AshTech #7 - Pokemon Go

Sat, 16 Jul 2016 23:37:56 -0400

Pokemon Go, Story Arcs, Bitcoin Halving, AI photo coloring, China Fitness Boom

Pokemon Go

Pokemon Go mania is upon us. Almost every person you encounter walking while looking into their phone is playing the game. Walking on NYC streets, on buses and restaurants that I visit Pokemons, poke-stops and poke-gyms are everywhere . I am glad that this game has got kids off the couch and exploring neighborhoods looking for Pokemon. Although 20 years in the making Pokemon is best suited to the Augmented reality experience and the game developers Niantic have done a very good job with it. This week it became the most downloaded app in a week on the ios app store. Gotta Catch em all !

Six basic Arcs of story telling

https://goo.gl/iOMJhW

Word sentiment analysis data mining of over 1700 stories has shown that they fall into 6 basic arcs. Vonnegut spoke about graphical shapes of stories in a lecture in 1995 and Aristotle spoke about similar arcs 2000 years ago. Its good to see that data mining is lending its voice to these theories.

Bitcoin Miner reward is cut in half

http://goo.gl/Srdihi

The reward miners get for sealing a block on the bitcoin ledger drops from 25 btc to 12.5 btc .Known as “the halving” this has been a programmed feature in bitcoin. It is only the second time that this has happened. It will be interesting to keep an eye on the bitcoin price for the next few weeks to see the impact if any.

Deep Learning to colorize your photos

https://goo.gl/MNOlPU

A deep learning algorithm developed by UC Berekley students is doing a decent job at colorizing photos. Click the link above to see some stunning results.

VCs are betting on a chinese fitness boom

https://goo.gl/E1MkcI

365 million chinese millenials are hitting the gym and VCs are taking note. I suspect Apple and Fitbit have their eyes on this mega market.

AshTech #6 - Parsey McParseface

Mon, 23 May 2016 21:52:37 -0400

SWIFT, Eye Computer, VIV, Bitcoin, Parsey McPareface

Another SWIFT Attack

http://goo.gl/n3pPaH

The SWIFT interbank network that handles money transfers between bank has seen its second major hack attack. SWIFT is the primary way banks move billions of dollars to other banks daily. The hack spreads malware using a pdf reader software and bears code signatures similar to the Sony hack and the recent attack on the Bangladesh Central Bank. So if you work at a bank and are reading swift message via a pdf reader make sure its not infected and stay vigilant.

A computer in your eye

(http://goo.gl/5ZHy4G)

Google glass was a stepping stone to the next gen devices google is dreaming up. Not content with the public rejection of google glass the company continues to push the envelope on a wearable computer. It latest vision via a patent filing is to implant one directly into your eyeball. Once injected the device would be powered by an energy harvesting antenna. The device can transmit signals like GPS, NFC, LTE. Will it be able to interact with the optic nerve and beam signals directly to the neo cortex is still unknown.

Viv - Conversation as a platform CAAP

(http://goo.gl/wDLp5H)

A new conversational bot named Viv was unveiled last week by the creators of Siri. Viv promises to be the bridge between the apps on your device. You could ask Viv to order some flowers for mom or the temperature at the golden gate bridge at 7pm. You could even ask it to send some money to your friends. The AI assistant would be social graph and service aware to make the autonomous decisions for you. Will Viv be a radical change or just another bot that is gobbled up by Siri, Cortana or Ok Google

Will the real Satoshi Nakamato please stand up …

(https://goo.gl/kCy4Vh)

The elusive founder of bitcoin was found and lost again. Australian Craig Steve Wright was briefly unmasked as the infamous Satoshi Nakamoto, founder of bitcoin. Several clues including a PGP pubic key, blog posts and the mysterious “Tulip Trust” . Clues that surfaced after the release of the Wired story point an elaborate hoax that Wright may be propagating. So once more Nakamoto-san slips back into matrix..

Cause I’m Slim Shady, yes I’m the real Shady All you other Slim Shadys are just imitating So won’t the real Slim Shady please stand up, Please stand up, please stand up?

Parsey McParseface

(http://goo.gl/dxd3ih)

Google this week open sourced its natural language parser. This will enable smarter applications that one can communicate with using natural language. This should make chatbots smarter. The parser SyntaxNet is a Neural network built on googles macdhine learning framework Tensor Flow.

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