Four Weekly Tech Newsletter – Nov 23
Lead articles from November 23
Can AI give elephants a winning edge?
Images of elephants roaming the African plains are imprinted on all of our minds and something easily recognized as a symbol of Africa. But the future of elephants today is uncertain. An elephant is currently being killed by poachers every 15 minutes, and humans, who love watching them so much, have declared war on their species.
The way we train AI is fundamentally flawed
The process used to build most of the ML models we use today can’t tell if they will work in the real world or not—and that’s a problem. It’s no secret that ML models tweaked to near-perfect performance in the lab often fail in real settings. This is typically put down to a mismatch between the data the AI was tested on and the data it encounters.
Making sense of IoT's quantum future
Its potential impact on IoT security. Quantum computing can sound too good to be true. The name has that futuristic flair that verges on buzzword territory. When explained, the concept can be difficult to introduce in a way that makes the benefits obvious. We’re familiar with the concept of bits, those zeroes-and-ones on-and-off switches that make up a traditional computer’s decision-making process…
ML guarantees robots' performance in unknown territory
A small drone takes a test flight through a space filled with randomly placed cardboard cylinders acting as stand-ins for trees, people or structures. The controlling algorithm has been trained on a thousand simulated courses, but this is new. 9 times out of 10, the tiny plane dodges all the obstacles in its path.This experiment is a proving ground for a pivotal challenge in modern robotics.
The future of AI in a post-COVID 19 world
Over the past several years, Artificial Intelligence has frequently been cited as an emerging technology that improves efficiency across a multitude of industries. Crucially, AI relies on large amounts of historical data from the systems it was built to improve. So, what happens when those industries and everyday life are dramatically transformed in a matter of weeks and suddenly nobody behaves the same way they used to?
The impact of AI on influencer marketing
Digital marketers have to deploy AI. They also have to defeat it… In October 2017, Facebook altered the Instagram API to make it harder for users to search its giant database of photos. The change was a small element of the company’s response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but it was a significant problem for parts of the digital marketing industry.