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. I like the image below ( source ) that whilst on one hand is showing a time graph, the correlation between them and how one is a subset of the other is what is interesting. ...

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: ...

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.

There of course are many, but for someone coming from computer science, and, software engineering, where the environment is relatively clean and certain (deterministic), it usually is a leap to understand that Machine Learning (and other elements of #AI) are not. Machine learning, is based on probability theory and deals with stochastic (non-deterministic) elements all the time. Nearly all activities in machine learning, require the ability to factor and more importantly, represent and reason with uncertainty. ...

How to protect your data from what the The Guardian calls as ‘ US border agents are doing ‘digital strip searches’? The only way I think this is possible in a fool-proof way in the near future is that every has to absolutely implement a two-factor-DDA-authentication. There is not better #security today - period! There ain’t no stinking #AI, #RNN, #DNN, or Boltzmann machine in the world, or #Quantum computer worth its #quibits which can crack this - at least not in the near future. ...

When it comes to AI and the limits of human kind, what better example that shows the art of the possible than what Microsoft is doing with special awareness and HoloLens and other sensors. And not only can this replay time and allow you to have a ’living memory’ but it also is mobile. ...

Of course you heard of Neural Networks! In the context of #AI they are all the buzz of course. You might have heard of some such as DFF (Deep Feed Forward) or RNN (Recurrent neural networks)? Or perhaps you meant Recursive neural networks? Irrespective, it can be quite messy as you can see below and it would be somewhat important to have some understanding of the differences. And in case you are thinking, well what good or use is all this? Here is one example ( MarI/O - Machine Learning for Video Games) that shows how a computer learned to play Mario using DeepMind and a Neural network. ...

I have said in the past, Culture eats strategy for breakfast. One cannot fix culture - but rather lead with example and have others follow. This article on how Satya at Microsoft is expecting a culture shock to drive growth at Microsoft is a great example of this. Quite exciting days for Microsoft ahead.

This wired article titled If Xerox PARC Invented the PC, Google Invented the Internet , is an old one - from 5 years ago, but it is still an inspirational read. So many things lined up for Google, to be where they are today. I still get goose bumps reading that article - but then I am a geek, if that wasn’t obvious. Whilst, grid computing with GFS, MapReduce, Hadoop, are still very much relevant and great (and most others still trying to use and understand it); Dynamo (from Amazon) and BigTable lead to NoSQL which is great and still worth spending a lot of time learning, playing, and, experimenting - I would love to hear on what they are doing now with Colossus (think of that as GFS vNext), Caffeine and, Spanner . ...

Microsoft just announced an update around the HoloLens that allows you to share on what you are seeing (from a first-person perspective) with others to make to more interactive. This is a combination of MRC (Mixed Reality Capture) which already exists and some new updates that address some of the short coming of the MRC - especially when working with a audience. The main use case on the spectator view - as the name suggests is to allow those in the room not wearing a device to see the holograms but also the interactions that the folks wearing HoloLens with their mixed reality experience. ...

Us vs. some of our friends. You know who you are. 

I have been using Mouse without Borders , a program that allows you to make a virtual KVM between machines for some time at home and it is awesome. You can use one set of keybard and mouse among various (windows) machines including clipboard and copy and paste. If you haven’t tried it, I would highly recommend it. However lately I could not connect between two machines and kept getting the error: “Only one usage of each socket address”. To the point where it was unusable and was pretty annoying. I looked online at their site but nothing jumped out. BTW, I was seeing this only on one machine (running Windows 10) and not the other one (also running Windows 10 but an inner ring of the Creators Update - essentially the next version of Windows). ...

It isn’t often that one see’s issues with Bing - I can’t recall when I last saw it, but then when it does it sure is cute. We love Pandas so this can only be good. 😄

Dilbert says it nicely! :)

Continuing the previous #ArtificialIntelligence theme. Wanted to see what and how does Amazon’s rekognition work and different from the #AI offerings from the others, such as Microsoft. Here is a #ProjectMurphy image’s confidence score. I am glad to see that there is a 99% confidence that this is a person. Object and Scene detection The request POST is quite simple: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 { "method": "POST", "path": "/", "region": "us-west-2", "headers": { "Content-Type": "application/x-amz-json-1.1", "X-Amz-Date": "Thu, 01 Dec 2016 22:21:01 GMT", "X-Amz-Target": "com.amazonaws.rekognitionservice.RekognitionService.DetectLabels" }, "contentString": { "Attributes": [ "ALL" ], "Image": { "Bytes": "..." } } } And so is the response: ...

So, been spending a lot of time recently around many things related to Artificial Intelligence (#AI). More on that some day. :) Was curious about yesterdays Amazon’s announcement to jump on this bandwagon. Of course Microsoft and others have been there. I don’t know to what extend has Amazon been working on this, but given Alexa has been out for a couple of years, I know they have had rich pickings of tuning this further. ...

This video proves it; and it also shows that Clint is probably one of the best teachers out there! Love the passion! Now, go learn some Excel. :)

Honestly, I don’t think even Tony Stark can explain - this sums it up quite nicely and the music is just the cherry on top. :)

Some of the folks working on PPI and HoloPortation team from MSR left and went to setup a new company called PerceptiveIO . They have recently published a paper called Fusion4D: Real0time performance capture of challenging scenes. In that they cover some of the work around multi-view performance capture, the raw depth acquisition and preprocessing that needs to be done around that. This interestingly also handles deformation changes (e.g. taking off a jacket or a scarf) and these can be non-rigid and much more difficult to handle, but they are done beautifully. ...

(Hip hip Hooray!)3

I guess you can see the similarity. No? 😈

In addition to the HoloLens Device Portal ( see part 1 ), another option is using the UAP HoloLens companion app which you can install from the store . I think this is a little more end-user friendly, and perhaps a little less developer focused. It exposes a subset of the same functionality. Once you install it, you connect more or less in the same manner; I think most people will like the live streaming option. There is a bit of latency between the device and what is shown, but that could be somewhat because of our (possibly crappy) wireless which was overloaded with many folks at work. ...

One of the advantages of running Windows 10 on the HoloLens is that it has all the regular features that you would expect. From a developers perspective, one of those being the Device Portal which is awesome. It is essentially a web server that is being hosted on the machine, and allows you to manage your device over Wifi and USB. It is a must have if you want to stream your apps (including Holograms) so that others can see it, or alternatively you can record and then share. And of course there are details for various debug situations and the Virtual input saves your fingers from getting tired! 😄 You also use this to side load the apps you built. There are REST APIs you could use if you want to program, and there is also a UAP app on the store (more on that in part 2 ). ...