Originally published in Los Angeles Times, March 19, 2021. Sonoma County is adding artificial intelligence to its wildfire-fighting arsenal. The county has entered into an agreement with the South Korean firm Alchera to outfit its network of fire-spotting cameras with software that detects wildfire activity and then alerts authorities. The technology sifts through past and
Originally published in Blogboard Journal, Jan 7, 2021. In this article we’ll look at several case studies of data science being used to optimize marketing efforts at companies like Lyft, Airbnb, Netflix, Doordash, Wolt, Rovio Entertainment. In...
Originally published in Protocol, Feb 18, 2021. This is the story of Li An, a pseudonymous former employee at ByteDance, as told to Protocol’s Shen Lu. I wasn’t proud of it, and neither were my coworkers. But...
Originally published in Nature Machine Intelligence, Feb, 2021. Turning principles into practice is one of the most pressing challenges of artificial intelligence (AI) governance. In this Perspective, we reflect on a governance initiative by one of the...
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...
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...
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 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...