A very readable analysis of Uber: Since it began operations in 2010, Uber has grown to the point where it now collects over $45 billion in gross passenger revenue, and it has seized a major share of the urban car service market. But the widespread belief that it is a highly innovative and successful company...
Author: Martin Treiber
Customized Progressive Web Apps
The motivation to customize products comes from the fact that people like to modify things they bought according to their taste. It gives them a sense of ownership that is related to people’s psychology. Put simply: people like things more when they clearly say “it’s mine”. If you have your own app for your customers,...
EmTechNext 2019
EmTechNext 2019 is over. The overall impression I got by listening to the discussions is that we are looking at an uncertain, but positive future of work. This is a bit surprising, since the public discourse about machine learning, artificial intelligence and the gig economy is often dominated by visions of dystopian (jobless, low income)...
AI deepfakes are now as simple as typing whatever you want your subject to say – The Verge
Deepfakes are becoming very easy to create. As shown in the work by scientists from Stanford University, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Princeton University and Adobe Research, videos can be fine-tuned to audiences of different backgrounds. All this is done purely by editing scripts, automating previously tedious manual work. The authors themselves note: However, the...
Perception As Controlled Hallucination | Edge.org
An EDGE conversation with Andy Clark on perception and the role of predictive processing. The concept of predictive processing describes the brain as pediction machine gathering statistical information to adapt its model of the world. Sources: https://www.edge.org/conversation/andy_clark-perception-as-controlled-hallucination https://www.mindcoolness.com/blog/bayesian-brain-predictive-processing/
Mobile, Mobile, Mobile!
Recent studies in the US [1,2] emphasize the importance of mobile for retail. The numbers speak for themselves: 61% of online purchases were made via mobile 60% of consumers shopped via a mobile app If you think about it for a minute it makes absolutely sense: people use their mobile all the time. If your...
The importance of a seamless checkout
A easy to use checkout process for your online business is of utmost importance. Why? Because more than one in four shoppers abandoned a cart due to a long or complicated checkout process. Think about it for a minute. These shoppers put items in the shopping cart and were ready to checkout and pay. They...
Artificial Artificial Intelligence
Behind a successful AI there is a human doing critical work. It’s an open secret that behind the “magic” of AI tools there are large teams of people, doing things like labeling the training data to make it work. The result of their work is truly impressive: we are tricked into believing that these AIs...
Like it or not
Instagram (or Insta as the platform is called by the cognoscienti) is experimenting with a feature that removes likes. It’s a move that potentially should remove the social pressure users experience: nothing is more devastating on a social media platform than nobody linking your posts. This has of course a huge impact on all those...
The Challenge of Crafting Intelligible Intelligence | June 2019 | Communications of the ACM
Modern AI approaches often work like black boxes: nobody really knows why things work the way they work. Offering explanations why an AI system came to a conclusion is certainly needed. The article by Daniel S. Weld and Gagan Bansal [1] studied two approaches that are promising: using an inherently interpretable model, or adopting an...
