To survive in today’s digital economy, it’s imperative for organizations to convert their key business stakeholders into “Citizens of Data Science.” Meaning, they should not only understand where and how to apply data science to power the business, but champion a data-first approach toward decision-making across the entire organization.
That’s the subject my new workbook, “The Art of Thinking Like A Data Scientist”, seeks to accomplish. It’s designed to be a pragmatic tool that can help your organization leverage data and analytics to power its business and operational models. The content is jammed with templates, worksheets, examples, and hands-on exercises — all composed to help reinforce and deploy the fundamental concepts of “Thinking Like A Data Scientist.” Read More
Daily Archives: August 5, 2019
Automated Reconstruction (Mapping) of a Serial-Section EM Drosophila (Fruit Fly) Brain with Flood-Filling Networks and Local Realignment
Reconstruction of neural circuitry at single-synapse resolution is an attractive target for improving understanding of the nervous system in health and disease. Serial section transmission electron microscopy (ssTEM) is among the most prolific imaging methods employed in pursuit of such reconstructions. We demonstrate how Flood-Filling Networks (FFNs) can be used to computationally segment a forty-teravoxel whole-brain Drosophila ssTEM volume. To compensate for data irregularities and imperfect global alignment, FFNs were combined with procedures that locally re-align serial sections and dynamically adjust image content. The proposed approach produced a largely merger-free segmentation of the entire ssTEM Drosophila brain, which we make freely available. As compared to manual tracing using an efficient skeletonization strategy, the segmentation enabled circuit reconstruction and analysis workflows that were an order of magnitude faster. Read More
Artificial intelligence predicts which movies will succeed—and fail—simply from plot summaries
Artificial intelligence (AI) still can’t see the future, but a new algorithm may come close: Using nothing but written movie summaries, the AI can consistently tell which films will play well—or rottenly—to critics and audiences. If the model can be further refined, it could one day help producers predict whether a movie will be a flop at the box office, before it’s even made. Read More
Advances in Conversational AI
Dialogue research is a crucial component of building the next generation of intelligent agents. While there’s been progress with chatbots in single-domain dialogue, agents today are far from capable of carrying an open-domain conversation across a multitude of topics. Agents that can chat with humans in the way that people talk to each other will be easier and more enjoyable to use in our day-to-day lives — going beyond simple tasks like playing a song or booking an appointment.
Generating coherent and engaging responses in conversations requires a range of nuanced conversational skills, including language understanding and reasoning. Facebook AI has made scientific progress in dialogue research that is, in the long run, fundamental to building more engaging, personable AI systems. In this blog post, we describe new open source data sets, algorithms, and models that improve five common weaknesses of open-domain chatbots today: consistency, specificity, empathy, knowledgeability, and multimodal understanding. Read More
Every step you take
Kashgar, China — You expect to have problems when reporting on sensitive stories in China. People following you, thugs blocking your way, obstacles springing up in the most innocuous of places — it shocks you at first but eventually you get used to things like that. It comes with the territory.
But when we went to the region of Xinjiang a few months back, it was a whole other level — surreal, sinister and sometimes comical all rolled into one. Read More
Watch Hong Kong Protesters Use Lasers To Disrupt Facial Recognition Cameras
Protesters in Hong Kong appear to be keenly aware of the Chinese mainland’s all-pervading Orwellian surveillance system and facial recognition software, and they are already taking action to thwart such systems installed in Hong Kong.
The UK Independent reports based on a viral video posted by a freelance journalist this week:
Protesters in Hong Kong are using lasers to blind security forces and avoid facial recognition cameras used by authorities.
Hong Kong protestors are on another level. Here they’re using lasers to avoid facial recognition cameras. A cyber war against Chinese artificial intelligence. pic.twitter.com/t1hIczr5Go — Alessandra (@alessabocchi) July 31, 2019
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