Data Science

This past week, I sat with my friends to count our blessings and rejoice in the season of winter festivals. It will not surprise you to learn that we had some unexpected guests including the President of the United States. Not in person, of course, but he was “in the house.” I won’t bore you with the general split. You already know everything you need to know about the topic and what each side believes. But here’s what I didn’t know. The people who are most influenced by sockpuppeted, bot-influenced, social media-infused, AI-generated, deepfaked content are the ones who are the most certain that they are not influenced at all. Continue Reading →

Here's some fun stuff you can do on your year-end holiday vacation: learn to use AI to read and understand your documents or email messages. It’s so easy that anyone can do it. Continue Reading →

A few weeks ago, Amazon announced new developer tools to enable Alexa to speak with emotion, either excited or disappointed across a range of intensities. Amazon said, "Use new Alexa Emotions and speaking styles to create a more natural and intuitive voice experience." Continue Reading →

Robocalls are so universally hated that the United States House of Representatives (a group not known for their bipartisan approach to legislating) passed the Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence Act (TRACED) 417-3. I am wondering what the three representatives who did not vote in favor of the bill like about robocalls... Continue Reading →

While I was out at a meeting, my meticulously neat wife armed herself with a feather duster, donned protective pink rubber gloves, and viciously, mercilessly straightened, organized, and dusted the desk in my home office. My desk was clean, but the results were suboptimal. Continue Reading →

Fans of Star Trek (The Original Series) will fondly remember the "Universal Translator." While Gene Roddenberry's epic saga was both inspirational and aspirational for some, it set goals for others. How much wireless bandwidth would you need on the Starship Enterprise? How would a medical tricorder work? What kind of storage would you need on Memory Alpha? How did the noise-cancelling for communicators work? Every engineer I know can tell you a story about how he or she was inspired by this amazing 1960s television show. Continue Reading →

LinkedIn published its "Top 10 Emerging Jobs" list on Tuesday and -- no surprise -- most of them are tech jobs. Coming in at number one is Artificial Intelligence Specialist. Continue Reading →

Snapchat will launch on December 18 a new feature called Cameo that will allow you to put your face onto short looping videos. This is a "shallowfake," meaning that you know it's fake, and so does everyone else who is watching. There is no attempt to fool anyone. It's basically a better version of Elf Yourself. Continue Reading →

In engineering parlance, getting closer to the "edge" means bringing computational resources closer to the user. To do that, you need a bunch of stuff to line up. In an ideal world, you'd combine powerful cloud resources and a low-latency high bandwidth network. That's exactly what Amazon and Verizon plan to do. Continue Reading →

Cyber Monday is supposed to be an awesome online shopping day. It is. I've seen estimates as high as $9 Billion for today. However, I've also seen estimates from NBC News and Radware that as much as 97 percent of online traffic today will be bot traffic. Continue Reading →