Issue 30

In the News

Can Watson save IBM?

Hopes pinned on developing system into a powerful and profitable set of services

Bayes's theorem: what's the big deal?

Bayes’s theorem, touted as a powerful method for generating knowledge, can also be used to promote superstition and pseudoscience

Facebook’s secret chat SDK lets developers build Messenger bots

M won’t be the only artificial intelligence on Facebook Messenger. Facebook has given some developers access to an unannounced Chat SDK that allows them to build interactive experiences and “bots” in Messenger for shopping, booking travel, and more

Also in the news this week...

Google is working on a secret messaging service that will deliver services through chat bots, similar to those already found in Kik and WeChat. More
Apple buys Emotient, a start-up that develops computer vision algorithms to read emotions in faces. More
Mark Zuckerberg's personal challenge for 2016 is building an AI for his home. More
NVIDIA launches AI engine for self driving cars. More

Learning

Attention and Memory in Deep Learning

This post explores Attention Mechanisms in the context of language translation and image analysis.

Why too much evidence can be a bad thing

Under ancient Jewish law, if a suspect on trial was unanimously found guilty by all judges, then the suspect was acquitted. This reasoning sounds counterintuitive, but the legislators of the time had noticed that unanimous agreement often indicates the presence of systemic error in the judicial process, even if the exact nature of the error is yet to be discovered. They intuitively reasoned that when something seems too good to be true, most likely a mistake was made.