AI News Today

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

This article was originally published on our sister site, Freethink. When Sophia the robot debuted in 2016, she was one of a kind. She had a remarkably lifelike appearance and demeanor for a robot, and her ability to interact with people was unlike anything most had ever seen in a machine. Since then, Sophia has spoken to audiences across the globe (in multiple languages), been interviewed on countless TV shows, and even earned a United Nations title (a first for a non-human). Today, she's argua

The 20th anniversary of 9/11 arrives with pessimism and a sense of defeat. 9/11 caused a national trauma that lasted for years. We should remember this when analyzing the mistakes that America made in its war on terrorism during the subsequent 20 years. As the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attack approached, I was disappointed to see how negative the media coverage is. The overall reportage is defeatist, focusing almost exclusively on how America made countless mistakes and accomplished

One of the popular memes in literature, movies and tech journalism is that man's creation will rise and destroy it. Lately, this has taken the form of a fear of AI becoming omnipotent, rising up and annihilating mankind. The economy has jumped on the AI bandwagon; for a certain period, if you did not have "AI" in your investor pitch, you could forget about funding. (Tip: If you are just using a Google service to tag some images, you are not doing AI.) However, is there actually anything deservin

What is Narrative Analysis? Narratives can come from almost anything; interviews, books, blogs, journals, diaries, autobiographies, podcasts, videos, audio recordings, anywhere someone is telling a story. Narrative analysis is the technique of using those narratives to address a research question, to examine business issues, to understand or develop public policy, etc.[1] It is a form […]

Today I’m excited to share the news that Lexalytics has been acquired by InMoment, the leader in Experience Improvement (XI). If you haven’t already seen the press release it can be viewed here. For nearly two decades, Lexalytics has been a pioneer in structured and unstructured data analytics, translating text into profitable decisions with our […]

There are plenty of comprehensive pieces on the practice of product design out there—our own Kyle Turman has written an excellent post on the Pillars of Digital Product Design—but there’s a crucial layer of thinking that can sometimes elude the design process itself, partially because it’s so obvious that it’s hiding in plain sight. “Of […] The post Make things that people want (instead of what you want them to want) appeared first on Slack Design .

Understanding the building blocks and design choices of graph neural networks.

What components are needed for building learning algorithms that leverage the structure and properties of graphs?

Back in 2018 I self-published the Core ML Survival Guide , a 500-page ebook with lots of tips and tricks for getting the most out of Apple’s Core ML framework and mlmodel files. It’s the documentation that Apple didn’t write. <img srcset="https://machinethink.net/images/CoreMLSurvivalGuide@2x.png 2x" src="https://machinethink.net/images/CoreML

I regularly get asked to give interviews on the topics that I work on, especially for podcasts. To make them easier to find for anybody who’s interested, I thought I would make a list. They touch on a range of different topics, although there is also some overlap so I...

A question I get asked with some frequency is: why bother measuring X, why not build something instead? More bluntly, in a recent conversation with a newsletter author, his comment on some future measurement projects I wanted to do (in the same vein as other projects like keyboard vs. mouse , keyboard , terminal and <a href="https://danluu.com/inpu

Antiracist economist Kim Crayton says that “intention without strategy is chaos.” We’ve discussed how our biases, assumptions, and inattention toward marginalized and vulnerable groups lead to dangerous and unethical tech—but what, specifically , do we need to do to fix it? The intention to make our tech safer is not enough; we need a strategy. This chapter will equip you with that plan of action. It covers how to integrate safety principles into your design work in order to create tech that’s s

Learn the five copy principles that help us write great Marketing copy in the Slack voice and tone. Part 1 in a series Words give meaning to your marketing materials: if the brand is the lifeblood of your business, words are the atomic structure that make up that lifeblood. When copy—that is, the […] The post The voice of the brand: 5 principles for great Marketing copy at Slack appeared first on Slack Design .

I’m starting a new blog post series about the development of PyTorch’s computer vision library. I plan to discuss interesting upcoming features primarily from TorchVision and secondary from the PyTorch ecosystem. My target is to highlight new and in-development features and provide clarity of what’s happening in between the releases. Though the format is likely […]

Today we’re releasing a chapter on Sending Information to Servers. In it, our browser becomes an application platform, starting with a 90s-style guest book. The next few chapters will explore that theme, building more and more capable web applications as we go.

An analysis of Twitter Data Using WordStat More and more researchers are using social media as a means to try to understand or explain the impact of events and social policy on society at large or on different targeted groups. We know anecdotally, personally and from media reports the Covid-19 pandemic has had different effects […]

Next.js 11.1 introduces an important security patch, ES Modules support, performance improvements, Rust-based tooling, 2x faster data fetching when pre-rendering, and more!

Intel-based Macs (2006-2020) Up until the end of last year, several options were available to run QDA Miner, WordStat or SimStat on Mac computers. Since 2006, Apple computers came equipped with Intel chips, the same chips used in PCs. One could even remove the MacOS and transform an Apple computer into a pure Windows machine […]

In the 1950s, many in the elite running community had begun to believe it wasn’t possible to run a mile in less than four minutes. Runners had been attempting it since the late 19th century and were beginning to draw the conclusion that the human body simply wasn’t built for the task. But on May 6, 1956, Roger Bannister took everyone by surprise. It was a cold, wet day in Oxford, England—conditions no one expected to lend themselves to record-setting—and yet Bannister did just that, running a mi

We are excited to announce the release of Vue.js 3.2 "Quintessential Quintuplets"! This release includes many significant new features and performance improvements, and contains no breaking changes.

Glad you asked! This question is especially relevant to me right now, as I’m currently learning a new prototyping tool here at Slack. 🙃 Whether you’re trying to learn a technical skill, a new industry tool, sharpening your visual design chops, or leveling up a soft skill like public speaking, the only way to get […] The post Hey Slack Design — What are the best ways to uplevel or learn new skills? appeared first on Slack Design .

While much of the tech world has come through Covid-19 relatively unscathed, some tech-focused industries have definitely felt the effects of the pandemic. As an AI and NLP software vendor with clients in myriad industries — including those with a focus on restaurants, airlines and hospitality — we were certainly affected, especially early on. However, […]

ReWriting the Human Story: How Our Story Determines Our Future an alternative thought experiment by Nikola Danaylov Chapter 11: The AI Story Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. Edsger Dijkstra When looms weave by themselves, man’s slavery will end. Aristotle Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to […]

One of my ML research mentees is following OpenAI's Spinning up in RL tutorials (thanks to the nice folks who put that guide together!). She emailed me some good questions about the basics of Reinforcement Learning , and I wanted to share some of my replies on my b

We’ve been having conversations for thousands of years. Whether to convey information, conduct transactions, or simply to check in on one another, people have yammered away, chattering and gesticulating, through spoken conversation for countless generations. Only in the last few millennia have we begun to commit our conversations to writing, and only in the last few decades have we begun to outsource them to the computer, a machine that shows much more affinity for written correspondence than fo

Popular media and hype cycles are leading us to expect radical changes and perfect results from artificial intelligence. But you don’t read perfectly, so why should your AI? In this blog, Tim Mohler explains when "good" is good enough for AI.

After five years, Distill will be taking a break.

Today we’re releasing a chapter on Handling Buttons and Links. This is the chapter when the browser really starts surfing the web. It also becomes a pretty good way to read this book!

<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjocri5AhqOSvuM_gmFus_6PItcVMUzpKAD76ohO6KvZack92Q8ffy96BvK8e8LzRUFF-L_xQMR7GbANh1aDA-7wxr-gbn-sQ3p7fYN1SV707CFEI-F7EBXkWknlS1ZMxNHo4wWjTof