Items of Interest

Facial Recognition Boarding

#156
JetBlue Airways in the U.S. have rolled out a facial recognition boarding system called Biometric Exit that allows passengers to look at a camera at the boarding gate without having to present a boarding pass or passport. IFL Science have highlighted a twitter conversation between a privacy concerned passenger and Jet Blue about the system.
AI & ML

Software Estimation

#156
Erik Bernhardsson takes an interesting look at software estimation with some statistics. He looks at how estimating the median time of a task seems to be easier for developers than estimating the mean average, and he investigates plotting the blow-up factor (actual vs estimate time).  
Web Dev

Dadabots

#156
Want some endlessly streaming AI generated technical death metal? Then checkout Dadabots by CJ Carr and Zack Zuckowski, who work on creating recurrent neural networks trained on datasets from specific musical genres. Their latest project Relentless Doppleganger was trained on a dataset of Canadian technical death metal band Archspire and is streaming on YouTube.
AI & ML
Music

Brave Browser

#156
Brave is a new browser built on Chromium that claims 2x to 8x speed increases over regular browsers. It also focusses on ad tracking privacy by blocking all third party ad tracking. On top of this, using the Basic Attention Token, users can opt-in to Brave Rewards allowing for the collection and donation of BATs directly with content creators and publishers. You can earn yourself some BATs now on Coinbase Earn by watching a few videos about Brave.
Blockchain

Facial Recognition System for $60

#155
The New York Times ran an experiment using a public video stream from Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan. They collected publicly available photos of people that worked near the park and then ran one day's worth of footage from the public video stream through Amazon's commercial facial recognition service at the cost of approx $60. Over a nine hour period it detected 2,750 faces, including an 89% match of a college professor from his employer's website headshot.
AI & ML
Innovation
Tech

Explainable AI

#155
This is an interesting introduction to Explainable AI on KD Nuggets. Explainable AI are systems and models that extend black box AI models to allow transparency into why results are returned by the black box AI models. This is increasingly needed in a number of contexts such as providing information to doctors about automated predictions or diagnoses.
AI & ML

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