Microsoft R Open 3.2.5 is now available.
While there are no substantial changes to core R, the CRAN snapshot includes some new packages, such as deeplearning—a deep neural network implementation for regression and classification.
Parsey McParseface
Personally I think that the UK’s National Environment Research Council (NERC) missed a trick in ignoring the results of their own public poll when naming their new polar research vessel.
The poll results where overwhelmingly in favour of naming the vessel RRS Boaty McBoatface. Unfortunately, ministers went for the much safer fourth-placed option of naming it after beloved nature broadcaster Sir David Attenborough.
In terms of engaging the public with science, every time RRS Boaty McBoatface was mentioned by the media people would have paid attention. Instead the message is “So much for democracy.”—reinforcing the opinion many people hold about politics today.
However, NERC’s loss is Google’s gain. They’ve named a component of their TensorFlow open source machine intelligence framework “Parsey McParseface”. Parsey McParseface is a pre-trained parser for English text.
I’m not likely to forget that now, am I?
World’s largest ad agency appoints robot as creative director
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.
Microsoft R Server is now on the Microsoft Data Science Virtual Machine
The Microsoft Data Science Virtual Machine (DSVM) now comes pre-configured with Microsoft R Server Developer Edition.
As you can scale the DSVM according to your needs, this is an easy way to get going with some heavy duty R computations.
Google’s self-driving car causes crash
The New Scientist reports that one of Google’s autonomous cars drove into a bus on 14 February 2016.
Apparently Google’s cars have been involved in 18 accidents in Mountain View since it started testing in 2010. All have been other vehicles striking a stationary or slow moving Google car. However, in the latest incident the AI decided to pull out into the path of the slow-moving bus—i.e. the AI was at fault.
What interested me was the explanation given by Google
Our car had detected the approaching bus, but predicted that it would yield to us because we were ahead of it
As the driver is software, it’s possible to to examine the logs and know exactly how and why the accident occurred. Obviously, things are rarely as clear-cut when human drivers are involved in accidents. This makes it a lot easier to determine where the problem lies and, more importantly, to reduce the chances of it happening again. A single incident produces a bunch of useful data.
The ability to audit the behavior of autonomous cars is going to be one of their big selling points.