Facial recognition is a blossoming field of technology that is at once exciting and problematic. If you’ve ever unlocked your iPhone ($1,000 at Amazon) by looking at it, or asked Facebook or Google to go through an unsorted album and show you pictures of your kids, you’ve seen facial recognition in action. Whether you want it to or not, facial recognition (sometimes called simply “face recognition”) is poised to play an ever-growing role in your life. Read More
Monthly Archives: March 2019
Amazon's Rekognition software lets cops track faces: Here's what you need to know
Amazon Rekognition is the company’s effort to create software that can identify anything it’s looking at — most notably faces. Business organizations and, yes, law enforcement agencies are already licensing that software for their own use. That means that you don’t need to use Facebook or buy a face-scanning iPhone or a fancy video doorbell from Google-owned Nest or Amazon-owned Ring in order for facial recognition to be a part of your everyday life. With Rekognition, maybe it already is. And maybe you aren’t OK with that. Read More
The Bizarre and Terrifying Case of the “Deepfake” Video that Helped Bring an African Nation to the Brink
When Gabon’s government released the video, it raised more questions than it answered. Some Gabonese, seeing the video, thought there was little left to doubt about their president’s health. But Bongo’s critics weren’t sold. One week after the video’s release, Gabon’s military attempted an ultimately unsuccessful coup—the country’s first since 1964—citing the video’s oddness as proof something was amiss with the president. While a variety of theories about the video have circulated in the country, Bruno Ben Moubamba, a Gabonese politician who has run against Bongo in the previous two elections, argues that the video is a so-called deepfake—the photoshopped equivalent of video where software can create forged versions of people saying and doing things that they never actually said or did. Read More
Bill Gates says AI should improve education and medicine
“The world hasn’t had that many technologies that are both promising and dangerous,” Gates said Monday, mentioning nuclear energy and nuclear weapons as other examples with that much potential for profound change. As for areas where AI has helped society so far, he said, “I won’t say there are that many.” But that doesn’t have to be the case. He singled out medicine and education as areas where AI could help out the humans while speaking at a conference run by the new Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. Read More
Evolution of Natural Language Generation
Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) are among the fastest growing applications of AI due to the increasing need to understand and derive meaning from language, with its numerous ambiguities and varied structure. According to Gartner, “By 2019, natural-language generation will be a standard feature of 90 percent of modern BI and Analytics platforms”. In this post, we will discuss a brief history of NLG since the early days of its inception, and where it is headed in the coming years. Read More
Nvidia AI turns sketches into photorealistic landscapes in seconds
Today at Nvidia GTC 2019, the company unveiled a stunning image creator. Using generative adversarial networks, users of the software are with just a few clicks able to sketch images that are nearly photorealistic. The software will instantly turn a couple of lines into a gorgeous mountaintop sunset. This is MS Paint for the AI age. Read More
How To Develop An Artificial Intelligence Strategy: 9 Things Every Business Must Include
Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform every business – in the same way (and possibly more) as the internet has utterly transformed the way we do business. From smarter products and services to better business decisions and optimised (or even automated) business processes, AI has the power to change almost everything. Those businesses that don’t capitalise on the transformative power of AI risk being left behind. Read More
We’re not prepared for the promise of artificial intelligence, experts warn
Artificial intelligence will unleash changes humanity is not prepared for as the technology advances at an unprecedented pace, leading experts told an audience at the official opening Monday of Stanford University’s new AI center. Read More
Europe’s silver bullet in global AI battle: Ethics
As American and Chinese companies dominate the AI battlefield, the EU has pinned its hopes on becoming a world leader in what it calls “trustworthy” artificial intelligence. Read More
A Handy Way to Think About Machine Learning
I often find explanations of machine learning either too complex or overly simplistic. I’ve recently had some luck using a simple frame for explaining it to people in person. Let’s see if I can quickly capture it in this post. Read More
Rick's Cafe AI 