AI News Today

Training an end-to-end differentiable, self-organising cellular automata for classifying MNIST digits.

Jenny Kleeman is a journalist who covers award-winning true stories in print, audio, and video. Most recently Kleeman is the author of a meticulously researched and extremely well-written book titled Sex Robots and Vegan Meat: Adventures at the Frontiers of Birth, Food, Sex and Death. Given that birth, food, sex, and death encompass the human […]

Chapter 2 is ready. Read about window handles, display lists, and events. Our browser creates a window, draws text to it, and tells a story about a monkey. (My favorite part is the aside on Chinese line layout.)

Jacinta González is not an angel or venture capitalist. She is not a scientist or a technologist. She doesn’t have a Ph.D. in AI or quantum mechanics. She is not an entrepreneur who founded the next unicorn startup. Yet Jacinta’s decade-long first-hand experience of surveillance, and the system and technology that supports it, is as […]

The Datumbox Framework v0.8.2 has been released! Download it now from GitHub or Maven Central Repository. What is new? The version 0.8.2 is a limited incremental release that focuses on resolving bugs and updating the dependencies of the framework. Here are the details: Bug Fixes: Resolved an issue on ShapiroWilk which led to the incorrect […]

Discussions: Hacker News (397 points, 97 comments), Reddit r/MachineLearning (247 points, 27 comments) Translations: German, Korean, Chinese (Simplified), Russian, Turkish The tech world is abuzz with GPT3 hype. Massive language models (like GPT3) are starting to surprise us with their abilities. While not yet completely reliable for most businesses to put in front of their customers, these models are showing sparks of cleverness that are sure to accelerate the march of automation and the possib

Here is an image from the 10th art of neuroscience contest. It is striking in that it gives a view of the brain, where there are two major parts: the cerebrum and the cerebellum. Of course there are a lot of interesting structures hidden within the cerebrum, but still: Is this a von Neumann architecture, […]

The Covid 19 virus has been with us since late 2019 but only spread into a pandemic in early 2020. That is just seven months ago. Since then there have been thousands of journal articles, news reports, editorials, reports, commentaries, blogs and all other matter of text documents dealing with the virus, its spread and […]

Last month I did an interview for Johan Steyn. It was a great 45-min-conversation where we covered a variety of topics such as: the definition of the singularity; whether we are making progress towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI); open vs closed systems; the importance of consciousness; my Amazon bestseller Conversations with the Future; how I […]

Renée Cummings is a criminologist, criminal psychologist, and an AI ethicist who, among other things, specializes in best-practice criminal justice interventions and implicit bias. Given the global Black Lives Matter movement and the fact that there have been numerous examples where technological solutions have been proven to exhibit a biased or even racist predisposition, I […]

Bibliometrics and scientometrics often involve the monitoring of research, the assessment of the scientific contribution of authors, journals, specific works, or citations as well as the analysis of the dissemination process of scientific knowledge. The discipline has grown rapidly over the last 10-20 years. One of the reasons is the advent of readily available computer […]

John Ford Public Sector Research Psychologist The author can be reached at johnford514@yahoo.com This is the second of two Blogs on the Hiller Dictionary. The first one is titled Hiller Vagueness Dictionary: A Content Analysis Dictionary that Keeps on Giving The Hiller Communication Vagueness scales are useful measures of document clarity because they use vocabulary […]

Any time you have a benchmark that gets taken seriously, some people will start gaming the benchmark. Some famous examples in computing are the CPU benchmark specfp and video game benchmarks. With specfp, Sun managed to increase its score on 179.art (a sub-benchmark of specfp) by 12x with a compiler tweak that essentially re-wrote the benchmark kernel, which increase

2020 is the year where machine learning on mobile is no longer the hot new thing. Adding some kind of intelligence to apps has become standard practice. Fortunately, that doesn’t mean Apple has stopped innovating. 😅 In this blog post, I’ll summarize what’s new

Xiaoyi Yin (尹肖贻) has kindly translated this post into Chinese ( 中文 ) </span&

I spent many years working with founders and now I work with researchers. Although there are always individual exceptions, on average it’s surprising to me how different the best people in these groups are (including in some qualities that I had assumed were present in great people everywhere, like very high levels of self-belief). So I’ve been thinking about the ways they’re the same, because maybe there is something to learn about qualities of really effective people in general. The best peopl

This is the first of two Blogs on the Hiller Vagueness Dictionary It all started back in the late sixties and early seventies when J.H. Hiller and his collaborators wrote a series of papers exploring communication vagueness. Back in those early days they used computer-assisted content analysis to analyze lectures, students papers and presentations to […]

Sometimes simulating complex systems is the best way to understand them. Read more "HASH: a free, online platform for modeling the world"

Part one of a three part deep dive into the curve neuron family.

Almost every company and non-profit working on COVID-19 that I offered to help asked for support with clinical trials—for companies focusing on developing novel drugs, vaccines, and diagnostics, rapidly spinning up trials is one of their biggest bottlenecks. Science remains the only way out of the COVID-19 crisis. Dramatically improving clinical trials, which are usually time-consuming and cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, is one of the highest-leverage ways to get out of it faster.

Si vous désirez adopter l’analyse sémantique dans vos études marketing, voici deux webinars qui pourront vous intéresser ! Ils sont présentés par Normand Péladeau, CEO de Provalis Research et expert en analyse sémantique. Webinar 1 Analyse de données textuelles : approche qualitative ou machine learning?? Un faux dilemme Beaucoup de solutions d’analyse sémantique reposent essentiellement […]

Starting Thursday, June 11, we intend to hold a series of “Lunch and Learns” for QDA Miner or WordStat. The schedule is posted on our website. We have scheduled one a week until the end of June. There is no charge to attend. The events will feature our trainers as hosts. They will provide a […]

How is the media covering the death of George Floyd and the resulting protests? While we are still in the midst of the protests which are continuing across the U.S. and around the world we thought it would be of interest to examine how several media organizations are covering the event and how they compare […]

This is an archive of an old pseudonymously written post from the 90s from someone whose former pseudonym seems to have disappeared from the internet. I see that Star Trek: Voyager has added a new character, a Borg. (From the photos, I also see that they're still breeding women for breast size in the 24th century.) What ticked me off was the producer's comment (I'm paraphrasing), "The addition of Seven of Nine will give us limitless story possibilities." Uh

A lot of people seem to think that distributed tracing isn't useful, or at least not without extreme effort that isn't worth it for companies smaller than FB. For example, here are a couple of public conversations that sound like a number of private conversations I've had. Sure, there's value somewhere, <a href="https://twitter.com/mattklein123/status

We spent one day 1 building a system that immediately found a mid 7 figure optimization (which ended up shipping). In the first year, we shipped mid 8 figures per year worth of cost savings as a result. The key feature this system introduces is the ability to query metrics data across all hosts and all services and over any period of time (since inception), so we've called it LongTermMetrics (LTM) internally since

The most common question prospective startup founders ask is how to get ideas for startups. The second most common question is if you have any ideas for their startup. But giving founders an idea almost always doesn’t work. Having ideas is among the most important qualities for a startup founder to have—you will need to generate lots of new ideas in the course of running a startup. YC once tried an experiment of funding seemingly good founders with no ideas. I think every company in this no-idea

We trust that you are well and staying safe during these challenging times. Our team in Montreal is working from home as mandated by the government until at least May 4. We are working together providing regular services to all our customers including support, developing new features of the software, doing demos for prospective customers, […]

A couple of weeks ago I was interviewed by James Bickerton of the Daily Express. We discussed transhumanism, the Singularity, AI, and the threats to democracy, among other things. Here is the description from James Bickerton’s YouTube channel: I interview Nikola Danaylov (@singularityblog), founder of the Singularity Weblog and author of Conversations with the Future: […]

In this Blog we are highlighting papers authored with the use of our qualitative data analysis software QDA Miner and our content analysis and text mining software WordStat. This post features a paper where the authors use visual content analysis by employing QDA Miner to code images of sculpture taken by tourists and posted on […]

Dr Uwe Ewald Director of the International Justice Analysis Forum Uwe Ewald is the director of the International Justice Analysis Forum. IJA-Forum offers support in evidentiary analysis required for complex (international) crime cases, based on its expert network and roster of analysts and researchers. He started using qualitative data analysis software QDA Miner and the […]

How to tune hyperparameters for your machine learning model using Bayesian optimization.

I have previously interviewed a few fantastic scientists and philosophers but rare are those strange birds who manage to combine together both deep academic training and the living ethos of those separate disciplines. Prof. Massimo Pigliucci is one of those very rare and strange people. He has 3 Ph.D.’s – Genetics, Evolutionary Biology, and Philosophy, […]

To paraphrase the theme song of a 1960s U.S. TV show Mr. Ed, A horse is a horse of course, of course, and no one can find so many horses unless, of course, you are using WordStat! (inspired by original lyrics by Jay Livingston). See Video on YouTube. WordStat and QDA Miner software have […]

In this Blog we will be introducing you to different people who use Provalis Research software in their work. We hope this will give users and potential users of the software an idea of the type of work people are doing and the capabilities of the software. Our first profile is of Lara Gautier who […]

Framing is an active, evolving process to construct meaning and the evolution of frames reflects change in social movement or among activists. (Benford and Snow (2000)). Framing allows people to make sense of their world or events by putting it into context. In their paper Opposition to Abortion Then and Now: How Amicus Briefs […]

The media and the Democrats have never been popular with Fox News which many would argue is a large part of its appeal. Even with a global pandemic threatening the country not much has changed. Of course, this is something the mainstream media writes about and comments on with regularity. Lee Moran from Huffington Post […]