DAYMN — 3 Oct 2021
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October is here, and the last 3 months of the year are upon us already! Time flies indeed. Here are the top 5 articles from this past week — please do share your feedback & thoughts!
1. Using Make-Up To Fool Facial Recognition?
We have all heard of the anti-establishmentarian adverserial hats, eyeglasses, and T-shirts that are designed to fool the Big Brother-esque facial recognition softwares. But, one big challenge to be able to use these, is the ability to design and/or buy such complicated adversarial tools. Now, comes a new tool in this arsenal — using something as simple and common-place as a neutral tone make-up.
The research paper below talks about how make-up can be used to fool facial recognition tools!
Call out? ArcFace recognized participants wearing adversarial makeup in 1.2 percent of frames. It recognized those wearing no makeup in 47.6 percent of video frames, and those wearing random makeup patterns in 33.7 percent of frames. This new technique requires only ordinary, unobtrusive makeup, doing away with accessories that might raise security officers’ suspicions. It offers perhaps the easiest way yet for ordinary people to thwart face recognition — at least until the algorithms catch on.
2. Building an AI tool? You WILL have explosive demand ‘apparently’!
Building an AI-first company is all the rage right now. While finding the elusive product-market fit is still such a hard thing, one can take heart in the fact that there is “market” — a big one at that for any new AI driven innovation, especially AI platforms. AI platforms are self-contained systems that help everyone in an organisation use the smarts without having to know how to code or even understand the AI behind them, at times.
Which AI platform? AI Lifecycle Software is forecast to grow the fastest among the markets within AI Platforms. These are tools that help organisations understand and treat their customers better.
Call out? Worldwide revenues for the artificial intelligence (AI) market, including software, hardware, and services, is estimated to grow 15.2% year over year in 2021 to $341.8 billion. The market is forecast to accelerate further in 2022 with 18.8% growth and remain on track to break the $500 billion mark by 2024. Among the three technology categories, AI Software occupied 88% of the overall AI market.
3. A better nowcast for rain in the next 20 minutes!
How many times have we all wondered — why despite the most amazing advancements in machine learning technology — we are unable to predict when it will rain with a fair degree of accuracy? Although the answer is that weather is as fickle as the human mind, it also points to the fact that this is a complex interplay of so many fields and not something that can be solved just with data, tech and algorithms.
Some good recent research from DeepMind published in Nature, tries to solve for this problems using deep generative models, improving on existing solutions and providing the insight needed for real-world decision-makers. They have even made the code available publicly on Github.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03854-z
https://github.com/deepmind/deepmind-research/tree/master/nowcasting
Call out? We showed — using statistical, economic and cognitive measures — that our approach to generative nowcasting provides improved forecast quality, forecast consistency and forecast value, providing fast and accurate short-term predictions at lead times where existing methods struggle.
Using a systematic evaluation by more than 50 expert meteorologists, we show that our generative model ranked first for its accuracy and usefulness in 89% of cases against two competitive methods. When verified quantitatively, these nowcasts are skillful without resorting to blurring.
4. What is Product Analytics exactly?
This great article from Lottie Linter answers that difficult and often-confused topic about what a Product Analyst does. Not only, is it so very well-written, but the article also shows some great real-life examples, frameworks for success and an overarching description of this fast-growing key analyst area in a lot of new-age businesses, who are built on the “product culture”
Call out? Product Analysts, while needing solid business acumen and an appreciation for and understanding of commercials, are likely to be working closely with UX and user research teams, as well as product managers and developers. The vast majority of their analysis will be on frontend event data and focused on user behaviour, optimising conversions across the site or app.
5. Are we complicating fitness & wellness too much?
With the pandemic and lockdowns all around, fitness and wellness have taken an over-sized significance in our lives. While it is important to be healthy and well, there are quite a few fads and new-cool-things that obfuscate the fundamentals of fitness, and what it means to be healthy. Complicated diets, mystical tools and techniques and irrational belief systems are some of the few examples that have been so beautifully called-out in this article.
https://thegrowtheq.com/weve-reached-peak-wellness-most-of-it-is-nonsense/
Call out? Wellness — the kind that actually works — is simple: it’s about committing to basic practices, day in and day out, as individuals and communities. Unfortunately, these basics tend to get overlooked in favor of easy-to-market nonsense. That’s because, as many marketers (including in the self-help space) are fond of saying, “You can’t sell the basics.” I think that’s naive. We’d be much better off if we stopped obsessing over hacks and instead focused on evidence-based stuff that works.
Have a wonderful week ahead everyone, hope at least one of these articles is exciting reading material for you, and made you think for a moment
