Latest AI Articles:

1 - People Favour Expressive, Communicative Robots Over Efficient and Effective Ones

Episode Summary: Artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) are often seen as different trends, but there is a lot of overlap in these areas, where you might not expect. Lucid VR's CTO Adam Rowell speaks today about how AI plays a role in making VR work, augmenting the accuracy of images and making a more immersive and convincing experience for users. Rowell also touches on non-gaming VR apps that he and his company are excited about launching in the future.

At the recent KDD2016 (knowledge discovery and data mining) conference in San Francisco, Managing Director at Amazon Development Center Germany GmbH and Director of Amazon Machine Learning Ralf Herbrich discussed three lessons that he’s learned while working with sparse machine learning models at scale.

Episode Summary: At Facebook headquarters, I learned there are 1 billion active users every month. In a more recent interview at eBay headquarters in San Jose, l learned that the well-known digital store has over 1 billion products for sale. eBay is, without a doubt, the world’s largest marketplace, and there’s enough incoming data to keep a large team of data scientists busy for years. I speak with Zoher Karu, eBay’s chief data officer, about how eBay leverages data and machine learning to create a better experience for its customers and also their sellers, shedding light on important lessons for anyone looking to sell a product online.

Episode Summary: In this week’s episode, I speak with Igor Baikalov, chief scientist at cybersecurity company Securonix, about the trends in data security and where security itself has had to take a step up in the last five years. Igor touches on major meta-trends that have forced data security to advance, as well as what has made AI and machine learning a ‘requirement’ of modern data security strategy, something that has changed significantly in the last decade. Igor sheds light on these issues and likely future trends in cybersecurity over the next five to 10 years.

Machine learning has had fruitful applications in finance well before the advent of mobile banking apps, proficient chatbots, or search engines. Given the high volume, accurate historical records, and quantitative nature of the finance world, few industries are better suited for artificial intelligence. There are more uses cases of machine learning in finance than ever before, a trend perpetuated by more accessible computing power and more accessible machine learning tools (such as Google's Tensorflow).

Episode Summary: In this week's episode, we feature an in-person interview from Facebook's headquarters with Hussein Mehanna, director of engineering of the Core Machine Learning group. Mehanna and I talk in-depth about the topic of personalization, touching on the pros and cons, how it works at Facebook, and how his team is working to overcome technological barriers to implement personalization in a way that improves the customer experience. This interview was recorded in their famous "Building 20," which houses thousands of Facebook artificial intelligence employees and developers.

1 - How Locus Robotics Plans to Build a Successor to Amazon's Kiva Robots

Quiet Logistics' spin-off company Locus Robotics is building warehouse robots to help replace the former Kiva Robots once used by its parent company. Before being bought by Amazon in 2012, Kiva Robots supplied all of Quiet Logistics' robots, which were distributed to its clients to support warehouse operations. Instead of going to a new supplier, Locus Robotics was formed to design and build its own lines of warehouse fulfillment robots, which work in collaboration with humans to fulfill orders. When asked what makes the company's robots stand out amongst competitors, Locus Robotics' Chairman and Founder Bruce Welty said:
"My impression of everyone else who has entered this space is that they’re brilliant roboticists who have come into a market that they know nothing about. They don’t really, truly understand the business problem...We’re way down that path: because we know how warehouses work..."
Welty believes these robots will work alongside human workers for the foreseeable future, a minimum of five to seven years, citing their current limitation in working in the unpredictable situations that often occur in warehouses.

Episode Summary: When one thinks through important industry apps of AI, law or legal apps are not usually the first to jump to mind, but there’s certainly a need. Richard Downe PhD is vice president of Data Science at Casetext, a startup working on improving search and natural language processing and democratizing legal information. In this episode, he speaks about the current bottlenecks for people trying to get more out of of legal case documents, as well as some of the apps on which the Casetext team is working, to make these processes easier and to gain strategic advantage in this industry.

Bots are where the web was in 1994. The arena is still wide open, and we don’t know what’s going to work and what’s not, or areas where the overhype is most prevalent. The rise of the chat bots domain is still filled with unknowns, but there’s a tremendous amount of money to be invested and made in this industry, along with big wins and big losses, especially during this training-wheels period.