Intelligence as a war game

In May 1997, millions of people, despite likely never having played a game of chess themselves, gathered around their televisions to watch chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov play. His opponent, what appeared to be a pair of six-foot-tall cupboards enclosed in a black perforated metal grille, was IBM’s “Deep Blue” chess computer. Kasparov lost, and the event …

Enough with ‘human-AI collaboration’

Describing our interaction with Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems as ‘collaboration’ is well-intentioned, but flawed. Not only is it misleading, but it also takes away the credit of AI ‘labour’ from the humans behind it, and erases and obscures an often exploitative arrangement between AI producers and consumers. In this article, I explore how the AI …

Look, no hands! Exploring data with your eyes

Can you imagine using a computer without a mouse, keyboard, or touchscreen? Why would we even need to do that? In this article, we will learn how virtual on-screen ‘lenses’ can be controlled using eye-tracking technology, to magnify and show additional details on charts. Using your eyes to control a computer has some unexpected challenges, …

Coding in natural language: let’s start small

The idea of writing a computer program by writing English (or another natural human language) is attractive because it might make coding easier and faster. This article tells the story of my encounter with natural language programming as a graduate student, and the small working system I built. I discuss the idea of context limiting: …

Tell, don’t show: how to teach AI

Should we teach good behaviour to Artificial Intelligence (AI) through our feedback, or should we try and tell it a set of rules explaining what good behaviour is? Both approaches have advantages and limitations, but when we tested them in a complex scenario, one of them emerged the winner. If AI is the future, how …

People reluctant to use self-driving cars, survey shows

Autonomous vehicles are going to save us from traffic, emissions, and inefficient models of car ownership. But while songs of praise for self-driving cars are regularly sung in Silicon Valley, does the public really want them? That’s what my student Charlie Hewitt, and collaborators Ioannis Politis and Theocharis Amanatidis set out to study. We decided …

Human language isn’t the best way to chat with Siri or Alexa, probably

The year is 2019. Voice-controlled digital assistants are great at simple commands such as “set a timer…” and “what’s the weather?”, but frustratingly little else. Human language seems to be an ideal interface for computer systems; it is infinitely flexible and the user already knows how to use it! But there are drawbacks. Computer systems …

Talking to a bot might help with depression, but you won’t enjoy the conversation

Mental illness is a significant contributor to the global health burden. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) provided by a trained therapist is effective. But CBT is not an option for many people who cannot travel long distances, or take the time away from work, or simply cannot afford to visit a therapist. To provide more scalable …

Setwise Comparison: a faster, more consistent way to make judgements

I originally wrote this post in 2016 for the Sparrho blog. Have you ever wondered whether doctors are consistent in their judgements? In some cases, they really aren’t. When asked to rate videos of patients with multiple sclerosis (a disease that causes impaired movement) on a numeric scale from 0 being completely healthy to 4 …

How To Generate Any Probability Distribution, Part 2: The Metropolis-Hastings Algorithm

In an earlier post I discussed how to use inverse transform sampling to generate a sequence of random numbers following an arbitrary, known probability distribution. In a nutshell, it involves drawing a number x from the uniform distribution between 0 and 1, and returning CDF-1(x), where CDF is the cumulative distribution function corresponding to the probability …