In the coming years, mobility solutions—or how we get from point A to point B—will bridge the gap between ground and air transportation—yes, that means flying cars. Technological advancements are transforming mobility for people and, leading to unprecedented change. Nand Kochhar, vice president of automotive and transportation for Siemens Software says this transformation extends beyond…
It’s time we began to “fixate on data” to solve our problems, says one of the world’s leading experts in data science. In 2006, Jeannette Wing, then the head of the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University, published an influential essay titled “Computational Thinking,” arguing that everyone would benefit from using the conceptual tools…
Freshman year of high school, my boyfriend asked, “What’s it like having her around all the time?” He meant Kim. The bell for third period rang. I shifted against him, a combination lock pressed into my back, lockers slamming around us. Our mouths were still so close. I’d been wondering if he also felt hot…
With the supply-chain disruptions of the past two years showing no signs of easing anytime soon, businesses are turning to a new generation of AI-powered simulations called digital twins to help them get goods and services to customers on time. These tools not only predict disruptions down the line, but suggest what to do about…
Much has been written about struggles of deploying machine learning projects to production. As with many burgeoning fields and disciplines, we don’t yet have a shared canonical infrastructure stack or best practices for developing and deploying data-intensive applications. This is both frustrating for companies that would prefer making ML an ordinary, fuss-free value-generating function like…
Kevlin Henney and I were riffing on some ideas about GitHub Copilot, the tool for automatically generating code base on GPT-3’s language model, trained on the body of code that’s in GitHub. This article poses some questions and (perhaps) some answers, without trying to present any conclusions. First, we wondered about code quality. There are…
In June 2021, we asked the recipients of our Data & AI Newsletter to respond to a survey about compensation. The results gave us insight into what our subscribers are paid, where they’re located, what industries they work for, what their concerns are, and what sorts of career development opportunities they’re pursuing. While it’s sadly premature to…
In the first article of this series, we discussed communal computing devices and the problems they create–or, more precisely, the problems that arise because we don’t really understand what “communal” means. Communal devices are intended to be used by groups of people in homes and offices. Examples include popular home assistants and smart displays like…
Home assistants and smart displays are being sold in record numbers, but they are built wrong. They are designed with one person in mind: the owner. These technologies need to fit into the communal spaces where they are placed, like homes and offices. If they don’t fit, they will be unplugged and put away due…
OpenAI’s text generating system GPT-3 has captured mainstream attention. GPT-3 is essentially an auto-complete bot whose underlying Machine Learning (ML) model has been trained on vast quantities of text available on the Internet. The output produced from this autocomplete bot can be used to manipulate people on social media and spew political propaganda, argue about…