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nick lally // art, geography, software » Blog Archive » geographies of software, AAG 2017
A variety of technologies have emerged in the last decade that make it easier and cheaper than ever before to make representations of everyday mobile embodiment. Increasing numbers of people are quantifying and self-tracking their everyday lives recording behavioural, biological and environmental data (Beer, 2016; Neff & Nafus, 2016) using a variety of technologies, for example: • lightweight wearable cameras such as the GoPro allowing users to record footage of their most banal everyday activities; • devices such as the Fitbit and Apple Watch bringing continuous physiological monitoring out of the medical realm and into mainstream culture; • apps like Strava allowing people to quantify their cycling, running and walking activities; • lightweight devices for measuring brain activity (EEG) and stimulation (EDA) becoming sufficiently robust and discreet to be used in non-lab environments. None of the underlying technologies are novel, but as they are made accessible in cheaper and more user-friendly packages, new techniques and sources of data are becoming more readily available for geographical analysis. Engagement with these technologies has created a rapidly expanding area of investigation within geography. The emergence of the quantified-self poses both opportunities and dilemmas for geographical thought. We wish to move past simplistic protests that dismiss such technology as offering another take on Haraway's (1988) 'god trick', presenting partial, and highly situated data as objective truth. Instead, this session will build on the potential identified by Delyser and Sui (2013) to take more inventive approaches toward mobile methods. The focus will be on how these technologies can be engaged with by critical geographers to bring new perspectives to their analysis of everyday embodiment.
Google DeepMind AI achieves near-human level speech capabilities
DeepMind, the Google artificial intelligence division behind the champion-defeating AlphaGo bot, has revealed that it's managed to create some of the most realistic, human level speech ever achieved from a machine. Called WaveNet, the new AI is said to act as a deep neural network that's capable of generating speech by sampling real human speech and forming raw audio waveforms. Testing among English and Mandarin Chinese listeners has found that WaveNet is already better than existing text-to-speech systems, but still just short of being as convincing as a real human's speech. Current text-to-speech programs work in one of two ways; the first is a human-sounding voice that speaks via recordings of actual speech that have been broken up into tiny pieces and rearranged -- a bit like a ransom letter. The other relies on a computer-generated voice that has been programmed with rules on grammar and sounds, meaning it doesn't need pre-recorded recorded material, but in turn comes out very robotic sounding.
Innovation in Tech Evolves in New Ways
Early reviews of Apple Inc. AAPL -2.26 % 's new iPhone 7 were, in a word, "meh." Pundits praised the many improvements in the device, but a consensus emerged that Apple had not given existing iPhone owners a compelling reason to upgrade. Why are the iPhone, and other computing devices like PCs and tablets, not changing as quickly as they once did? There are many reasons, but the central issue is this: It is harder than ever--more technically difficult, more expensive and more time consuming--to advance the state of the art. Our devices are so complicated that, at their most fundamental level, advancing them further pushes against the boundaries of physics.
EderSantana/awesomeMLmath
Information Theory Here is the deal, a probability density function (pdf) is as much as we can know about a radom variable. Machine Learning is about estimating "momements" (you should learn that) of a pdf. If your random variable is not Gaussian, you will need more than mean and variance to correctly describe it (mean and var are the 1st and 2nd order moments).
TES HireWire
The role purpose is to establish and lead the Applied Intelligence in Health group within the wider Health Informatics group, the aim of which is the development and deployment of innovative applications of computer science to improve patient care and medical and biological knowledge discovery. The role will build and evaluate Intelligent reasoning systems and autonomous multi-agent ecosystems to serve as key use-cases in the infrastructures of partner hospitals. Objectives of the role include: • Establishing novel methodologies for temporal representation, reasoning and management of medical knowledge and use the methodologies to create and evaluate measures of patient profile similarity based on mined temporal patterns in longitudinal patient records, using the resulting measures in personalised clinician assistant recommender systems. Successful candidates will have knowledge & skills in Artificial Intelligence, bioinformatics, and health/clinical informatics. Experience in translational research delivery, temporal medical knowledge management, bioinformatics, temporal representation and reasoning, multi-agent systems, graphical representations and machine learning is essential.
Morning roundup of Artificial Intelligence news for September 11, 2016
Follow Google's TTS system can mimic the human voice. Google has announced that DeepMind can mimic the human voice. While this feat might not seem that impressive given the fact that AI-driven voice synthesis has been around for some time, Google's engine can mimic any type of human voice without little to no interference or input from the user. We can all relate to Windows' XP TTS engine, where the user could instruct the system to read aloud chunks of texts either in a female or male voice. Google-owned artificial intelligence company DeepMind presented a deep neural network that generates amazingly human-like speech.
General Catalyst's Phil Libin says first bot IPOs are 2 or 3 years away – VentureBeat
VentureBeat sat down with Phil Libin, managing director at venture capital firm General Catalyst, to get his take on the state of the bot ecosystem. It was just a year ago that the former Evernote CEO joined General Catalyst as a partner. Since then, chatbots and conversational interfaces have roared into the technology mainstream, with hundreds of companies attracting more than 4 billion in funding to make thousands and thousands of bots and conversational UIs for platforms like Messenger, Slack, Alexa, and Allo, to name just a few. In April, Libin made his first investment in Begin, a stealth bot startup. And a few months later, Libin announced investments in Growbot and Butter.ai,
Amelia and the rise of digital labour
The market opportunity for artificial intelligence has been expanding rapidly, with analyst firm IDC predicting that the worldwide content analytics, discovery and cognitive systems software market will grow to US 9.2 billion in 2019. Automating IT and business processes for enterprises is cited by some as having a potential 5 – 7 trillion economic impact by 2025. IPsoft are one of the businesses on the front line of this new disruptive wave of technology and their solutions aim to transform business performance through the employment of'digital labor', most famously its cognitive agent Amelia. Amelia is capable of analyzing natural language, she understands context, applies logic, learns and resolves problems. Her declarative memory consists of both episodic memory and semantic memory, exactly the way human memory is organized.
Listen to New Google AI Program Talk Like a Human and Write Music
Google-owned artificial intelligence company DeepMind presented a deep neural network that generates amazingly human-like speech. Called WaveNet, this AI makes a significant advancement over existing speech synthesizers. What's more, it can write pretty good classical music. DeepMind is a British company, previously known for creating machine-learning AI software that beat the world champion of the notoriously-intricate game Go. Machine learning allows computer systems to teach themselves and make predictions based on gathered data.