Mobile was often regarded as enemy of brick and mortar businesses. People would come into a store use their mobile to sometimes scan items and order them elsewhere. That was the story told by many brick and mortar businesses. This has changed considerably. Instead of fighting mobile, leading players in the retail sector have actively...
Category: Technology
What It’s Like to Work on a 30-Year-Old Macintosh – The Atlantic
Ian Bogost writes about his experience using a Macintosh SE from 1990. He attributes the attractiveness of this long past computing area to the simplicity of using devices like a Mac: But it wasn’t user-friendliness alone that made computers of this era great—it was simplicity. Mousing, dragging, and menuing does make the machine easier to...
AI deepfakes are now as simple as typing whatever you want your subject to say – The Verge
Deepfakes are becoming very easy to create. As shown in the work by scientists from Stanford University, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Princeton University and Adobe Research, videos can be fine-tuned to audiences of different backgrounds. All this is done purely by editing scripts, automating previously tedious manual work. The authors themselves note: However, the...
Artificial Artificial Intelligence
Behind a successful AI there is a human doing critical work. It’s an open secret that behind the “magic” of AI tools there are large teams of people, doing things like labeling the training data to make it work. The result of their work is truly impressive: we are tricked into believing that these AIs...
The Challenge of Crafting Intelligible Intelligence | June 2019 | Communications of the ACM
Modern AI approaches often work like black boxes: nobody really knows why things work the way they work. Offering explanations why an AI system came to a conclusion is certainly needed. The article by Daniel S. Weld and Gagan Bansal [1] studied two approaches that are promising: using an inherently interpretable model, or adopting an...
Almost 80% of AI and ML Projects Have Stalled, Survey Says – Robotics Business Review
Doing an AI project is hard. The main obstacle is the volume and quality of the training data, so Nathaniel Gates, CEO and co-founder of Alegion While large companies (more than 100,000 employees) are the most likely to have an AI strategy, only 50% of them currently have one, according to MIT Sloan Management Review....
Fallacies and Pitfalls in building (hybrid) Progressive Web Apps
We’ve rolled out our first wave of (hybrid) Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) to our customers during the last couple of weeks. Using a PWA based approach speeds up the development process for sure, however building hybrid PWAs which run a native web container had some challenges. Design Considerations Before we started to implement the hybrid...
Ephemeral Apps
In the past, there was an app for everything. People were happy to download those apps. However, people evenually got tired from installing apps for everything. It’s easy to see why this has happened. Some apps did not live up to the expectations, other apps are often used sporadically for a very specific task. For...
Towards a Proxemics Driven Software Architecture
We’ve build software for decades now. Starting with running software on remote mainframes and providing access via (dumb) terminals we moved toward personal computing where most of the computing activities happened locally on the desktop of the computer (aka the personal computer revolution). Spreadsheets are a wonderful example for this: from the mid-1960s onwards software...
Introducing LEIA – Your Shopping Avatar
Wouldn’t it be nice of you have your own personal assistant that helps you with all your shopping endeavors? An assistant that goes for you through advertising material and filters out news, coupons that are of interest for you? We are working on a personal assistant that brings these features to your mobile in the...
