AI News Today

I’ve had an idea kicking around at the back of my mind for years and finally spent a few hours over the last couple of weekends building it. It’s a probabilistic spreadsheet.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning can help to improve disaster relief programs by quickly processing large volumes of complex, fragmented data.

Here's a list of errors on this blog that I think were fairly serious. While what I think of as serious is, of course, subjective, I don't think there's any reasonable way to avoid that because, e.g., I make a huge number of typos, so many that the majority of acknowledgements on many posts are for people who e-mailed or DM'ed me typo fixes. A list that included everything, including typos would both be uninteresting for other people to read as well as high overhead for me, which is wh

Analyzing Arabic with WordStat WordStat text mining software can help you analyze more than 60 languages including; Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russia, Turkish and Arabic. Even though the information is available on our website, we are often asked by prospective customers about WordStat’s languages capabilities beyond the obvious ones like English and the main European languages. […]

One of the most common mistakes I see people make when looking at data is incorrectly using an overly simplified model. A specific variant of this that has derailed the majority of work roadmaps I've looked at is treating people as interchangeable, as if it doesn't matter who is doing what, as if individuals don't matter. Individuals matter. A pattern I've repeatedly seen during the roadmap creation and review process is that people will plan out the next few quarters of work an

Three major tools that companies have to influence behavior are incentives, process, and culture. People often mean different things when talking about these, so I'll provide an example of each so we're on the same page (if you think that I should be using a different word for the concept, feel free to mentally substitute that word). Getting people to show up to meetings on time Incentive: dock pay for people who are late Process: don't allow anyone who's

Fostering a sense of connection with your team is probably the hardest part of working remotely. When you work in an office together, you can walk by someone’s desk and give them a friendly “hello,” ask if they want to grab coffee later, and even share a joke with another colleague when you realize you […] The post Getting to know your remote teammates appeared first on Slack Design .

Do you find yourself designing screens with only a vague idea of how the things on the screen relate to the things elsewhere in the system? Do you leave stakeholder meetings with unclear directives that often seem to contradict previous conversations? You know a better understanding of user needs would help the team get clear on what you are actually trying to accomplish, but time and budget for research is tight. When it comes to asking for more direct contact with your users, you might feel li

People frequently 1 think that I'm very stupid. I don't find this surprising, since I don't mind if other people think I'm stupid, which means that I don't adjust my behavior to avoid seeming stupid, which results in people thinking that I'm stupid. Although there are some downsides to people thinking that I'm stupid, e.g., failing interviews where the interviewer very clearly thought I was stupid, I think that, ov

It's common to see people advocate for learning skills that they have or using processes that they use. For example, Steve Yegge has a set of blog posts where he recommends reading compiler books and learning about compilers. His reasoning is basically that, if you understand compilers, you'll see compiler problems everywhere and will recognize all of the cases where people are solving a compiler problem without using compiler knowledge. Instead of hacking together some half-baked solution th

Today we’re releasing a chapter on Keeping Data Private. Cookies enable a whole economy of personalized web applications—but also raise issues of security and privacy. New, powerful browser-side tools can help.

A common topic of discussion among my close friends is where the bottlenecks are in our productivity and how we can execute more quickly. This is very different from what I see in my extended social circles, where people commonly say that velocity doesn't matter . In online discussions about this, I frequently see people go a step further and assign moral valence to this, saying that it is actually bad to try to increase veloc

Being immersed in Slack’s highly collaborative culture and an even closer-knit team, saying no to meetings used to be slightly terrifying. But when I realized my calendar wasn’t always working for me, I had to make some adjustments to my thinking and my RSVPs. Whatever’s at the heart of your own “meeting decline guilt”—the patriarchy, […] The post How to say no to meetings without feeling guilty appeared first on Slack Design .

The last couple of weeks were super busy in “PyTorch Land” as we are frantically preparing the release of PyTorch v1.10 and TorchVision v0.11. In this 2nd instalment of the series, I’ll cover some of the upcoming features that are currently included in the release branch of TorchVision. Disclaimer: Though the upcoming release is packed […]

Tokenization plays an important role in key text analytics features, like entity and theme extraction. Whether you're building or buying, you've gotta know tokenization. In this two minute article, our Chief Scientist, Paul, lays out the fundamentals.

We recently announced the rollout of audio and video clips in Slack, which allow anyone on Slack’s paid plans to send audio, video, and screen share messages. With clips, you can quickly capture an idea, celebrate team wins, or present your work in a more personal way. Clips are transcribed, captioned, and searchable, so they’re […] The post The story of Slack Clips: Prototyping the path to audio and video messages appeared first on Slack Design .

An alternate title for this post might be, "Twitter has a kernel team!?". At this point, I've heard that surprised exclamation enough that I've lost count of the number times that's been said to me (I'd guess that it's more than ten but less than a hundred). If we look at trendy companies that are within a couple factors of two in size of Twitter (in terms of either market cap or number of engineers), they mostly don't have similar expertise, often as a result of path dependence — because the

Do you remember when having a great website was enough? Now, people are getting answers from Siri, Google search snippets, and mobile apps, not just our websites. Forward-thinking organizations have adopted an omnichannel content strategy , whose mission is to reach audiences across multiple digital channels and platforms. But how do you set up a content management system (CMS) to reach your audience now and in the future? I learned the hard way that creating a content model —a definition of con

There is a subfield of robotics research called “sim-to-real” (sim2real) whereby one attempts to solve a robotic task in simulation, and then get a real robot to do the same thing in the real world. My team at Google utilizes Sim2Real techniques extensively in pretty much every domain we study, including locomotion and navigation</a&gt

Today we’re releasing a chapter on Running Interactive Scripts. Binding a JavaScript engine to our browser—and building the system for passing data between JavaScript and browser code—makes possible a whole new world of interactive web applications.

Astrophysicists anxiously await the upcoming launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, slated for December 18. Things can go wrong. This spectacular giant will be the most powerful space telescope ever built, opening new windows to nascent galaxies and stars from billions of years ago, as well as to planets circling other stars in our cosmic neighborhood. It will help us refine our own story — a story of our origins and how similar and different we are to the rest of the universe. The history of

If there is one thing that Russia scholars can agree on, it is the poor quality of leadership that has plagued the country since its inception. Though some could have become the posthumous victims of inflated rumors or political propaganda, others may have been even crueler than we thought. People like Anna Ivanovna (Russia's ice queen) and Lavrentiy Beria (Stalin's secret police chief) continue to strike fear in the hearts of modern readers. A popular joke among American students majoring in Sl

Mindfulness has become a billion-dollar industry. Research shows mindfulness can be an effective wellness practice, yet the effect sizes found in studies tend to be moderate. Mindfulness may be worthwhile, but only if we approach it with understanding and realistic expectations. Unless you've recently returned from a hermitage atop the sacred mountain, you've probably noticed that mindfulness has become a big deal. As measured by Google searches , interest in the East Asian tradition has risen s

Compared to other Big Tech companies, Apple has been the poster child of privacy protection. Unfortunately, a recent announcement has breached that trust. How much power do we want Big Tech to have? And what sort of society do we want? Apple has built a reputation as the "least evil" Big Tech giant when it comes to privacy. All these companies — Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon — collect our data and essentially spy on us in a multitude of ways. Apple, however, has cultivated a reputat

Right now, there's just one virus on everyone's minds: SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. But humanity is plagued by many respiratory viruses, such as influenza A (IAV) and respiratory syncytial viruses (RSV), which cause hundreds of thousands of deaths every year . Most of these viruses – apart from influenza and SARS-CoV-2 – have no vaccines or effective treatments. A recent study from the University of Glasgow has discovered what happens when you get infected with some of these virus

The Einstein field equations appear very simple, but they encode a tremendous amount of complexity. What looks like one compact equation is actually 16 complicated ones, relating the curvature of spacetime to the matter and energy in the universe. It showcases how gravity is fundamentally different from all the other forces, and yet in many ways, it is the only one we can wrap our heads around. Although Einstein is a legendary figure in science for a large number of reasons — E = mc², the photoe

Imagine you've just sat down to watch your favorite TV show. You decide to snuggle in with your legs crisscrossed because you find it more comfortable that way. When the episode ends, you try to stand up and suddenly your right foot isn't working. At first you just can't move it, then it feels like it has pins and needles all over it. For a minute or two it feels uncomfortable and weird, but soon enough you are able to stand up and walk around normally. What just happened? I'm an exercise physio

To prevent the present from erasing the past, non-profit organizations are creating detailed 3D scans of famous monuments. Stored online and shared with researchers around the world, these digital copies will endure long after their real counterparts are gone. Occasionally, this work is incredibly dangerous. On the night of May 14, 1940, the German Luftwaffe bombed the Dutch city of Rotterdam. When government administrators entered the streets to tally their losses the next morning, they learned

Plato wrote profusely, and his ideas are intelligent, well argued, and powerful. His works form the backbone of so many subjects: epistemology, aesthetics, metaphysics, politics, and psychology. Plato also influenced Christianity, which in turn became a new kind of religion altogether. Nothing in life can be treated in isolation. Behind every idea, person, discovery, invention, or project is a hidden network of conditions that gave rise to it. This is never truer than in academia. As Isaac Newto

A new study suggests that exomoons are common in multistar systems. Thus far, only a few exomoon candidates have been identified. Exoplanets with moons may be likelier to host life than those without moons. Though Earth has only one (very special and precious) moon, the average planet in our solar system has 26 moons . (The range is from zero moons for Mercury and Venus to 82 moons for Saturn.) If the Milky Way has about 100 billion exoplanets, as astrophysicists suppose, then we can expect many

We assume that physical constants do not change from time to time or location to location. Measurements aimed at calculating the fine-structure constant, however, challenge this assumption. A big puzzle remains unsolved to this day: why do quasars appear to show small but significant differences in the inferred value of the fine-structure constant? Whenever we examine the universe in a scientific manner, there are a few assumptions that we take for granted as we go about our investigations. We a

Researchers observe in a series of photos an unexpected rescue of two young wild boars from a trap. The whole rescue took less than half an hour thanks to a clever adult female wild boar. Aside from the fact of the rescue, there are signs that the rescuer was exhibiting and acting out of empathy for the captives. There is a danger in attributing human-like motivations to animal behavior. We have no way, after all, of really knowing what is going on in a non-human's mind. Controlled experiments c

Daoism is the philosophy that there is a right way to live life, and it involves finding and following the "Dao", or path, to our life and also the universe. Yin-Yang is the symbol that represents difference yet unity in life. It is not a conflict or struggle but shows that nothing in life is solely either this or that. When things in life feel wrong, or if you get that gut feeling that you are on the wrong path, Daoism offers advice about how to get things straight. No person is one thing. The

Anxiety is an inevitable feature of our lives. Our brains need stress in order to thrive, but neither too much nor too little. By harnessing neuroplasticity — the brain's ability to adapt to new situations — we can use anxiety to improve our lives. The following is an excerpt from Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion . Copyright (C) 2021 by Wendy Suzuki, PhD. Reprinted with permission from Simon & Schuster. This idea that anxiety is dynamic and changeable blew me

This article was originally published on our sister site, Freethink. Oxford scientists have proposed what they believe is a more sustainable approach to copper mining: digging deep wells under dormant volcanoes to suck out the metal-containing fluids trapped beneath them. The status quo: Currently, most copper mining is done via open pits. Drills and explosives blast away rock near the surface, which is then transported to a processing facility. There, the rock is crushed so that the tiny portio

Is there an external reality? Is reality objective? Is the information your senses are feeding you an accurate depiction of reality? Most neuroscientists and scientific leaders believe that we can only comprehend a sliver of what is true reality. Although we assume our senses are telling us the truth, they're actually fabricated to us. Considering senses are unique from person to person, and through our unique senses we can only intemperate a fraction of what is real, there is no all-encompassin

A study finds that people associate personality traits with faces. People thought to have similar personalities were viewed as looking alike; people thought to look alike were viewed as having similar personalities. The research holds a surprise for Vladimir Putin and Justin Bieber. Humans are so good at identifying faces that we see them in places where they do not exist, such as on the moon or Mars or in combinations of circles, line segments, and dots . It is a particularly useful skill for a

For centuries, sailors have been reporting strange encounters like the one below. “The whole appearance of the ocean was like a plain covered with snow . There was scarce a cloud in the heavens, yet the sky … appeared as black as if a storm was raging. The scene was one of awful grandeur, the sea having turned to phosphorus, and the heavens being hung in blackness, and the stars going out, seemed to indicate that all nature was preparing for that last grand conflagration which we are taught to b