Artificial intelligence

2019-10-31 (Thursday)

Posted on by What did you learn in School today ?

Today, I learned about:

Salvador

During the month of October, my daughter Karina had the pleasure of presenting a project related to NLP (Natural Language Processing) at an international conference for AI (Artificial Intelligence) in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil.

While still being a Portuguese colony, during the 16th century, São Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos, or just Salvador for short, became the first capital of Brazil, before it later on moved to Rio de Janeiro and Brasília. Here are some nice pictures from Salvador. See also reference # 1 below.

The sun sets in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. Photo taken from Morro do Cristo da Barra by Karina Johansson on 2019-10-18.
Six different views of Salvador. Upper row from left to right: Monument of the fallen cross in the historical center, statue raised in 1999; Karina joined the legendary author Jorge Amado, his wife Zélia Gattai and their dog Fadul on this park bench in Rio Vermelho. Lower row from left to right: The district of Pelourinho in the historical center; The Lacerda elevator, the world’s first urban elevator from 1873, connecting upper and lower parts of Salvador; A view from the Ibis hotel in Rio Vermelho; The Museum of modern art (MAM), inaugurated in 1963, with one building going back to the 16th century. All photos taken on 2019-10-17- -20.

Update 2019-11-04

Today I received more details from the conference I mentioned above. It was called STIL – XII Brazilian Symposium in Information and Human Language Technology and was held in Salvador on 2019-10-15 – – 18, bringing together both academic and industrial participants working in the areas of Linguistics, Computer Science, Psycholinguistics, Information Science, etc.

STIL also had three different collocated events, one of them being VI Student Workshop on Information and Human Language Technology (TILic). It was at TILic that Karina presented her project, Research of the use of word embeddings for calculation of similarity in translation memories, with the following abstract:

“The strategy traditionally employed by the CAT tools to match the segments of the phrase being currently translated with the segments present in the translation memory considers the intersection of the sequence of words (n-grams) present in the segments of the text being compared. However, this strategy is not capable of capturing semantic similarities beyond the trivial level. This study therefore presents a project with the aim of investigating the applicability of monolingual and bilingual word embeddings to implement the matching. The study is still in its initial phase of development. In sequence, there will be proposed and implemented a strategy for the calculation of similarity using word embeddings, which will be incorporated in a open source CAT tool. In order to evaluate the proposed strategies, the quality of matching in the baseline system (a version of a CAT system without any modification) will be compared to those of the system in which the proposed method will be implemented. At the conclusion of this project is expected to have obtained a strategy based on semantic similarity that will be an alternative to the traditional matching strategy based on n-grams. Although there are already texts covering the use of word embeddings to detect the textual similarity and cleaning of translation memories, there is no literature about any work that has investigated the objective of this project. Consequently, this study should be considered as the first initiative to an investigation within this context.”

In ref. # 2 below is the complete presentation (in Portuguese).

And here are three photos from the event. It shows Karina and her colleague João Gabriel Melo Barbirato, who presented a project named “Linguistic improvements on the text-image aligner LinkPICS”.

João Gabriel Melo Barbirato and Karina Mayumi Johansson presenting their projects at TILic19 on 2019-10-17.

That’s what I learned in school !

Refs.:

1: Salvador

2: Investigação do uso de word embeddings para cálculo de similaridade em memórias de tradução

*: What did you learn in school today ?

2018-02-28 (Wednesday)

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Today, I learned that:

We are in the middle of the Winter Olympic games and the Paraolympic games, but did you know that not only humans compete in skiing? Watch the video in reference #1 and marvel about what our AI friends can do!

On various occasions, I have told you the story about a new fantastic material called graphene. If you want to catch up on those, look at my posts from 2016-02-01, 2016-05-22, 2016-10-29, and 2017-06-23. And here comes another interesting fact from “down under”. Researchers in Australia have produced a very effective water filter using graphene film with microscopic nano-channels. When tested with the polluted waters in Sydney harbor, the result was so good that they could drink the water without any health issues. See more in reference # 2 below.

Finally, look at this amazing photo! It shows the light emitted by a single atom. More information can be found in reference #3 below.

Single atom light

The tiny dot in the center of the screen, between the two metal electrodes, is the light emitted by a single atom. Photo taken by quantum physics professor David Nadlinger, University of Oxford.

That’s what I learned in school !

Refs.:

1: Skiing robots hit the slopes in South Korea

2: Graphene film makes dirty water drinkable in a single step

3: A ‘trapped’ atom is visible to the naked eye

*: What did you learn in school today ?

2018-01-09 (2 years !!!)

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Today, I learned that:

What started out as a dream (literally) is now reality since 2 years ago. Of course I am talking about this blog. Thanks to all my followers for your encouraging remarks and faithfulness! And instead of publishing a new header photo today, for some time ahead, each time you open my blog again there will be a random photo from the first two years to catch your eye!

My main topic today is AI, robots, and how they interact with us humans to make the world a better place to live:

One month ago, the Swedish writer Johan Nyberg published his column in Radio Sweden’s weekly news program, Godmorgon, världen (“Good morning, world”). It was an interesting story on how today’s computers can perform many of the routine tasks in any many disciplines much more efficiently than human beings, but the best solution of all is when the two work together in a team. He gives various examples on such successes, not only chess, but also everyday situations in big service companies such as Amazon, which besides the investment in 45 000 robots during the last three years also has employed 250 000 people. So his closing remarks are that we should not have any fear that the computers will grab our jobs, but that workers with computers will take the jobs from workers without computers. See also reference #1 below for a complete transcript (in Swedish).

Then, a couple of days later, I heard another interesting story of how AI computers and people interact with good result. X-ray images that need to be analysed by a physician can now be pretreated by a computer which scans the images to present the doctor with results of areas where s/he can look further to make a more accurate and faster diagnose as compared to the old method when few areas were chosen out of random or a hunch. Reference #2 discusses this topic (also in Swedish).

And yesterday, there were two interesting topics on the same issue: In the morning, I heard that in the Southern city of Trelleborg, the city administration’s social assistants are delighted, because a “robot” (in fact an app on their web) is now taking care of the investigative, preparatory work, such as checking with the tax authorities etc., when a person is applying for social allowance. They now enter only in the decisive phase, which leaves them available for more personal contacts, and the result is that they have been able to find new jobs for those people in record numbers and huge savings in not needing to pay out social allowances.

At the same, in a later edition of the same news program, it was reported that their counterparts as social assistants in the city of Kungsbacka, immediately south of Göteborg (Gothenburg in English) are  disappointed, they would like to continue turning papers instead of doing proactive work, so 12 out of the 16 assistants have handed in their resignation notes, as a protest against a similar system which will begin to operate in the month of May. More about these two cases can be found in reference #3 below (also in Swedish).

With so many interesting news stories from Sweden, why not learn Swedish and accompany the news yourself? If you are interested, drop me a message to Swedish lessons and I am sure we can work out something interesting!

Finally, did you hear that a robot recently reported having been molested by a human being? Its name is R2Me2 of course!

That’s what I learned in school !

Refs.:

1: Krönika av Johan Norberg

2: Aj aj blir AI AI – Möt din blivande läkare datorn

3: Socialsekreterare säger upp sig när robot ska ta över deras arbetsuppgifter

*: What did you learn in school today ?

2017-10-15 (Summertime)

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Today, I learned that:

On the Southern hemisphere, we are moving on towards the brightest season of the year. One of the signs of that is the adoption of daylight saving time, a.k.a. summer time, when the clock advances one hour instantaneously. However, the Brazilian government continues to make that happen at midnight, moving ahead to 01:00. Although this might not be a big obstacle right now, when moving back to standard time in February, 2018, it will occur once more at midnight, jumping back to 23:00. I think that the European model, where the change occurs at a time when much less people are active, involving 02:00 and 03:00, is much better, and its also does not involve two different dates. References #1 and 2 remembers that wonderful time of the year, seen through the hands and voice of George Gershwin and Janis Joplin.

And for the following people, in jail because of corruption, summer time may be some sort of relief:

Relief

Cartoon from Folha de S. Paulo today:
“-We managed to reduce your stay! -How much? -One hour. Summer time is about to start.”

In my post of 2017-09-29, I mentioned the word infinitesimal used in a broadcast from Radio National, Australia. In the same interview is also remembered the old commercial from Esso, “Put a tiger in your tank”, which can be answered by “What is the use of a tiger in tank, if there is a jackass at the steering wheel?” (See also the transcript in reference #3 below).

As a parallel, watch the two videos in references #4 and 5 below. So what is the use of high speed automated routing system for packages when they are treated so badly at the destination?

But everything in Brazil is not as pessimistic as it may seem from the examples above. The Swedish-Brazilian Chamber of Commerce (Swedcham) just published its annual survey of the business climate in Brazil for 70 Swedish companies. Despite the Brazilian recession, 36% of the companies say that they are satisfied with the present business climate. You can read the complete report in reference # 6 below.

Finally, here are two interesting examples of how AI (artificial intelligence) is helping out in the fields of health and beauty:

  • In an eye clinic in the Aravind hospital in Madurai, India, AI is examining photos taken of the eyes of diabetic patients. If they are not treated in time, there is a risk that they may go blind. So together with Google, the hospital has developed a computer program to examine the photos of the retinal fundus of the eye. Tests have shown that the program has the same accuracy as the professional ophthalmologist, up to 90 %, and in much less time. See references # 7 and 8 below.
  • Intel has developed a mobile application (named Face It) that uses computer vision to acquire data about a user’s facial structure as well as machine learning to determine the user’s face shape. This information is then combined with manually inputted information to give the user a personalized set of hair and beard styles that are guaranteed to make the user look his best. A personalized list of tips are also generated for the user to take into account when getting a haircut. See the screenshot and reference # 9 below.

FaceIt

Example of tips generated by Face It

That’s what I learned in school !

Refs.:

1: Summertime

2: Janis Joplin – Summertime, Live 1969

3: Micropayments could amount to large sums for conservation

4: Shipping Warehouse Robots

5: Flagra de funcionário dos Correios jogando encomendas

6: Swedish business climate in Brazil 2017

7: AI räddar synen för diabetiker

8: Ophthalmoscopy

9: Face It – The Artificially Intelligent Hairstylist

*: What did you learn in school today ?

2017-03-12 (Sunday)

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Today, I learned that:

Even if you loose your voice, there are now ever better means of communicating with other people. Of course you can write, if you are able, but you must agree with me that an audio is much easier to grasp than a text, one can continue with most other activities and still understand what is being said. (But take very much care, even if you use a handsfree mobile phone in your car, your attention to the ongoing call is often so high that you can be a menace to other drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians.)

Yesterday, I watched the 2014 movie about Stephen Hawking and his first wife Jane, “The Theory of Everything”. In the very moment when Stephen is first heard through his mechanical voice, Jane is pretty excited, but complains that the voice has an American accent. If that had happened today, the genius, who recently celebrated his 75th anniversary, could use his own voice, although generated artificially. More about the movie and Stephen Hawking can be found in references #1 and 2 below.

And now over to the story about Jason Liversidge and his new voice: Just like Stephen Hawking, Jason, who lives in Yorkshire in northeast England, suffers from the neurological disease called ALS. The first symptoms appeared almost 10 years ago, but it was only three years ago that he got the diagnosis of ALS. His own voice is still working, but sometimes he needs a backup voice, and then he can use his computer which generates sounds with the same accent as Jason’s, “not the posh English accent”. His artificial voice was created from a video recording of a speech he made some years ago, combined with speech from other men from Yorkshire. A research institute in Edinburgh, Scotland, were then able to recreate Jason’s voice synthetically. The proper Jason and his family recognize the similarity of both voices. Reference #3 appoints to the radio program from Radio Sweden (in Swedish) which tells the whole story.

Jason

Jason Liversidge from Yorkshire already has a sounds-alike backup to his voice when his own does not perform as desired. Photo by Stephanie Zakrisson/Sveriges Radio.

Exactly one year ago, 2016-03-12, I published a video showing Atlas, a robot from Boston Dynamics performing gracious movements. But it did not stop there, look at this video of its newest sibling, Handle, in reference # 4 below, SIMPLY AMAZING!

BR-PY2

Ponte da Amizade (“Bridge of Friendship”) joining Foz do Iguaçu – PR, Brazil, where the photo was taken on 2017-01-26 by my daughter, with Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, in the left side.

The photo above shows another view of the Paraná River, this time from the Brazilian side, shot 200 km South of the photo from 2016-11-30. It shows the bridge interconnecting the Brazilian city of Foz do Iguaçu – PR, to the right, and the Paraguayan city of Ciudad del Este. Not long ago, this bridge used to be packed with people and cars returning to Brazil from a shopping spree in Paraguay, but the ongoing financial crisis has also here had a devasting effect. (I already published a photo from Foz do Iguaçu on 2016-01-28).

… That’s what I learned in school !

byran
Do you need to TRANSLATE DOCUMENTS between ENGLISH, BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE, and the SCANDINAVIAN (SWEDISH / DANISH / NORWEGIAN) languages? Contact “Byrån / The Taskforce” here !!!

Refs.:
1: The Theory of Everything

2: Stephen Hawking

3: Talsyntes på dialekt stärker identiteten

4: Introducing Handle

*: What did you learn in school today ?

2016-03-26 (Saturday)

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Today, I learned that:

We have arrived at the Easter weekend and in most countries where Easter is celebrated, it is normally Easter Sunday which attracts the main interest culinarywise. Sweden is an exception, there it is Easter Eve, Saturday, that has that attribute.

So I would like to contribute with a marvellous dessert to break the normal sweets tradition. Avocado for most people is known for its use in appetizers, e.g. filling it with prawns, caviar, etc., and of course as a guacamole dip for the tortillas or nachos. But in Brazil, we like to eat the avocado sweet, mixing its pulp with sugar and water / milk, to form a delicious cream. See the photo and reference #1 below.

Creme de abacate

Avocado cream is extremely simple to make, and yet it is so tasty. Just divide the fruit in two halves, scrape out the pulp and place it in a blender. Add some sugar and a liquid, either water or milk. Dose and blend well to desired consistency. If you use water, then some lime will give the cream a delightful contrast. But do not add lime if you are using milk, they do not go well together chemically.

This morning, I heard some distressing news from the local news program of SR Sjuhärad. It was reported that the new EU regulations about traffic safety does not oblige the car driver to have his/her tail lights lit when out driving in the fog. To me, and so many others, that seems like a dangerous degradation of the safety rules. Let us hope that the human drivers have more wit than the EU legislators and leave the lights on. See also reference #2 below.

In two earliers posts, 2016-03-10 and 2016-03-12, I reported about the outcome of the first three games of Go in a best of five series challenge between the AlphaGo computer and the Korean master Lee Sedol. Here comes the final report, in which Lee won his first game and AlphaGo won one more. So the challenge victory went to AlphaGo with a 4-1 match record.

Go45

The results of games 4 and 5 in the challenge series between AlphaGo and Lee Sedol show how the two opponents won one game each. The final result of the 5-game series is thus 4-1 to AlphaGo

… That’s what I learned in school !

Refs.:

1: Avocado

2: Släckta bakljus ger sämre säkerhet i dimma

3: AlphaGo’s ultimate challenge: a five-game match against the legendary Lee Sedol

+: What did you learn in school today ?

2016-03-12 (Saturday)

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Today, once more I learned that:

There are machines all around us, performing all kinds of tasks. Below are three interesting examples of their versatility.

Solution to Problem # 4, Drilling square holes, posted on 2016-03-06

The question was: How would you construct a tool to drill square holes? The solution can be found in the following drawing. See also the amazing video in reference # 1 below.

Corner mill

This drawing from the Japanese company Dijet show the principle of successive milling of the corners of the hole, which results in a square hole.

Update on AlphaGo vs. Lee Sedol

Just as we could expect, AlphaGo did it again, and won also the third game against Lee Sedol. There are still two more games to go, but the 3-0 lead that AlphaGo already has is of course sufficient to win the match. See the following images and reference #2 below.

go3

Top: The result of the third game of the historic match between AlphaGo and Lee Sedol, played in Seoul 2016-03-09–12. Bottom: AlphaGo operator Aja Huang, Lee Sedol, and Google co-founder Sergey Brin, on a photo taken before the third game. Graphic and photo supplied by Google.

A robot I would not mind having as my partner

Here comes a perfect example of how advanced robots are today. It is the US company Boston Dynamics that has developed Atlas. How about teaming up AlphaGo and Atlas, thus forming the ultimate Go player? See the following photo and another fantastic video in reference #3 below.

Atlas

Atlas lighting a box weighing 4,5 kg. I suggest that Google employs him together with AlphaGo to form an invincible Go player.

… That’s what I learned in school!

Refs.:

1: Square Hole Drill

2: AlphaGo’s ultimate challenge: a five-game match against the legendary Lee Sedol

3: Atlas, the next generation

+: What did you learn in school today ?

2016-03-10 (Thursday)

Posted on by What did you learn in School today ?

Today, I learned that:

The world is undergoing a constant evolution, and in the field of technology it seems more evident than ever.

Do you remember Deep Blue, the first computer to beat a human world champion in chess? It happened in 1996, when it won the first game of six against Garry Kasparov, although Kasparov came back and won the series with 4-2. But in 1997, Deep Blue got its revenge, winning a tough series of games with 3,5-2,5. Deep Blue was a joint project between IBM and Carnegie Mellon University. Kasparov accused IBM of cheating and demanded a rematch, but IBM denied it. Later it was the inverse, IBM challenged Kasparov again, in vain. However, Deep Blue gave inspiration to other chess playing programs and nowadays it is quite common to see human chess players go up against their virtual opponents. See also reference #1 below.

DBW

To the left: Deep Blue (photo by James the photographer – http://flickr.com/photos/22453761@N00/592436598/), and to the right: Ken Jennings, Watson, and Brad Rutter in their Jeopardy! exhibition match (Wikipedia)

Then came Watson, yet another implementation from IBM. In 2011, a computer won the popular quiz game of Jeopardy! against the champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. IBM later continued development of Watson further into a commercial application for management decisions in lung cancer treatment, announced in 2013, see reference #2 below, and an update in January 2016 (reference # 3 below) gives more recent examples of where Watson is finding applications for its skills.

Both Deep Blue and Watson are good examples of what is commonly called Artificial Intelligence (AI), and yesterday, 2016-03-09, represented another historic date for AI. This time, the application is playing the ancient Chinese boardgame Go, considered to be far more complex than chess. The British company Deep Mind started in 2010 to develop a computer system which purpose was to play Go the way no man (or machine) had ever done before. Google acquired the company in 2014 and here comes the graduation task for AlphaGo: beat the world’s leading Go player.

The series of best of 5 games, which is held in Seoul, started yesterday, when AlphaGo won the first game of Go against the world’s best player, the Korean Lee Sedol. Also in the second game, held today, AlphaGo defeated its opponent, and unless Sedol wins the remaining three games, we will have proof, once more, that well designed computers can beat the best players in the world in their respective specialities. The following images show the result of the first two games. For more information about the match and Go in general, see references #4 and #5 below.

go12

The two first games of the historic match between AlphaGo and Lee Sedol, played in Seoul 2016-03-09–10. Graphic produced by Google.

Finally, although the machines are clever, do not forget that there are humans behind them, responsible for the programming. Reference #6 below talks about a case revealed today about how hackers were able to transfer US$ 81 million from the US Federal Reserve Bank in New York to Asia, completing thus 4 of the assigned 13 transfers. But on the fifth task, a routing bank in Germany detected a misspelling of “foundation” as “fandation”, which stopped the remaining US$ 850 million from getting stolen.

This reminds me of the old slogan for Esso gasoline to “put a tiger in the tank”. Such a procedure will not have any effect if there is “a jackass sitting behind the wheel” !!!

… That’s what I learned in school !

Refs.:

1: Deep Blue (chess computer)

2: Watson (computer)

3: The Rise Of Thinking Machines: How IBM’s Watson Takes On The World

4: AlphaGo’s ultimate challenge: a five-game match against the legendary Lee Sedol

5: Go (game)

6: Hackers tried and failed to steal a billion dollars from bank

+: What did you learn in school today ?