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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 ). ...

As we start to play and explore with new AR/VR mediums like Oculus and HoloLens there is a stronger shift from the traditional medium of working from a more transaction with-known-outcome based model to a more expressive and exploratory model. In the context of many enterprises this is a bigger shift - albeit some of it they have started seeing with mobility but still not the same. I really like how Rick explains and expresses this both in terms of definition and thinking. The clay analogy I think really helps. ...

I have talked to a few folks recently, and they still don’t believe bash on Windows (RS1) is ‘real’ and think it some kind of a VM. No it is not. It is the ‘real’ user mode running on Windows. It is not Cygwin, and it is not a VM. It is essentially all of the user mode (I.e. Linux without the kernel). The kernel in this case is a wrapper around the NT kernel that translates the Linux commands to Windows and then things run. As far as Linux is concerned, its the same code and doesn’t have any changes). Technically this is called Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). ...

Update - Was a typo in the script, which I fixed. If someone had an issue, copy it again and give it a go. I prefer to download and see the decks and videos ‘offline’ instead of streaming, as I can easily pause them and then pick off where I left - especially handy when I need to go to a meeting, or take care of some work, or just on a crappy network. ...

OK, now this is cool - not only is bash on fire, but I can miracast directly from Windows to another device. The first video shows a few basic shell commands and then catches fire! There should have been a video here but your browser does not seem to support it. And this second video - essentially miracasts the same video you just saw on my TV without any special adapters. The TV is connected to the network and is showing a channel. Windows RS1 (“Anniversary Edition”) can find that on the network (from a Surface Book) and directly stream to that. The TV automatically switches over the input from cable and shows the video; and when I stop, it switches back to the cable input. Sweet. :) ...

I am wondering, so what happens to PowerShell now?

Hmm, what is it downloading from the store? I thought that is what The Add/Remove features would add.

Have been playing, a little with the new Visual Studio “preview” version (the installation of which is super smooth and takes waaaaay less time!). And as part of that saw the Unity Debugger option. Was this always there or is that new? Or did the Unity Tools beta add it? Interesting times to start playing with this, primarily for AR/VR and #HoloLens.

Will be publishing a Virtual Reality (VR) point of view internally, and thinking of starting with this.

Can we see the formula displayed in lovely maths? (and trying a simpler equation, as the last one did not parse properly) $$i\hbar\frac{\partial}{\partial t}\left|\Psi(t)\right>=H\left|\Psi(t)\right>$$ Ohh, looks pretty! Though some LaTeX is being finicky, need to take out time to start posting some stuff here, given this is supported. 😁

We, humans, are multi-threaded by design and can do many things in parallel - with two exceptions I think. The only two blocking function we have to deal with are sneezing and farting. During these times, all current activity must be suspended for the duration. And of course it can be pretty annoying (or depending on the function, embarrassing). So next time you check in some code, think about it - is this smelly and sneezy (yep, that’s a word, now) or have I done the right thing?

#Love is … staying friends throughout a holiday with no WiFi. ????

At home I have a multitude of sensors and devices - ~80 or so which are a combination of water sensors, motion sensors, door sensors, humidity, temperature, etc. A good bunch of these are controlled and integrated with Smartthings, and some I can interact with other apps (e.g. Amazon Echo or Philips Hue etc.). Most are Z-Wave based and some are WiFi. I wanted to know if there are any z-wave visualisers? Essentially software that uses a USB z-wave network device as a node and then can plot what the mesh looks like. Would be awesome to be able to debug the packet hops from the controller to the device. ...

Woah! Almost 7 GB of system error mem dumps! Seriously? I understand the value they provide but why do I need to manually go and clean them up. And 7 GB????? Does anyone even read them?