Overview: Science&Technology

“data is the new oil” ... your company can consider itself lucky. You collected all this data, and then it turned out you were sitting on an oil reserve ... when you have that sort of luck, it is probably a good idea to ask “Are we really that lucky?”... the data you are sitting on now... accumulated over time, is the type of data used to build t…

regulation needn’t be such a compliance burden... an opportunity - how can we sustain a sophisticated and modern regulatory system, and at the same time manage complexity for end users?... re-imagining regulation as an open platform, based on digital logic... supports a future ecosystem of digital regulation tools and services... working with gov…

Over the coming years, we’ll see the BBC develop and roll-out more and more machine learning algorithms for storing, retrieving, tagging and possibly even creating content.... What if we lock our audiences in to what they just want to hear, never challenging them? ... Should the algorithms we use be open to public scrutiny?... inform our own thin…

GDS does have a clear function and is learning from its experiences ... struggled to demonstrate the value of flagship initiatives... or to set out key priorities.... Another criticism ... not sustained its framework of standards and guidance, with some being removed and web links broken... leave scope for interpretation and disagreement... somet…

Progress has been sporadic, but... plenty of observers wouldn’t have expected this much of GDS when it was set up in 2011... It made its mark largely because it had Maude, the senior minister in the Cabinet Office and a heavyweight in the Conservative Party, fully engaged and ready to back GDS chief Mike Bracken in inter-departmental tussles... i…

Any real-world solution consists of these core algorithms and a non-AI shell to prepare and process data ... this non-AI part is oftentimes the real value proposition of AI-driven companies. It’s their secret sauce.... f you build your business in the path of the AI mainstream train, nothing can save you.... there are a few scenarios that are imp…

Artificial intelligence has been hailed as the last invention human beings will ever create. Universal basic income... is now being discussed openly .... Design thinking has entered mainstream business lexicon ... These three unique concepts will have a powerful impact on work in the coming decades... If some people do not have to work to surviv…

The things that you can change (depth of the network, the activation function, the learning rate, etc.) are called hyperparameters. So by clicking around in the playground, you are "modifying the hyperparameters of a feedforward multilayer neural network".

a four-factor definition of what I consider to be a vertical AI startup:... full-stack fully-integrated solution to the end customer problem from the interface ... down the stack to the functionality, models, and data;... deep subject matter expertise... trust, respect, and relationships within the industry.... combine the subject matter and tec…

startups today need to build systems of intelligence™ — AI powered applications — “the new moats.”... SaaS and cloud services can have strong economies of scale; ... your product or service has “network effects” if each additional user ... accrues more value to every other user;... Proprietary software or methods is where most technology compan…

Here’s a discussion of the way machine learning-first startups are built, which ones are pushing the ecosystem forward, and why they look so different than the SaaS startups that came before them... you can do very interesting things with IBM Watson... if you spend a few months and a significant amount of money training it... their marketing claim…

big data has transformed AI, to an almost unreasonable level. Blockchain technology could transform AI too... Some applications ... mundane... Some appear almost unreasonable, like AI that can own itself ... This article will explore these applications... blockchains introduced three new characteristics: decentralized / shared control, immutable …

Deep Learning systems will most likely not be programmed in the manner that we do today. Rather, it will be more like working with a biological system where we purposely condition the system to achieve our objectives.

Q Data is a marketplace for selling and buying raw and aggregate data, and Tasko offers on-demand data collection... Many enterprises have plenty of data but don’t know how ... Latent value lurks everywhere... many startups know how to turn data into value using AI, but they’re starving for data.... Blockchain... will allow figuring out who orig…

organic, authentic voices in the public debate — more than 99% of which are in favor of keeping net neutrality — are being drowned out by a chorus of spambots.

Building on our Primer on Artificial Intelligence, this microsite is intended to help newcomers (both non-technical and technical) begin exploring what's possible with AI... a resource for anyone asking those questions, complete with examples and sample code

Meta-Learning can be understood as algorithms the search and select different DL architectures. Hyper-parameter optimization is an instance of this, however there are another more elaborate algorithms

The video distills the current state of AI into 3 waves... simplified presentation because it lumps all of machine learning, Bayesian methods and Deep Learning into a single category. There are many more approaches to AI that don’t fit within DARPA’s 3 waves. Pedro Domingos ... talks about the 5 Tribes of AI: Connectionists, Symbolists, Evolutiona…

A.I. Writer ... wrote an article. The only instructions it received were to write a story with the headline “Sugar controversy history”. It received no other input ... AlphaZero, the A.I. from DeepMind, learned to be the best at chess than any human in less than four hours.

Reuters designed a social monitoring tool, the Reuters News Tracer, which can identify events that are breaking on Twitter, analyzing millions of tweets with almost 80 percent accuracy.

an ecosystem that rewards publishers in a new kind of way... to disrupt the current financial norms of online publishing... reward users for browsing the web... make advertising less intrusive and more relevant... let readers ... ‘tip’ websites that they visit based on time spent on the site.

it is important for change agents to identify and solve real problems by developing the important skills for collaboration, storytelling and influence... Although digital transformation is one of the biggest trends in business today ... many still do so as a grassroots effort driven by resourceful individuals — digital change agents ... Digital c…

new crypto-economy for fearless, independent journalism that will empower action for change... the absolute dysfunction of the global information architecture — represented in the intersection of mainstream media outlets, social technology platforms and giant digital aggregators — that is sowing confusion, and paralyzing us... the global media in…

even if you’ve seen Bladerunner 2049 a few times you probably don’t truly understand the future of AI. But don’t let a lack of knowledge stop you from being seen as an AI industry expert.

News Quality Scoring Project ... humans and algorithm to separate “commodity news” from “value-added news” ... based on quantifiable and qualitative signals — like word count, freshness versus evergreen material, quote density, contextualization, and the presence of a byline... human/machine, subjective/objective hybrid as the still-under-constru…

the hashgraph consensus algorithm... much more cost-effective ... 50,000 times the speed, safer ... more efficient ... mathematically fairer than the blockchain.... the future of the internet and decentralized technology. 

AI is increasingly being used to support public participation in policy. While they offer a lot, they could invisibly skew policy if used carelessly.- 3rd post in preparation for my EWRC 2017 workshop on online communities and public participation in policy 

This edition focuses on getting the most out of podcasts and so includes a new tweak to my personal content strategy.

I was particularly ashamed of the way that the AAA ratings, which were in some sense a mathematical promise of safety, had been actually just lies, mathematical lies... like a weaponized mathematics ... actually people don’t want to know what their actual risk ... mathematics ... was being used ... so that people could go on doing essentially corr…

internal mandate demanding that Amazon teams communicate with each other by exposing “their data and functionality through services interfaces.” ... Bezos had quietly refactored Amazon into a platform company.... information technology can’t be compared to the transition from steam engines to railroads or from telegraphs to telephones — technolog…