Picture this: You’re playing a game of trivia with friends. The question is, “How many bones are in the human hand?” Your friend answers 27. You decide to ask Alexa, the smart speaker sitting in the living room, to verify the number. Alexa says, “26.” Everyone agrees that even though your friend’s guess was close,… Read more »
Monthly Archives: December 2019
Oil pumpjacks and the changing Alberta landscape
The oil producing equipment is not going extinct like the traditional grain elevator, but just as technology changed how agriculture companies built their terminals, innovation is altering the number, size and placement of pumpjacks. For much of the last century, oil wells were similar to drilling a water well — they were vertical. That changed in… Read more »
How bots are stealing artwork from artists on Twitter
Artists have told the BBC how their artwork is being stolen from social media and sold for profit online. They claim malicious individuals are finding their art, often with the aid of an automated system known as a bot, and uploading it on to a website where it can be sold on a T-shirt without… Read more »
Fraudsters almost swindled the Royal Canadian Mint with payroll ‘spoofing’ scam
The Royal Canadian Mint fell for what’s known as a “spear-phishing” scam and almost forked over an employee’s paycheque to fraudsters, according to a breach report obtained through access to information. Spear-phishing is a type of fraud which sees swindlers carefully collect information on a target in order to impersonate them. It’s one of the “most common and most dangerous… Read more »
The economics of AI
I teach a one class introduction to AI for my Introduction to Management Information Systems class. This video explains, in very simple terms, that AI is a “prediction machine”, analogous to how a computer is a “mathematics machine”. Source: YouTube Date: December 13th, 2019 Link to 16 minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdhAu6Jwc0E
Basics of Machine Learning
I teach a one-class session on Artificial Intelligence. In order to “open the black box” of AI, I use this simple but very information video to explain how machine learning works. Machine learning forms the basics of AI. Source: YouTube Date: December 13th, 2019 Link to 8 minute video: https://youtu.be/ukzFI9rgwfU
How computers wrote BBC election stories
For the first time, BBC News published a news story for every constituency that declared election results overnight – all written by a computer. It was the BBC’s biggest test of machine-generated journalism so far. Each of nearly 700 articles – most in English but 40 of them in Welsh – was checked by a… Read more »
How AI is helping spot wildfires faster
As wildfire season raged in California this fall, a startup a few states away used artificial intelligence to pinpoint the location of blazes there within minutes — in some cases far faster than these fires might otherwise be noticed by firefighters or civilians. Santa Fe-based Descartes Labs, which uses AI to analyze satellite imagery, launched its… Read more »
GPS tracking gives snowmobilers access to sensitive B.C. caribou habitat
“This new, innovative technology provides us with the opportunity for continued snowmobile access, while minimizing disturbance to caribou herds,” said Donegal Wilson, executive director of the British Columbia Snowmobile Federation, in a written statement. The GPS equipment was already fitted to a few members of the herd by provincial biologists in 2017, according to a release from the… Read more »
Inuit sharing ancient knowledge of ice, sea and land with new app
A social media app geared toward the outdoor lives of Inuit launched Wednesday with features that tie traditional knowledge to smartphone technology. The Siku app and web platform, named after the Inuktitut word for sea ice, allows users to trade observations about dangerous conditions, document wildlife sightings and trade hunting stories. It also integrates modern weather, sea ice… Read more »
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