Decision Mechanics

Insight. Applied.

World’s largest ad agency appoints robot as creative director

By

AI-CD β

McCann, the world’s largest ad agency, has appointed a robot as creative director in its Japanese office.

AI-CD β, as the new hire is called, is fed with data on award-winning commercials and comes up with ideas based on a “brief”.

Not content with having AI-CD β be merely a piece of software, McCann have created a robot with an arm that writes out its suggestions in Japanese calligraphy.

Clearly, this is more about getting noticed than actually believing that AI can run the company. Deep Knowledge Ventures, a venture capital firm, did something similar when they appointed an algorithm to the board. As far as I know, it didn’t slaughter its fellow members and seize power.

Still, it’s interesting to see people start to toy with the idea that machine learning can play a central creative role in organizations.

DeepMind has access to data on millions of NHS patients

By

DeepMind, the Google-owned AI company, has an agreement with the Royal Free NHS Trust that gives it access to healthcare data on 1.6 million patients who visit three London hospitals. The agreement includes access to five years of historical data.

The company is building an application to help monitor patients with kidney disease.

While it will be interesting to see what DeepMind can produce with such comprehensive data, the National Health Service sharing identifiable healthcare information with a commercial entity is sure to raise privacy concerns.

Tufte in R

By

minimal line plot using ggplot2

Lukasz Piwek maintains a resource that shows how the visualization practices developed by Edward Tufte can be replicated in R.

His neat Tufte in R site currently contains examples of the following visualizations

  • minimal line plot
  • range-frame (or quartile-frame) scatterplot
  • dot-dash (or rug) scatterplot
  • minimal boxplot
  • minimal barchart
  • slopegraph
  • sparklines
  • stem-and-leaf display

It’s a living resource, so he’s adding to the collection over time.

Example code is given for R base graphics, lattice and ggplot2.

US lotteries rigged using malicious code

By

The Des Moines Register reports that an information security officer used malicious code to manipulate lottery results in Wisconsin, Colorado and Oklahoma.

Apparently

Examiners found out-of-place programs known as dynamic link libraries, or DLLs, that had been written onto the Wisconsin computer. The programs were designed to “redirect” a drawing if certain conditions were met…

This is a problem with applications that use common libraries (such as DLLs). It’s difficult to be sure what code is being executed.