Just what i find

In an interesting piece of research intended to highlight the biases embedded in AI systems and training data, a team at the University of Melbourne produced a system capable of making assessments of physical attributes and the emotional state of people in a photo. Hidden in the assessments are a range of biases – gender is assumed to be a binary state, there are only five ethnicities, and emotional judgement or "responsibilities" are clearly highly subjective. https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/biometric-mirror-judges-your-looks/ Would you be freaked out if a facial recognition mirror started making judgments about your age, gender, race, attractiveness, and even trustworthiness? Get… Continue reading →

Two years after the unveiling of the original Tensor Processing Unit, Google's announced "Edge TPU" – tiny AI accelerator chips designed to be embedded in IoT devices. Models will be trained on large, server clusters like today, and then embedded in edge devices in factories or workshops – perhaps analysing samples for quality control, processing movement of objects around a plant, etc. https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/26/17616140/google-edge-tpu-on-device-ai-machine-learning-devkit The hardware is destined for enterprise applications, not your phone Continue reading →

In a major breakthrough, researchers from Deep Mind have improved the accuracy of AI lip reading, with half the error rate of previous methods, and over 50% accuracy. If embedded in to smart devices, it could make lip reading accessible to anyone with a smartphone – both helping the many people who struggle in noisy and crowded environments, and putting at risk the privacy of many others. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/lip-reading-artificial-intelligence-could-help-deaf-or-spies A new algorithm silences its competition Continue reading →

One of the questions we often ask in interviews is for a candidate to talk about a piece of data they've seen recently which surprised or interested them – an interest in data journalism is (for my team) an indicator of a person interested in numbers, a prerequisite for a successful career in data and analytics. These sorts of data are going to become more accessible as Google News starts to include them in search results to help quash "fake news" https://www.engadget.com/2018/08/01/google-search-data-journalism/ Google is shining its Search spotlight on useful news data. Continue reading →

One obvious use case for autonomous cars is to ferry people on the "last mile" between their starting point (e.g. home, office etc.) and public transport, and Google's Waymo has started a pilot programme in Phoenix to help evaluate the model. https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/31/waymo-partners-with-phoenix-to-connect-people-to-public-transit/ Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that spun out to become a business under Alphabet, is launching a program in Phoenix next month that will focus on delivering people to bus stops and… Continue reading →

Perhaps further evidence that "fitting to a curve" can produce syntactically and mathematically correct prose (e.g. which rhymes, has the correct pace and tone), without truly understanding the meaning of the content that's being generated, the emotion is missing. I'm sure simulation will continue to improve, but without true understanding of the causal link between words and the emotions they invoke, it's hard to see how truly creative, emotionally evocative content will ever be generated. https://www.datanami.com/2018/08/01/deep-speare-emulates-the-bard-with-ai/ A deep learning model trained on 2,700 of William Shakespeare’s sonnets is giving poetry fans fits trying to tell the AI-generated poems from the… Continue reading →

I've never considered before what's missed when faces are "blurred" to provide anonymity – of course, you lose facial expression and so emotions. A new technique allows faces to be anonymised without losing that expressive motion. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180801131551.htm Researchers have devised a way to replace the use of ‘blurring’ faces in news reports when anonymity is needed. The team’s method uses artificial intelligence (AI) techniques that aim to improve… Continue reading →

Tesla claims its custom AI chips are capable of processing 10x frames per second compared to their current off the shelf NVIDA chips – opening up a wide range of future development opportunities. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/01/elon-musk-says-tesla-ai-chip-project-is-finally-coming-to-fruition.html Elon Musk said Tesla has been working on a self-driving chip for three years. Continue reading →

The Large Hadron Collider generates more data per second than Facebook collects in an entire year – even after compression, it's far too much to store. Through clever use of AI and machine learning, applied in real time, the data can be analysed almost as it's generated, and the system decides for itself what dat to keep and what to chuck. More recently, the teams have started deploying deep learning with networks many, many layers deep. But there's more to come. https://phys.org/news/2018-08-particle-physicists-team-ai-toughest.html Experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest particle accelerator at the European particle physics lab… Continue reading →

In an interesting piece reminding us that "it's not their fault, it's yours" if people can't follow your user interface to access features they want or could find useful, Fredric Paul argues that, without more and better thought on usability and proper reconsideration of user interfaces for functionality not just to make it "sexy", IoT "for seniors" will end up no-where, and the potential for devices to help with elder care will never realise their full potential. https://www.networkworld.com/article/3294198/internet-of-things/why-iot-for-seniors-is-a-lot-tougher-than-it-looks.html Senior citizens are often touted as a huge potential market for the Internet of Things (IoT), but progress may be slower than… Continue reading →