Yep. See here for more details:
Face and hand tracking in the browser with MediaPipe and TensorFlow.js — The TensorFlow Blog
Yep. See here for more details:
Face and hand tracking in the browser with MediaPipe and TensorFlow.js — The TensorFlow Blog
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May 11, 2020 in AI, new!
Tagged AI, google, recognition, tensorflow, tracking
The Sonos One is a smart little speaker. Using Google Assistant and IFTTT.com make it even smarter.
Chatbots are relatively straightforward to deploy these days. AI providers like IBM and others provide all the technology you need. But do you really need them? And if you already have a bunch of them deployed, are you doing it right? If these questions have you wondering, I recommend you read this: Does Your Company Really Need a Chatbot?
You still may want to proceed with chatbots: they make a lot of business sense for certain types of work. But you will have a better idea when not to use them, too.
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May 27, 2019 in AI, new!
What are some of the flaws with facial recognition software? Too many for me just to list. Instead, read this article to get a sense of how bad this software can be.
San Francisco is in the vanguard of trying to rein in this technology. Let’s hope more jurisdictions do the same.
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May 16, 2019 in IT, new!
Tagged AI, facialrecognition, IT, law, legal
I am glad to see more articles highlighting the difference between ML and AI. For example, this one: How machine learning is different from artificial intelligence – IBM Developer.
There is still lots to be done in the field of machine learning, but I think technologists and scientists need to break out of that tight circle and explore AI in general.
(Image: from the article)
Nope. And this piece, Machine Learning Vs. Artificial Intelligence: How Are They Different?, does a nice job of reviewing them at a non-technical level. At the end, you should see the differences.
(The image, via g2crowd.com, also shows this nicely).
Possibly, but as this article argues, there are at least three areas where robots and suck at:
Creative endeavours: These include creative writing, entrepreneurship, and scientific discovery. These can be highly paid and rewarding jobs. There is no better time to be an entrepreneur with an insight than today, because you can use technology to leverage your invention.
Social interactions: Robots do not have the kinds of emotional intelligence that humans have. Motivated people who are sensitive to the needs of others make great managers, leaders, salespeople, negotiators, caretakers, nurses, and teachers. Consider, for example, the idea of a robot giving a half-time pep talk to a high school football team. That would not be inspiring. Recent research makes clear that social skills are increasingly in demand.
Physical dexterity and mobility: If you have ever seen a robot try to pick up a pencil you see how clumsy and slow they are, compared to a human child. Humans have millennia of experience hiking mountains, swimming lakes, and dancing—practice that gives them extraordinary agility and physical dexterity.
Read the entire article; there’s much more in it than that. But if your job has some element of those three qualities, chances are robots won’t be replacing you soon.
Here’s an assortment of 42 links covering everything from Kubernetes to GCP and other cloud platforms to IoT to Machine Learning and AI to all sorts of other things. Enjoy! (Image from the last link)
WIRED has a good review of the latest product from Sonos, here: Sonos One Review: Amazon’s Alexa Is Here, But It Still Has Some Growing Up to Do
What makes this development significant to me is that it signals that Sonos is concerned with Apple and others coming and taking away market share. Sonos has a great line of products already, but Apple is threatening to take a piece of that with their new home speaker with Siri/AI capability. Sonos has beefed up their AI capability to meet the challenge.
I expect that the next big thing in IT will be the vocal interface tied in with a speaker system in some form. I expect we will see them everywhere. Perhaps not for extended communication, but for brief and frequent requests.
If you are an IT person, I recommend you learn more about chatbot technology and how it will integrate with the work you are doing. More and more users will want to be able to communicate with your systems using voice. You need to provide a vocal interface for them to get information and send information.
Most homes will have one device acting as an aural hub. Sonos wants to make sure it is one they make, and not Apple.
This piece: What it’s like to be a modern engraver, the most automated job in the United States — Quartz, reminded me once again that the best use of technology is to augment the people doing the work, and not simply take away the work. Must reading for anyone who’s believes that the best way to use AI and other advanced tech is to eliminate jobs. My believe is that the best way to use AI and other advanced tech is to make jobs better, both for the employee, the employer, and the customer. The businesses that will succeed will have that belief as well.
(Image from this piece on how humans and robots can work together.)
According to Haydn Waters, a writer at CBC, the mail robots at the corporation are being discontinued. Instead:
Mail will be delivered twice a week (Tuesday and Thursday) to central mail delivery/pickup locations on each floor.”
What gets lost in alot of discussions of robots, AI, etc., taking all the jobs is that the drivers for the decisions is not technology but economics. If there is no economical need for robots and other technology, then that technology will not just appear. There is nothing inevitable about technology, and any specific technology is temporary.
Of course there will be more use of robots and AI and other technology to replace the work people may currently do. The key to finding work will be to continually improvise and improve on the tasks one has to do to remain employed. That’s something humans do well, and technology will struggle with for some time in the future, AI hype not withstanding.
If you are looking to build AI tech, or just learn about it, then you will find these interesting:
This is a pretty cool DIY project: The AIY Voice Kit Lets You Build a Google Home for Only $35.
Now, I have my qualms about letting Google have access to so much personal information. If you do not have such qualms and you want to build a cool project, click the link and head on over to Wired, where they have more information on it and how to get it.
According to this, chatbots in China have been removed after being critical of the Chinese government. This to me is not unlike what happened to Microsoft's chat bot that became racist after being feed racist input from users. If you put AI out there and allow any form of input, then the equivalent of vandals can overtake you AI and feed it whatever they choose. I'm not certain if that was the case in China but I suspect it was.
AI researchers need to expect the worst case use cases if they allow their software to do unsupervised learning on the Internet. If they don't, it's likely that their projects will be a disaster and they will do damage to the AI community in general.
In France, politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon plans to be in seven places at once using something similar to a hologram. According to Le Parisien:
Strictly speaking, these are not holograms. Jean-Luc Mélenchon will be present in seven different places thanks to … an optical illusion discovered for the first time half a century ago by an Italian physicist
Virtual Mélenchon reminds me of the politician Yance in Philip K Dick’s novel, The Penultimate Truth. We may not be far off where we get virtual candidate that look like people but behind the scenes we have AI or some combination of AI and people.
For more on the technology, see the article in Le Parisien. For more on Dick’s novel, see Wikipedia. Read up now: I think we can expect to see more of this technology in use soon.
This piece, Most engineers are white — and so are the faces they use to train software – Recode, implies that AI software doesn’t do a good job recognizing non-white faces because most engineers (i.e. software developers) are white. I’d argue that the AI does a poor job because of this: the developers aren’t very good.
Good software developers, in particular the lead developers, take an active role in ensuring they have good test data. The success of their software when it goes live is dependent on it. Anyone using training data (i.e. using test data) in AI projects that is not using a broad set of faces is doing a poor job. Period. Regardless of whether or not they are white.
If the AI is supposed to do something (i.e. recognize all faces) and it does not, then the AI sucks. Don’t blame it on anything but technical abilities.
Because if you don’t have augmented intelligence, and if you solely depend on AI like software, you get problems like this, whereby automated software triggers an event that a trained human might have picked up on.
AI and ML (machine learning) can be highly probabilistic and limited to the information it is trained on. Having a human involved makes up for those limits. Just like AI can process much more information quicker than a limited human can.
See the link to the New York Times story to see what I mean.
Interesting article: How IBM Watson helped Time magazine narrow its search for Person of the Year (IT Business)
From a technology point of view, it is also interesting that the IBM partner was using IBM’s Watson and Bluemix technologies.
I am biased here, as someone who works for IBM and believes in these technology, but I do think that if you think A.I. and cognitive doesn’t have a place in your business, you should read this. In the next two years, expect all your competitors to adopt these new technologies to compete with you.
This piece, 1.8 million American truck drivers could lose their jobs to robots. What then? (Vox) is a great primer on self driving trucks and how they are going to have a major impact sooner than later.
If you are interested in IT, AI or robots, it really shows one of the places where this technology is going to have a significant impact.
If you are interested in economics, politics, or sociology, then the effect of robots replacing all these truck drivers is definitely something you want to be aware of.
If you drive on highways, you definitely want to know about it.
In any case, it’s a good piece by David Roberts. That is his beat and I find he always does a great job of breaking down a topic like this and making it easier to understand and relevant to me. I recommend any of his pieces.
If you want a better understanding of artificial intelligence or if you want to gain some insight into the future of machine learning, I recommend these two free reports, found here: Free AI Reports from O’Reilly Media. There’s so much hype and speculation about AI: these reports cut through all that noise and they will give you a better understanding of what A.I. really is and where it is going.
P.S. If you like them, check out the many great non-A.I. related reports as well. You don’t have to be a technologist to be able to read them.
Comments Off on Want to understand what artificial intelligence and machine learning is?
Tagged advice, AI, intelligence, IT, machinelearning, ML, oreilly
I have thought a lot about Waze since I started using it. Without a doubt, it has improved my life substantially. Here are some other thoughts I had as I used it.
This article, Datasets Over Algorithms — Space Machine, makes a good point, namely
…perhaps many major AI breakthroughs have actually been constrained by the availability of high-quality training datasets, and not by algorithmic advances.
Looking at this chart they provide illustrates the point:
I’d argue that it isn’t solely datasets that drive A.I. breakthroughs. Better CPUs, improved storage technology, and of course new ideas can also propel A.I. forward. But if you ask me now, I think A.I. in the future will need better data to make big advances.
There is so much wrong in this article, The Real Bias Built In at Facebook – The New York Times, that I decided to take it apart in this blog post. (I’ve read so many bad IT stories in the Times that I stopped critiquing them after a while, but this one in particular bugged me enough to write something).
To illustrate what I mean by what is wrong with this piece, here’s some excerpts in italics followed by my thoughts in non-italics.
In short, like many of the IT think pieces I have seen the Times, it is filled with wrong headed generalities and overstatements, in addition to some concrete examples buried somewhere in the piece that likely was thing that generated the idea to write the piece in the first place. Terrible.
Things I am interested in or working on these days: AI, WebSphere setup, Python, Twitter programming, development in general, configuring Netscalers, cool things IBM is doing, automation, among other things.
Bots combined with AI and social networks are going to become an increasing problem. I thought of this when reading about the relatively recent Ashley Madison fiasco. Even if you wouldn’t be caught dead using such a service, this applies to you in other ways.
One of the fascinating aspects of Ashley Madison was just how many bots were employed by the company, at least according to this article: Ashley Madison Code Shows More Women, and More Bots.
How many? Alot! From the article:
After searching through the Ashley Madison database and private email last week, I reported that there might be roughly 12,000 real women active on Ashley Madison. Now, after looking at the company’s source code, it’s clear that I arrived at that low number based in part on a misunderstanding of the evidence. Equally clear is new evidence that Ashley Madison created more than 70,000 female bots to send male users millions of fake messages, hoping to create the illusion of a vast playland of available women.
This matters to you because chances are you will be interacting more and more with bots. Bots are cheap, and companies and organizations are going to go with them to meet their needs and yours. Maybe the bots will be harmless, like customer service reps that are actually just software programs. However it is also possible, just like it was at Ashley Madison, that these bots will be customized to con you into thinking you are dealing with a real person so that you will give them more money in some form or another. Bots may be obvious now, but as AI improves, so will the ability of bots to fool you. It’s not inconceivable that we will spend more and more time interacting with software that we think is human. It is something we need to think about and talk to fellow humans — and not AI driven bots — about how it will affect us and if it is negative, what we are going to do about it.
Robots in the real world may not realistically resemble humans for a very long time. Online bots that realistically resemble humans will get there much sooner. We need to quickly anticipate what positive and negative effects that will have and prepare for that.
A year or so ago, a parking lot I use had a human in a booth to take tickets and provide other services. That human booth was replaced by the thing in the photo above.
It’s not a robot and it’s not A.I., but it is replacing humans.
Stories about A.I. or robots taking over work makes them interesting. It’s also secondary to the real story. What is really taking people’s jobs is a willingness of others to use technology, and a willingness of companies to replace people with technology. People are not afraid to use technology. If anything, sometimes they prefer to deal with technology. This makes it easier for companies to go with technology as compared to using people, and if companies can save money or make money, so much the better.
It is happening in all sorts of industries, from food to sportswriting. The technology isn’t the driver of this: it’s the willingness of people to prefer technology that is the driver.
While there is lots of discussion about self driving cars, it’s much more likely that self driving trucks will become standard and accepted first. Here are two stories that support that. First this: How Canada’s oilsands are paving the way for driverless trucks — and the threat of big layoffs. Second, over at Vox, is: This is the first licensed self-driving truck. There will be many more. Key quote from Vox:
Last night at the Hoover Dam, the Freightliner company unveiled its Inspiration Truck: the first semi-autonomous truck to get a license to operate on public roads.
The Inspiration is now licensed to drive autonomously on highways in Nevada. It works a bit like a plane’s autopilot system: a driver will get the rig on the highway, and can take control at any time once it’s there. But the truck will be able to drive itself at high speeds, using cameras to make sure it stays within its lane and doesn’t get too close to the vehicle in front of it.
Self driving trucks are already up and operational. Additionally, the business case and the hurdles to overcome with self driving trucks will be easier to achieve than that of self driving cars in urban areas. Sooner than you think, you will commonly see self driving trucks on highways, especially during the hours when most highways are 80-90% trucks.
Transportation is changing. Self driving trucks are going to be leading that change. Self driving cars will be a distant second.