Overview: Science&Technology

Pluto-focused project, upcoming episodic series, and experiments with “meditative VR,” The Times is experimenting with different applications for the new technology... The idea is to do proper VR shows that have a through-line and episodic structure... We’re looking at an experience that we jokingly call “meditative VR.” These are single-shot, no…

After so much talking about the risks of ultraintelligent machines, it is time to turn on the light, stop worrying about sci-fi scenarios, and start focusing on AI’s actual challenges, in order to avoid making painful and costly mistakes in the design and use of our smart technologies... Believers in true AI and in Good’s ‘intelligence explosion’…

Government Chief Scientist, Sir Mark Walport, sets out how this technology could transform the delivery of public services and boost productivity... The report makes a number of recommendations which focus on ministerial leadership, research, standards and the need for proof of concept trials.

Blockchain... - is already being explored as a way of securely managing the distribution of government grants... a key role in the Government as a Platform programme to create "an ecosystem of interconnected components that departmental teams can use to assemble their services ... foster a new culture of trust”.

AI can be effective, particularly its Natural Language Processing (NLP) aspect — but only in the right context... we need to work out when it’s a help and when it’s a hindrance... Whilst AI may be the new kid on the technological block, it works best as a complement to good UI, not a substitute.

But what we are building with artificial reality is an internet of experiences... although every one of these environments was fake, the experiences I had in them were genuine... you gain authentic experiences, as authentic as in real life. People remember VR experiences not as a memory of something they saw but as something that happened to them.…

Technology is superior when humanity is woven into its DNA. I’m newly fond of saying, “Everyone is working on Artificial Intelligence, what about just, Intelligence?” Jelly sprung from the question, “What would search look like if it were created today?” We knew mobility and good old, human experience would be defining factors.... Enter your quest…

I haven’t yet met a single bot that actually does ANYTHING better than a great UX... that actually does ANYTHING beyond a narrow scripted interaction. They all seem OK inside a script (in English), but become super-annoying very fast, when moving out of their pre-designed limits. So I decided to deploy a chatbot, without building one, just to see …

When a Vox Media Slack user sends a direct message to simbot specifying a seed article URL and a number of desired results, then the bot would return a ranked list of articles that are most similar in content to the article found in the provided URL. two main applications for the bot ... enable editors ... on social media... to discover related…

You can now chat with all sorts of bots through a number of messaging services... The trouble is that computers still have a hard time understanding human language... but chatbots are still prone to confusion and misunderstanding... The best commercial chatbots will most likely be those that recognize their own limitations... There have been no …

Picture a nightmarish future in which half-witted “conversational user interfaces” drive us insane with mindless conversation and misunderstandings...chatbots may be incredibly annoying. And things may be even more annoying if app designers fail to appreciate the significant challenges that remain with using computers to parse and respond to natur…

bandwagons are bad for your health, as illustrated by the impending death of content marketing and the gathering backlash against Slack (Slacklash? BackSlacksh?) and (already!?) chatbots.

your market of digital narcissists is only going to become more elusive... Micro-moments happen when a customer demonstrates intent by reaching for his or her phone to act on a need in real time. They unfold through a variety of common "I want" scenarios that help people take steps or make decisions as to what to buy, do, know, etc... The third w…

But Go programs still fell far short of human players in ability. It seemed as though a strong intuitive sense of board position was essential to success.What’s new and important about AlphaGo is that its developers have figured out a way of bottling something very like that intuitive sense... .Just because neural networks can do a good job of cap…

EurActiv.com is opening one of its media innovations to other media interested in increasing competitiveness through translated syndication. (Update, 31/3/16: this project was covered, among many other things, in an interview with professional EU interpreter Alexander Drechsel in his podcast Demos ex machina? Multilingual communication with Mathew…

At first, Fan Hui thought the move was rather odd. But then he saw its beauty. “It’s not a human move. I’ve never seen a human play this move,” he says. “So beautiful.”... AlphaGo ... has beaten the very best by playing in ways that no human would.... AlphaGo has taught him, a human, to be a better player. He sees things he didn’t see before. And …

these vehicles will also collect reams of personal information about their passengers... topic came up last week at a Congressional hearing on driverless cars, and the companies potentially doing the data-collecting were, and this is putting it gently, evasive.

she and her team record real audio and motion capture data, then work it into a digital recreation of an event. It's an unusual technique that lets people not just see an event, but explore it.

could pose a devastating threat to large tranches of the financial industry, and profoundly change the management of monetary policy... RSCoin would be a tool of state control, allowing the central bank to keep a tight grip on the money supply and respond to crises. It would erode the exorbitant privilege of commercial banks of creating money out …

AI still can’t ... deal with natural language well enough, but it’s getting much better. And the way translation’s currently done will change because Google now has what promises to be a much better way to do machine translation.

The main Topics this time are language technology, mobile innovation and EU communications, with a few extras to catch-up since the last edition.

Google’s self-driving cars are logging some 15,000 autonomous miles per week on public streets...a fatal accident will eventually happen. And a fatal accident could doom the entire effort. How the public responds to the first human deaths caused by self-driving cars will ultimately determine the technology’s trajectory... self-driving cars end up…

data enrichment platforms have become a valuable resource for data scientists looking to automate and scale the cleaning, labeling and enrichment of data using human intelligence for machine learning — i.e. training data creation.

Enter the new editors of the Internet: giant, centralized tech companies that have created platforms... notably Facebook and Apple — want to be the newsstands of tomorrow: the place we go, inside their own ecosystems, to get our news and information... journalism organizations feel they have no alternative but to be part of those ecosystems. This …

the future of work will rely on self-organization, enabled by collaborative software like Slack and Ethereum... Even in a self-organized, decentralized, collaborative, and high-trust future ... people will need to navigate their organization... Roles and projects will need to be created, filled, and disbanded with increasing frequency... we need …

To help developers quickly begin exploring the use of blockchain in the enterprise, IBM this week made several announcements to rapidly advance the use of distributed ledger technology across multiple industries. New blockchain services on IBM’s cloud platform, as well as plans to offer blockchain engagement centers (called Garages) in London, New…

The afternoon session at Future Media Lab 2016 showed that while European media are warming to the idea of using advanced language technologies to share content across borders, their audiences are already well ahead of them.

“We are approaching a time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task... Physicist Stephen Hawking and the tech billionaires Bill Gates and Elon Musk issued a similar warning last year... Vardi, a professor at Rice University and Guggenheim fellow... suggested AI could drive global unemployment to 50%, wiping out middle-…

I’ve just spent a few days running the Discovery phase of a new project to further develop the communication strategy of an EU Institution, with a particular focus on retooling its online, social media and publications tactics. Apart from focusing on developing a new information architecture, I’m running the overall project. This means not only en…

Artificial intelligence is the future of Google Search, and if it’s the future of Google Search, it’s the future of so much more... with its head of AI taking over search, the company seems to believe this is the way forward.