AI News Today

8 minute read Production engineers (PE) are expected to be incident management experts. Still, incident handling is difficult, often messy, and exhausting. We encounter new incidents, search high and low for possible explanations, sometimes tunnel on symptoms, and, under pressure, forget some best practices. At Shopify, we care not only about handling incidents quickly and efficiently, but also PE well-being. We have a special IMOC (incident manager on call) rotation and an incident chatbot to a

Deep Learning (the favourite buzzword of late 2010s along with blockchain/bitcoin and Data Science/Machine Learning) has enabled us to do some really cool stuff the last few years. Other than the advances in algorithms (which admittedly are based on ideas already known since 1990s aka “Data Mining era”), the main reasons of its success can […]

I've had this nagging feeling that the computers I use today feel slower than the computers I used as a kid. As a rule, I don’t trust this kind of feeling because human perception has been shown to be unreliable in empirical studies, so I carried around a high-speed camera and measured the response latency of devices I’ve run into in the past few months. Here are the results: table {border-collapse:collapse;margin:0px auto;}table,th,td {border: 1px solid black;}td {text-align:ce

A popular topic in Silicon Valley is talking about what year humans and machines will merge (or, if not, what year humans will get surpassed by rapidly improving AI or a genetically enhanced species). Most guesses seem to be between 2025 and 2075. People used to call this the singularity; now it feels uncomfortable and real enough that many seem to avoid naming it at all. Perhaps another reason people stopped using the word “singularity” is that it implies a single moment in time, and it now loo

By creating user interfaces which let us work with the representations inside machine learning models, we can give people new tools for reasoning.

Provalis Research is holding a two-day training workshop for QDA Miner 5 and WordStat 7 in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The training will be held from February 20 to February 21, 2018 at Carleton University, Dunton Tower, Room 701. QDA Miner training: February 20 – 9am to 5pm WordStat training: February 21 – 9am to 5pm Click here for a detailed description of the […]

A visual guide to Connectionist Temporal Classification, an algorithm used to train deep neural networks in speech recognition, handwriting recognition and other sequence problems.

A statement I commonly hear in tech-utopian circles is that some seeming inefficiency can’t actually be inefficient because the market is efficient and inefficiencies will quickly be eliminated. A contentious example of this is the claim that companies can’t be discriminating because the market is too competitive to tolerate discrimination . A less contentious example is that when you see a big company doing something that seems bizarrely ineffic

It's common knowledge that Android device tend to be more out of date than iOS devices, but what does this actually mean? Let’s look at android marketshare data to see how old devices in the wild are. The x axis of the plot below is date, and the y axis is Android marketshare. The share of all devices sums to 100% (with some artifacts because the public data Google provides is low precision). Color indicates age: blue: current (API major version) yellow: 6 months<

About once a month, an app that I regularly use will change its UI in a way that breaks muscle memory, basically tricking the user into doing things they don’t want. Zulip In recent memory, Zulip (a slack competitor) changed its newline behavior so that ctrl + enter sends a message instead of inserting a new line. After this change, I sent a number of half-baked messages and it seemed like some other people did too. Around the time they made that

How neural networks build up their understanding of images

We’re going to reproduce some results from papers on filesystem robustness that were written up roughly a decade ago : Prabhakaran et al. SOSP 05 paper , which injected errors below the filesystem and Gunawi et al. FAST 08 , which looked at how often filesystems failed to ch

If you look at “gaming" keyboards, a lot of them sell for $100 or more on the promise that they’re fast. Ad copy that you’ll see includes: a custom designed keycap that has been made shorter to reduce the time it takes for your actions to register 8x FASTER - Polling Rate of 1000Hz: Response time 0.1 milliseconds Wield the ultimate performance advantage over your opponents with light operation 45g key switches and an actuation 40% faster than standard Cherry MX

Montreal, Canada’s second largest city, known for its European flair, its culinary prowess, and its many festivals, is also home to Provalis Research. We are very proud of our city, and one of the things that makes us proudest is the tech scene. Major players are converging on Montreal because of its burgeoning AI scene. […]

Tomorrow (10/10) is our eagerly anticipated first talk of the year, Philosophy of The Mind: I Think Therefore I Am? There will be two amazing speakers for this session: – Prof. Mark Mon-Williams will talk about the Philosophy of the Mind from a psychological point of view. – And Marc Cole will give us the philosophical point of view. After the talks, we’ll be going …

Welcome back to Leeds for another academic year! It was good to see so many of you sign up and show interest in our society at the freshers fair last week from all difference subject areas. For those who don’t know, we’re an academic neuroscience society aimed at spreading current findings from neuroscience. We aim to run talks, debates, trips to BNA conferences throughout the …

On October 19 2017, Ubuntu 17.10 will be released and as many of you know it packs lots of significant changes. I spend a week testing the Beta 2 and in this “last minute” review, I document some of the less obvious features/gotchas of Ubuntu 17.10. I also share with you my experience and provide […]

Provalis Research is holding a three-day training workshop for QDA Miner 5 and WordStat 7 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The training will be held from December 6 to December 8, 2017 at the Provalis Research head office. QDA Miner training: December 6 and December 7 – 9am to 5pm, 9am to 12pm WordStat training: December 7 and December […]

The Datumbox v0.8.1 has been released! Download it now from Github or Maven Central Repository. What is new? The main focus of version 0.8.1 is to resolve various bugs, update the depedencies and improve the code architecture of the framework. Here are the details: Dependencies: Updated the Maven Compiler, Nexus Staging, Surefire, SLF4J and Logback […]

This is a pseudo-transcript for a talk on branch prediction given at Two Sigma on 8/22/2017 to kick off "localhost", a talk series organized by RC . How many of you use branches in your code? Could you please raise your hand if you use if statements or pattern matching? Most of the audience raises their hands I won’t ask you to raise your hands for this next part, but

Although relatively simple, Naïve Bayes (NB) is one of the powerful machine learning techniques. It’s not only simple but fast and accurate and has been used in various applications and domains. So, it’s a reliable friend that you can trust on rainy days! In this post, we will see how it works. Who is NB’s […]

I recently had a problem where part of the solution was to do a series of pointer accesses that would walk around a chunk of memory in pseudo-random order. Sattolo's algorithm provides a solution to this because it produces a permutation of a list with exactly one cycle, which guarantees that we will reach every element of the list even though we're traversing it in random order. However, the explanations of why the algorithm worked that I could find online either used some kind of mat

In our previous post on machine learning, we explained that there are supervised and unsupervised beasts lurking in machine learning land! One of the simplest machine learning techniques is the K-nearest neighbors (KNN). In this post, we will briefly review the way KNN works. We’ve all heard of lazy guys! With technology being more accessible […]

As more data becomes available, it gets harder to find and discover what to look for! As we discussed in our previous post topic modeling is a powerful unsupervised machine learning technique to discover hidden themes in a collection of documents. Topic modeling has achieved popularity in different disciplines because it offers several meaningful […]

There’s a great MSR demo from 2012 that shows the effect of latency on the experience of using a tablet . If you don’t want to watch the three minute video, they basically created a device which could simulate arbitrary latencies down to a fraction of a millisecond. At 100ms (1/10th of a second), which is typical of consumer tablets, the experience is terrible. At 10ms (1/100th of a second), the latency is noticeable, but the experience

John Ford is a public sector Research Psychologist who has authored numerous reports and articles about assessment, training, and other personnel management issues. He wrote this guest blog about a recent challenge of how to deal more efficiently with out of office messages with respect to tabulating the survey response rate. In this blog he […]

Throughout history, we have been interested in seeing the future, either in the form of checking the arrival time of the prince on a white horse or predicting stock prices to get rich! What caused this curse?! It’s probably part of human nature but we can also trace fortune-telling back to the advent of astrology, […]

6 minute read Shopify Capital provides funding to help merchants on Shopify grow their businesses. But how does Shopify Capital award these merchant cash advances? In this post, I'll dive deep into the machine-learning technique our Risk-Algorithms team uses to decide eligibility for cash advances. The exact features that go into the predictive model that powers Shopify Capital are secret, but I can share the key technique we use: quantile regression.

Many believe robotics is on the cusp of becoming the next technological revolution and that we should expect a significant impact from “intelligent” robots in the near future. Even today, we can see robots and intelligent systems working here and there in different domains. But, robotics is only one application of machine learning and artificial […]

We saw earlier that although machines are stone-hearted, they can learn! As a subset of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning algorithms enable computers to learn from data, and even improve themselves, without being explicitly programmed. That’s how your Siri communicates with you, or how your super car parks itself, or, partially, how your bank approves […]