Archives of ArtificialIntelligence

Do self-driving cars make the courier redundant?

I’ll start with a quote via “Why workers are losing the war against the machines” taken from A Farewell to Alms by economist Gregory Clark: “There was a type of employee at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution whose job and livelihood largely vanished in the early twentieth century. This was the horse. The population […]

Map/Reduce (Disco) on millions of tweets

Whilst working on data sciencey problems for AdaptiveLab I’m becoming more involved in simple visualisations for proof-of-concepts for clients. This ties in nicely with my PyCon Parallel Computing tutorial with Minesh. I’ve been prototyping a Disco map/reduce tutorial (part 2 for PyCon) using tweets collected during the life of SocialTies during 2011-2012. Using 11,645,331 tweets […]

Testing 3 modern face detection libraries (face.com, openCV, libccv)

As a research project months back Balthazar and I tested 3 modern face detection libraries (definitely see Balthazar’s write-up). Face.com had just been acquired by facebook, they had a great and free service which annotated not just face locations but also sex, age and emotion. We also tested OpenCV (popular and free) and the lesser […]

StartupChile (Round 2.1) all finished, thoughts

The odd thing is that I’ve been trying to write this post for 3 months. Having started and stopped several times (including during the flight back from Chile on Oct 15th) I figure I ought to put something out. The journey was, it turns out, somewhat of a roller-coaster ride. Early in January Kyran Dale […]

StrongSteam’s first novel OCR matching API (Python demo)

Here’s a preview of our first novel API in StrongSteam. We’ve been working with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for a while, we set ourselves the task of matching a noisy photograph of some text to a pre-seeded database of entries. If you follow my blog you’ll already have seen our example iPhone app for the […]

StartupChile, PyCon, StrongSteam

As ever with a startup – there’s always too much to do and the game is all about juggling burning balls whilst figuring out which shouldn’t be dropped. We’re rather busy here. Yesterday Emily and I finished the paperwork for our first reimbursement round at StartupChile. This is the part of the process that gets […]

Data mining/AI/robots/hackerspace meet-up this Thursday

This Thursday at 7pm our StrongSteam will run a friendly pub meet around: Data mining Artificial Intelligence (AI) Robots Hackerspaces The goal is to bring people together from StartupChile and the local community who are interested in the above subjects. The meeting is just a pub meetup, if there’s demand then I’ll organise speakers for […]

StartupChile – we have our contracts, StrongSteam progress, PyCon

A few days back we signed our StartupChile contracts, now we’re official. Apparently our ID cards are available but there’s no word on bank accounts yet. The admin rolls forward but it is a bit boring now. The feeling here is still very positive, we’ve gained some Return Value Agenda (RVA) points by meeting with […]