Sunday, September 01, 2019


A “Boy, I wish someone would do something about this” App.
The Rise of the Urban Tattletale
Say you spot a truck blocking a bike lane in San Francisco’s Mission District. Using a new app called Safe Lanes, you can snap a picture of the offending vehicle’s license plate, and beam it up to a constantly refreshing, GPS-coded map. Meanwhile, Safe Lanes will take your image and run it through a license-plate reader. Then, it will use the ID to automatically fill out a complaint form and submit it directly to the city’s non-emergency 311 service. If you’re lucky, officials will respond swiftly, and the vehicle will be towed, or the driver will be given a citation. You’ll also get a list of all the previous traffic tickets and citations the offending vehicle has earned. The bike lane will be clear, someone will (hopefully) learn a lesson, and you’ll get some satisfying closure that leaves a positive—and potentially lifesaving—mark on society.
But the pictures of people’s license plates, and their location on a geo-tagged map, don’t disappear once justice has been served: They live on for anyone on the internet to see. And as other kinds of citizen-powered crime-tracking form an ever-widening panopticon over our urban space, the act of recording and displaying those data has become more fraught.




Easy to get started, very hard to get right.
The shift toward open source conversational AI
In July, Uber released a new open source AI library called the Plato research dialogue system. A couple of months ago, Cisco open-sourced its MindMeld conversational AI platform, after acquiring the company of the same name in 2017 for $125 million.
In fact, the whole field of AI has seen a strong shift toward open source infrastructure in the past few years. The initial spark may have been Google’s decision to open-source TensorFlow in 2015. At that point, many businesses started paying attention. Google Search data shows that interest in open source libraries like TensorFlow and PyTorch has grown at the expense of closed platforms such as IBM Watson and Amazon’s Sagemaker.
The market is driving this shift. Companies are increasingly deciding that many of the AI capabilities they need are strategically important and should be developed in-house. By using open source tools, they can build up their own training data sets and other IP, such as custom integrations with their backend systems. By developing the talent, data, and software to ship AI themselves, these companies control their own AI destiny.
The market for conversational AI is starting to mature, especially in the banking, insurance, and health care industries. Bank of America’s Erica and Capital One’s Eno are examples from leading banks that have built large teams to develop conversational AI. Challenger startups like Lemonade and N26 are on the path to building autonomous organizations, which becomes possible as the industry moves from level three conversational AI to level five.




Another chapter
The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence in Law: Basic Questions
22 Pages Posted: 26 Aug 2019 Harry Surden University of Colorado Law School




The only cheating I encourage my students to try.



No comments: