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 … [Read more...]
DeepMind has access to data on millions of NHS patients
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 … [Read more...]
Tufte in R
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 … [Read more...]
On the dynamic structure of complex networks
Emergence published my article on the dynamic structure of complex networks. … [Read more...]
US lotteries rigged using malicious code
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 … [Read more...]