Analog Islands

Someone recently asked me, what are some of the use cases / examples of machine learning. Whilst, this might seem as an obvious aspect to some of us, it isn’t the case for many businesses and enterprises – despite that they uses elements of #ML (and #AI) in their daily life – as a consumer. Whilst, the discussion gets more interesting based on the specific domain and the possibly use cases (of course understanding that some might not be sure f the use case – hence the question in the first place)....

Trained a model to create a synthetic sound that sounds like me. This is after training it with about 30 sentences - which isn’t a lot. To create a synthetic voice, you enter some text, using which is then “transcribed” using #AI and your synthetic voice is generated. In my case, at first, I had said AI, which was generated also as “aeey” (you can listen here ). So for the next one, changed the AI to Artificial Intelligence....

Over the last few weeks, I built a self-driving car - which essentially is a remote control Rx car that uses a raspberry pi running Python, TensorFlow implementing a end-to-end convolution neural network (CNN) Of course other than being a bit geeky, I do think this is very cool to help understand and get into some of the basic constructs and mechanics around a number of things - web page design, hardware (maker things), and Artificial Intelligence principles....

Despite all the cloud talk and where I live, it is like the cloud mecca, for enterprises it is still quite new and many are just starting to think about it. A hard lesson that many of us learn (and partly how we amass our scars) is to design for failures. For those, who run things in their enterprises data center, are quite spoilt I think. Failures are rare, and if machines or state goes down, moving to another one isn’t really a big deal (of course it is a little more complex, and not to say, there isn’t any down time, or business loss, etc....

Recently, a few of us went through a workshop where one of the ‘homework’ was to score oneself, on the following 7 aspects – some of these are attributes that allows one to grow from being (hopefully) good managers to great leaders. In most enterprises, as one grows in their career, managers need to acquire new capabilities – and quickly. What they have, in terms of skills and capabilities and got her or him to this place, won’t be enough for the next step – as the scope and complexity increases it can leave executives underwhelmed....

Just as last year , I wrote a PowerShell script using which you can download the PowerPoint decks, and, videos from Microsoft Build’s conference, instead of streaming it (or manually download it one by one). You can choose if you want the decks, or the videos, or both. For the videos you can choose the desired resolution (Low, Medium, High) – of course the higher the resolution, the more space is needed....

If you were trying to pull the latest source code on your Raspberry Pi for donkeycar, and get the following error, then probably your clock is off (and I guess some nonce is failing). This can happen if your pi had been powered off for a while (as in my case), and it’s clock is off ( clock drift is a real thing) :). fatal: unable to access 'https://github.com/wroscoe/donkey/': server certificate verification failed....

Can #AI make me look (more) presentable? The jury is out I think. This is called style transfer, where the style/technique from a kind of painting (could be a photos too) is applied to an image, to create a new image. I took this using the built-in camera on my machine sitting at my desk and then applying the different kind of ‘styles’ on it. Each of these styles are is a separate #deeplearning model that has learned how to apply the relevant style to a source image....

Yesterday it worked Today it is not working #AI is like that #Haiku #GeekyHaiku #GeekyJokes

Rather than a beep Or a rude error message, These words: “File not found.” #Haiku #GeekyHaiku #GeekyJokes

One of the challenges we have with AI is that there isn’t any universal definition - it is a broad category that means everything to everyone. Debating the rights, and, the wrongs, and the should’s and the shouldn’t s is another post though. DARPA outlines this as the “programmed ability to process information” and across a certain set of criteria that span across perceiving, learning, abstracting, and, reasoning. AI Scale Intelligence They classify AI in three waves - out outlined below....

Cognitive Bias

When seeing this #CosmosDB is the first thing that comes to mind :)

What is it? What’s the next big thing in computing? Not the #AI or #blockchain’s of the world, that is starting to happen today (albeit a little early)? Quantum computing is one of those next big things, that is on the horizon (probably in the ~5 years range). Why do I care? Why do I care about quantum? Well, some problems are simply not solvable on convention digital computers – the kind we have today – these are called “classical” machines....

At a recent internal meeting, we were discussing productivity and the various levels of distractions that one has these days. Did you know that there is a hierarchy of digital distractions (see image below). No wonder, in todays connected, and agile world, for some people why it is so difficult to get any actual work done (that is not to suggest that they are not busy of course). At this meeting, analogy of the distraction was coined as the “monkey” – the monkey that each of us has on our shoulder and the constant attention it demands – I....

Parenting geek

I wakey wakey. Production release today. No breaky breaky. #Haiku #GeekyHaiku #GeekyJokes

Chaos reigns within. Reflect, repent, and reboot. Order shall return. #haiku #GeekyHaiku

Ridiculous mess iOS development conceived by hipsters #Haiku #GeekyHaiku #GeekyJokes

Thinking about #machinelearning? It will be helpful to understand some numerical computations and concepts that affect the #ML algorithm. One might not interact with these directly, but we surely can feel the effect. The things you need to think about are: 1. Overflow and underflow - thinking of them as rounding up or down errors that shift the functions enough, and compounded across the iterations cam be devastating. Of course can also easily get to division by zero....

I know I have had to explain this a lot in most #AI related conversations that I have had - and lately those have been quite a lot. In my experience, most people use these terms interchangeably when they are meaning one over the other. Whilst they all are (inter)related and one might help trigger the other, they are still fundamentally different and at some point, it is good to understand the differences....

Update: Modified the script to handle multiple instances but pay heed to the warning here . Similar to last year , I have a PowerShell script that will allow you to download the various PowerPoint decks and videos to watch locally rather than stream. This makes some improvements from the earlier scripts (e.g. if a file is already downloaded it will skip downloading it again) and does the following: Creates the relevant folder which includes the Session details (including the Title, and the Presenters) For each session, saves the description in a text file in the created folder....

In case you did not see Story Remix demos from Build, it is awesome. And here is my first take on it just using the photos that I took at Build 2017. Some of the things you saw at the keynote are not in the RS3 build I am running but interesting possibilities nevertheless. There should have been a video here but your browser does not seem to support it.