On my first work trip to Jakarta 14 January 2016 for Grab, multiple terrorist bombs exploded a couple of miles from the GrabBike office where I had just arrived. People were fleeing cafes and restaurants around the attack site. My new colleagues were shaken, glad to be safe, looking to help. There was news of crowds on the
Originally published in infoproc.blogspot.com, Feb 7, 2021. This paper shows that models which result from gradient descent training (e.g., deep neural nets) can be expressed as a weighted sum of similarity functions (kernels) which measure the similarity...
Originally published in MIT Technology Review, Jan 15, 2021. A growing ecosystem of “responsible AI” ventures promise to help organizations monitor and fix their AI models. Rumman Chowdhury’s job used to involve a lot of translation. As...
Why pretrained machine learning models are often unusable and irreproducible — and what we can do about it. Introduction A useful approach to designing software is through contracts. For every function in your codebase, you start by writing...
Originally published in The Netflix Tech Blog, Dec 10, 2020. Netflix is pioneering content creation at an unprecedented scale. Our catalog of thousands of films and series caters to 195M+ members in over 190 countries who span...
Originally published in Raconteur, Dec 10, 2020. From facial recognition technology that monitors brown bear populations, to intelligent robots sorting recycling, these initiatives are having a positive impact on the environment. 1. Conserving species The Living Planet...
Originally published in Anomalo, Dec 2, 2020. Airbnb has always been a data driven company. Back in 2015, they were laying the foundation to ensure that data science was democratized at Airbnb. Meanwhile, they have grown to...
Originally published in MIT Technology Review, Nov 18, 2020. The process used to build most of the machine-learning models we use today can’t tell if they will work in the real world or not—and that’s a problem....
Originally published in Forbes, Nov 23, 2020. The most obvious way that artificial intelligence (AI) can impact retailers is to help consumers choose the right products when they shop. But there’s another less apparent way that AI...
Originally published in Reuters, Nov 9, 2020. TBILISI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – When Anna Kuznetsova saw an ad offering access to Moscow’s face recognition cameras, all she had to do was pay 16,000 roubles ($200) and send...