers to focus Continue reading →

One problem with existing training methods for unsupervised learning used in human language translation is the availability of text "pairs" (such as the same sentence written twice) between obscure languages – such as Welsh to Urdu. Facebook is testing out a new mechanism involving "word embeddings" – vector-space representation of words in a given language Continue reading →

Looking for a way to pick up Python? Georgia Institute of Technology recently launched Code Shrew, a free, web-based learning platform for Python and object-oriented programming. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/07/code_shrew_python/ Shrew’d thinking: Code Shrew helps peeps who want to, or need to, gobble a slice of Py Continue reading →

A recently published poll shows that Americans are turning cold on one of the hottest technology frontiers – self-driving cars. A recent study showed that nearly half of drivers now say they'd "never" buy a Level 4 autonomous car, up from 30% two years ago, and Level 2 automation (which is recognised as being risky Continue reading →