algorithms: ai, ar, vr, crypto

People Won’t Talk to Alexa or Siri in Public

Jan 30, 2017 | ,

Virtual assistants are supposed to be a linchpin of tech’s future. Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Samsung, and others have all made big investments in the tech. Many of them are using the idea of a disembodied, information-fetching helper as a selling point for new devices.But while these assistants are infiltrating more and more gadgets, they still face a few giant hurdles on their way to wider acceptance. One, as this chart from Statista shows, is simple: People just don’t want to use them in public.

Source: Where people use virtual assistants: CHART – Business Insider

The connected car craze

Jan 28, 2017 | , , ,


The Internet of Things has created a new market in the automotive industry, which is showing no signs of slowing down. Connected cars and their associated services are expected to grow from $13.6 to over $42 billion by 2022.

A glimpse of our collective future can be seen in Cadillac’s Book by Cadillac entrance — an on-demand, luxury lifestyle-driven vehicles by subscription. The $1,500-a-month car subscription service allows members to swap out different models of high-end sedans and SUVs, beginning in New York in February. It’s the same business model as ClassPass or Netflix, but for the GM-owned Cadillac brand, competing with the likes of Audi’s luxury mobility offering, Audi on Demand.

Source: How automakers are cashing in on the connected car craze | VentureBeat | Transportation | by Brendan O’Brien, Aria Systems

Movies Starring You in a Thousand Plotlines

Jan 25, 2017 | , , ,

Moriarty believes that as computer graphics improve, the faces of actors, or even political figures, could be subtly altered to echo the viewer’s own features, to make them more sympathetic. Lifelike avatars could even replace actors entirely, at which point narratives could branch in nearly infinite directions. Directors would not so much build films around specific plots as conceive of generalized situations that computers would set into motion, depending on how viewers reacted.

“What we are looking at here is a breakdown in what a story even means—in that a story is defined as a particular sequence of causally related events, and there is only one true story, one version of what happened,” Moriarty said. With the development of virtual reality and augmented reality—technology akin to Pokémon Go—there is no reason that a movie need be confined to a theatrical experience. “The line between what is a movie and what is real is going to be difficult to pinpoint,” he added. “The defining art form of the twenty-first century has not been named yet, but it is something like this.”

Source: The Movie with a Thousand Plotlines – The New Yorker

The Age of Alexa

Jan 14, 2017 | , , , ,

The overall play for Amazon, says Forrester Principal Analyst Thomas Husson, is to continue to make Alexa more useful with more smart home integration and more media capabilities. Why? The more people use Alexa devices, the more likely they are to spend money on Amazon. And so, unlike many rivals, it can afford to take a loss on the gadgets. “Amazon will increasingly subsidize Echo by bundling content (think music, video) with the device,” Husson says. “They can afford this since this is not core to their business model: the end-goal is to facilitate interactions.”

Source: Amazon Echo vs. Google Home vs. Microsoft Cortana vs. Apple Siri – Business Insider

See also: Amazon’s Alexa at CES 2017 

Why AI Poker Is Very Hard

Jan 13, 2017 | , ,

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“In a complete information game you can solve a subtree of the game tree,” says Professor Tuomas Sandholm, who built the Libratus system with PhD student Noam Brown. AI trying to win a game of chess or Go can work through how a sequence of moves will play out. “With incomplete-information games, it’s not like that at all. You can’t know what cards the other player has been dealt,” he explains. “That means you don’t know exactly what subgame you’re in. Also, you don’t know which cards chance will produce next from the deck.”

Incomplete information games have thus far proved much harder to solve. CMU’s AI focuses on information sets, a grouping of possible states that take into account the known and unknown variables. It’s a massive mathematical undertaking. “The game has 10 to the power of 160 information sets, and 10 to the power of 165 nodes in the game tree,” says Sandholm. That means there are more possible permutations in a hand of poker than atoms in our universe. “And even if you had another whole universe for each atom in our universe and counted all the atoms in those universes, it would be more than that.”

Source: This AI will battle poker pros for $200,000 in prizes – The Verge  

See also:  

Amazon’s Alexa at CES 2017

Jan 6, 2017 | ,

Amazon isn’t at CES in any formal capacity, but once again, it seems to be everywhere thanks to Alexa. Since opening up its voice assistant to other companies’ products, we’ve seen it put in all types of gadgets and gain some strange integrations. And at CES this week, the continuation of that is one of the biggest trends we’ve seen. Here are the highlights:

Source: Amazon’s Alexa is everywhere at CES 2017 – The Verge

Bot Gender

Jan 2, 2017 | , , , ,

By creating interactions that encourage consumers to understand the objects that serve them as women, technologists abet the prejudice by which women are considered objects. They may overlook this hazard in part because these workers are, for the most part, men. The field of artificial intelligence has been accused of still lower gender diversity than the tech sector generally. Although women held fifty-seven per cent of all professional jobs last year, they held only a quarter of computing jobs; Latina and black women held just one and three per cent of those jobs, respectively. Fei-Fei Li, a professor of computer science at Stanford who helped pioneer computer vision, has recently advocated for greater diversity among A.I. workers, including gender diversity, citing the biases that have plagued machine-learning algorithms.

Source: The Bot Politic – The New Yorker

Virtual Assistants & Chatbots in 2017

Jan 2, 2017 | , , ,

Experimentation with voice-activated assistants and text-triggered chatbots blossomed in 2016, enabling users to order from Taco Bell using Slack’s messaging interface, check the status of UPS packages and order office supplies from Staples. In 2017, some of these tools won’t make the cut while others will proliferate across consumer and enterprise sectors, creating new workflows, operational efficiencies and opportunities for improved customer service.

Source: Virtual assistants, chatbots poised for mass adoption in 2017 | CIO

Virtual Reality Cafes

Dec 28, 2016 | , , ,


Every now and then it’s fun to take a break from fighting real-life bloodsucking mutants and spend an hour slaughtering some virtual zombies. Luckily, there is now a convenient way for you to escape this waking life for the world of the undead. Two brick-and-mortar locations for virtual reality gaming have opened in New York City this winter, giving New Yorkers the opportunity to experience the cutting edge of VR and thus the cutting edge of the zombie apocalypse.

Source: Step Into A Van Gogh Masterpiece Or Just Kill Some Zombies At These Virtual Reality Cafes: Gothamist

A Killer App for VR?

Sep 14, 2016 | , , ,


Even if the HoloLens, Rift, and Vive don’t themselves grow into the kind of mass-appeal gadgets that inspire mainstream acceptance, the breakthrough solutions they offer could lead to generations of ever-more-sophisticated VR products. And to be sure, the devices make you gasp with wonder when you use them for the first time; it’s one thing to read about the promise of virtual reality, and quite another to experience how utterly transporting the technology can be.

Source: What The First Mac’s Failure Teaches Us About VR | Co.Design | business + design

See Also: Insights: Dancing By Ourselves And The Unbearable Aloneness Of Being (Virtual)