Satalia is an optimisation company founded in 2007 by Dr Daniel Hulme. We solve hard problems using data science, optimisation and artificial intelligence, and were named a 2016 Gartner Cool Vendor. Our purpose is to enable everyone to do the work they love. By sharing the journey that we're on to understand ourselves and realise our purpose, we hope to inspire others in the AI sphere to be proactive in considering their relationship with society. Satalia was birthed during a period of relative calm for the Artificial Intelligence (AI) ecosystem.

If you've seen one Atari game you've seen them all, or at least once you've seen enough of them anyway. When we (humans) learn, we don't start from scratch with every new task or experience, instead we're able to build on what we already know. And not just for one new task, but the accumulated knowledge across a whole series of experiences is applied to each new task. Nor do we suddenly forget everything we knew before – just because you learn to drive (for example), that doesn't mean you suddenly become worse at playing chess. But neural networks don't work like we do.

The tech giant's AI software is named after Albert Einstein. Last week, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff touted a vision of the future in which everything and everyone will be connected and driven by machine learning and data. Benioff was launching his company's foray into artificial intelligence last week in front of 170,000 people at its annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. While the future-looking technology has been in the works for years and was built by hundreds of data scientists, Salesforce's AI tool actually takes a branding lesson from the past--specifically, from Albert Einstein. Salesforce unveiled Einstein in September and at Dreamforce explained how it works.

We've been hearing all artificial intelligence, all the time from the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) industry over the last several weeks. Microsoft is the latest to trumpet its AI capabilities for sales people with the general availability of Dynamics 365 coming on November 1st. Microsoft announced last summer that it was going to be combining its ERP and CRM into a unified solution, and this is the culmination of that announcement. Like many large organizations, Microsoft tends to deliver the news in waves -- it's coming, it's in beta, it's here. While the news smacks of "look at me too," Microsoft points out it has been working on AI long before its biggest competitors like Salesforce and Oracle, which recently announced their own AI capabilities at their respective customer customer conferences, Dreamforce and Oracle Open World. Microsoft has built in a couple of intelligence features into the release designed specifically for sales and service personnel.

AI today is a buzzword in technology that has everyone sitting up to pay attention. With every other billboard in the Bay area talking about AI and machine learning, it appears like the time of Jarvis from Iron Man, Samantha from'Her' and even the creepy'HAL' from 2001 – a space odyssey is fast approaching. This idea always presents itself with a bit of fear. Are machines going to take over? Are we going to lose our jobs?

They didn't know it, but the early humans who created the first stone axes and hammers started the incredibly fast-paced technological cycle we're living in today. Their primitive tools were used to create other, better tools, which were used to make even better tools. This cycle progressed relatively slowly for thousands of years -- leaving humans time to acclimate to the effect technology had on our daily lives. Today, technology changes so fast we can barely see what's 6–12 months ahead. Already, autonomous cars are driving on the road, money automatically moves between accounts as needed, homes autonomously control their climate while we're away.

In a quest to understand the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in advertising, The Drum, in partnership with Teads, has unveiled a new documentary, The Automation of Creativity, shot in Tokyo, London and Amsterdam. The 16-minute film explores how artificial intelligence is beginning to impact the creativity of advertising and the role of human creatives. To date, artificial intelligence (AI) machines have been able to write poetry, drive cars and there is even talk of a machine possibly winning a Pulitzer one day. Turning the focus on the ad industry, The Automation of Creativity film stars the world's first artificial intelligence creative director, AI-CD ß, launched by McCann Erickson Japan. AI-CD ß is set a brief by Mondelez in the film and presents its creative idea back to the client.

My last post focused on one key distinction between machine learning (ML) and econometrics (E): non-causal ML prediction vs. causal E prediction. I promised later to highlight another, even more important, distinction. I'll get there in the next post. But first let me note a key similarity. ML vs. E in terms of non-causal vs. causal prediction is really only comparing ML to "half" of E (the causal part).

Early in this decade interest in machine learning started to take off. Possibilities of machine learning seem endless. Today machine learning is truly & well underway for mass adoption. Anthony Goldbloom in his 2016 TED talk outlines how automation & machine learning will shape work of the future. Machines are getting very good at all high frequency routine tasks.

A few years ago I added an implementation of the max-margin object-detection algorithm (MMOD) to dlib. This tool has since become quite popular as it frees the user from tedious tasks like hard negative mining. You simply label things in images and it learns to detect them. It also produces high quality detectors from relatively small amounts of training data. For instance, one of dlib's example programs shows MMOD learning a serviceable face detector from only 4 images.