Number of Posts: 163
Posts 11 - 20
Caricatures become an obsession
Newspaper | Los Angeles Times
Date | 14.9.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | smartphone, virtual reality
Summary | Bitmoji is an app that allows users to create avatars of themselves. Bitmoji images are funny and absurd, which is why the app has become so popular. 3D Bitmoji World Lenses allows users to create 3D Bitmojis in the real world; they can select specific scenes through their smartphone, and it looks like Bitmoji avatars are interacting with their environment. Jacob Blackstock claims that it is important to have a digital extension of oneself. Also, based on a focus group study with teenagers, users want diversity. Moreover, they like the app because it offers a kind of lightheartedness that they can't find elsewhere.
Image Description | Screenshot of Bitmoji World Lenses, and series of different Bitmojis.
To Survive in Tough Times, Restaurants Turn to Data-Mining
Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 25.8.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | marketing, privacy, research/study
Summary | Restaurants are facing tough times as people seem to visit restaurants less ofter rises. Now analytic firms have come up with software designs that collect data about customers and waiting staff to find inefficiencies and smooth them out. This way all waiters would recognize guests by name and know their order and payment preferences. It could revolutionize customer service in the hospitality industry.
Image Description | People looking at a chart.
Image Tags | chart, female(s), male(s)
For travelers, chatbots and AI can't quite take you there
Newspaper | USA Today
Date | 27.8.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence
Summary | Artificial intelligence experts are very enthusiastic about the latest developments in AI for travel. Lay users however disagree, they find artificially intelligent chatbots as of now basically useless for real travellers. They still struggle to understand natural language and various bugs remain to be fixed.
Image Description | Screenshot of a chatbot conversation through Facebook including an image of a pizza with topping floating over it.
Image Tags | Facebook, text
How Hate Groups Forced Online Platforms to Reveal Their True Nature
Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 21.8.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | censorship, politics, social media, threat
Summary | Ever since the fatal Unite the Right protest in Charlotteville, social media and other internet companies seem to be washing their hands from any connection with far-right groups. Facebook has deleted such groups off of their platform, Reddit has done the same, Spotify is deleting white supremacist music from their libraries, and so on. Now far-right groups are building online alternatives for themselves and lamenting the censorship they have been victimized by.
Image Description | Illustration of hands around some crumpled-up paper.
Image Tags | hand(s)
The Secret to a Good Robot Teacher
Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 26.8.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | computer programming, research/study
Summary | Digitized education as it is usually designed today makes a fatal omission. It ignores the fact that human learning requires not only language as information but also language as social cues. Evolution has designed our minds so that we learn best from other human testimony. Studies with children show that they trust robotic teachers more when they display some kind of emotional range and social cues.
Image Description | Illustration of a robot teaching children.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s), school
In Social Media Era, Selfies Are the New Tupperware Parties
Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 25.8.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | Facebook, marketing, selfie
Summary | The old door-to-door sales and Tupperware party strategy has been revolutionized by social media. Now private consultants to these companies advertize the product on their Facebook accounts or organize Facebook parties where users gather in a Facebook group and witness the exclusive publishing of product information in that group. A company selling a eyelash enhancing serum has made hundreds of millions of dollars in profit because their private consultants sold the product on Facebook with before and after selfies.
Image Description | Fake eyelashes and the eyelash enhancing serum.
A Hunt for Ways to Combat Online Radicalization
Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 23.8.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | Google, research/study, social media, threat, YouTube
Summary | Social media companies have only recently begun waking up to the fact that their unpoliced platforms are safe spaces for all kinds of extremism. Studies show that extremists nowadays get radicalized online, whether they be islamists or white supremacists. While these two movements may differ in ideologies, they resemble each otehr very strongly in their internet strategies of recruitment and organization of offline events. A research group at Google has now come up with a diversion strategy to combat the radicalization of individuals online. They target people who watch extremist recruitment videos on YouTube with video suggestions that present differing arguments and the downsides of that ideology. So far, there can be no knowing whether this strategy is helping but the redirection videos are being watched.
Image Description | GIF with mouse cursor arrows: black arrows surrounding a white arrow.
Image Tags | gifs
Teaching Kids Coding, by the Book
Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 21.8.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | computer programming, gender, school
Summary | A non-profit organization called "Girls Who Code" provides after-school coding classes and coding camps to girls all over the country. It started as an attempt to recruit more girls to computer programming and now the demand is far larger than the available spots. The organization is now publishing a series of books of entertaining nature whose protagonists are girls who code so as to make girls relate to computer programming and imagine themselves as coders.
Image Description | Women/girls huddled over a laptop together.
Image Tags | computer/laptop, female(s), school
Teaching A.I. Systems to Behave Themselves
Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 13.8.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, Facebook, Google, threat
Summary | Artificial intelligence systems have made huge development leaps in recent times but there is still a lot of learning to do. The image recognition AI assistants of Facebook and Google demonstrate how, on the one hand, they can recognize a lot of images correctly if they have had enough data to learn from and, on the other hand, how it still makes bold mistakes. It suffices to manipulate a few pixels and the AI system gets confused. Developing AI systems not only takes a lot of data but also trial and error phases which are monitored and taught by human teachers.
Image Description | Programmers working on computers.
Image Tags | computer/laptop, female(s), male(s)
Farhad's and Mike's Week in Tech: A Snap and Google Tie-Up?
Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 5.8.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, Facebook, Google, Instagram, marketing, Snapchat
Summary | There is a rumor that Google might be interested in acquiring Snapchat. Instagram copies all features of Snapchat. Facebook has built a huge marketing company with Facebook itself and Instagram. Facebook is also working on improving its artificially intelligent chatbots so that they get better at understanding natural speech.
Image Description | Google and Snapchat logo.
Image Tags | Google, logo, Snapchat
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