Overview: Science&Technology

Now feels like the right time to take a step back, look at the landscape of VR and AR, and share a bit on how we think about the space: where we are, where we’re going, why it matters to Google, and why it matters to the world... VR can put you anywhere, and AR can bring anything to you... in time, these points on the spectrum will blur... let’s c…

I’ve been meaning to blog about the ‘backfire effect’ cognitive bias since first coming across it last December. It went to the top of my ToBlog list thanks to a little serendipity...

Our bodies exploit fractal networks to maximize surface areas ... Blood vessels branch out like root systems; the brain houses folds within folds... means we don’t simply enjoy looking at fractals—we are designed to process them effortlessly, and even have a need to be looking at them....That’s also why you might see a face in a cloud... or a prof…

a policy paper on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to help navigate some of the opportunities and challenges ... de-mystifying some of its fundamental concepts

for innovators who are tasked with problem solving and imagining the future, human curiosity and playfulness will always have the advantage.. . machines cannot yet have intuition, nor the ability to empathize, reframe problems and truly innovate.. . The robots may be coming for our jobs, but it is too early to call checkmate on human ingenuity.

It will still need human workers to review the machines’ output and make decisions AI can’t, but the greater need will be for the middle-level employees who have the experience to make judgment calls....[but] Where do those middle-level employees get that experience and judgment?

The open internet is a powerful tool in the fight against discriminatory mass surveillance... democracy’s antidote to authoritarianism... where the voices of dissidence that have always been watched, can watch and talk back.

illustrates the current limitations of artificial intelligence... a human being invisibly takes over, responding to your request as if the algorithms were still at the helm... to reveal how people would react to an omniscient virtual assistant, and to provide data that would let the algorithms learn ...progress has been harder won than expected...…

Facebook ... can never be, a platform where people have the power to build anything... the company’s main focus ... analyzing your data and showing you ads in exchange for advertiser’s money. A future where Facebook is the global social infrastructure, is a future with no refuge from advertising and number crunching... the future of social media …

there is no obvious way to design such a system so that it could always explain why it did what it did... How well can we expect to communicate—and get along with—intelligent machines that could be unpredictable and inscrutable? ... a journey to the bleeding edge of research on AI algorithms... including a meeting with one of the great philosopher…

there are a number of companies looking at ways to apply AI, machine learning and related concepts to recruiting... we see glaring limitations to applying machine learning and AI to screen candidates based on their CVs and social media profiles alone... CVs alone fail to capture individual performance and contribution, raw talent, actual competenc…

As ML algorithms solve bigger and more complex problems... training them can require massive amounts of pre-labeled data.... As recently as 2015, only large companies like Google, Amazon and Apple had access to the massive data ... The democratization of ML gives individuals and startups a chance... But access to data is only one way in which M…

People are remarkably bad at explaining what they do, or how they go about reasoning, but we manage to live in a world filled with people, anyway.

There’s no shortage of resources about Digital Transformation on my Hub, but ... I’m not sure I recommend all of them. This edition includes three I do

Each side of the climate debate accuses the other of exaggeration and suffers from its own... sometimes feel like a shouting match in a roomful of children wearing earplugs... We have allowed our political, national, economic, and cultural narratives free play ... where... are the narratives from science itself? Where is the science teacher?... p…

how hard is it for someone to put true artificial intelligence into a chatbot? ... here are the 50 lines of code that enable your bot to understand speech:

Many famous scientists have something in common—they didn’t work long hours... lives were full and memorable, their work was prodigious, and yet their days are also filled with downtime... great students didn’t just practice more than the average, they practiced more deliberately... engaging with full concentration in a special activity to improv…

if you’re having a conversation with your friend, @person@custom.website, and another user from custom.website wants to chime in, they will be invisible.... how does one end up on this blacklist? ... mastodon.social’s community policy:... your social graph is not portable between platforms ... first principle of a workable, future-proof social ne…

throwing more data at problems won’t necessarily lead to progress... us to artificial general intelligence... there’s low-hanging fruit that deep learning’s good at  —  specific narrow tasks ... we’re not making progress on cognition and strong AI.... we can’t well interpret what deep learning is doing... it isn’t literally exactly memorization…

Federated Learning enables mobile phones to collaboratively learn a shared prediction model while keeping all the training data on device, decoupling the ability to do machine learning from the need to store the data in the cloud.

science has become as horrifically politicized as any other aspect of American life.... If we truly want to endorse the idea of science, let’s break up into groups and fan out across America:

The internet freedom agenda presumed the benefits of the free flow of information only cut one way: in favor of open societies, values, and ideals. But we’re now seeing that its destabilizing effects cut both ways... The open internet creates an asymmetric threat... rather than the global village ... mid-21st century internet might ... be a feder…

there’s plenty of reasons why negativity abounds online... Incivility is a basic human instinct that’s encouraged by anonymity and exacerbated by inequality... anger helps drive participation... anyone who benefits from trolling — whether it’s platforms themselves or populist politicians — have little reason to improve the tone of online chatting…

The objectivity that matters so much in science is not primarily a characteristic of individual scientists but of scientific communities. Scientists rarely refute their own pet hypotheses... Their fellow scientists will be happy to expose these hypotheses to severe testing... Not being afraid of being wrong... is a value we could promote... Intel…

Enterprise systems and business processes are constructed... from an organization’s most strategic asset: subject matter expertise. ... doesn’t all sit neatly in some database or model. It sits in the spreadsheets and brains of the business analysts, the ... engineers, etc. Capturing and codifying this expertise to create more intelligent and auto…

guides you through the traffic of social networks and automatically creates data visualizations for exceptionally insightful discoveries, all on the cloud. Identify a topic and quickly get relevant content that shows you interesting relationships and patterns. You can easily take the pulse of your audience, gain greater visibility into a topic or …

intuitive ways for people with big ideas to start building AI tools without big expertise.

a list of basic resources for marketers who want to learn more about AI. Here’s a quick roundup of some of the things I’ve contributed to and some blogs to subscribe to, as of early 2017.

The war for the open internet is the defining issue of our time... By the end of this article, you’ll understand what’s happening, the market forces that are driving this, and how you can help stop it.