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Marla Rosner

Energy: All in on AI

It’s a scary time to be in the oil and gas industry. As over three billion people worldwide hunker down at home to help curb the spread of COVID-19, global oil demand has dropped by a third in mere months, with prices hitting a 20-year low. Meanwhile, the glut…

CTRL + P for PPE: How to make your own 3D-printed face shields

ONLY MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS used to know what “PPE” stood for. Now it’s common parlance—and it’s in short supply. Personal protective equipment such as face masks and face shields are vital to protect healthcare workers fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, but there’s not nearly enough to go around. We can’t all…

The Pandemic Pivot

THE IDEA DIDN’T start with any one team member in particular. “It was a few weeks before quarantine started, around when we were all realizing that coronavirus was really going to be a major crisis,” recalls Milton Lopez, the head of SparkCognition Labs. “So then a bunch of us…

Gotta Model ‘Em All? Teaching AI to Be a Pokémon® Master

Fans of the long-running Pokémon® game series know that the in-game Pokémon battles are optimized to be a thrilling challenge… for seven-year-olds. Climbing your way through the Pokémon League to be the very best, like no one ever was, is advertised as a test of strategy, skill, and your…

Turing Talk: An Interview with Virtual Assistant Alexa

We have a few questions for the world’s chatbots, virtual assistants, and other artificial users of natural language. Specifically, we have the questionnaire created by French TV host Bernard Pivot and popularized by James Lipton on Inside the Actors Studio. This issue’s guest is the virtual assistant Alexa, created…

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s AI

The only sounds drifting from Hagrid’s hut were the disdainful shrieks of his own furniture. Magic: It was something that Harry Potter thought was very good. Uh, what? Readers who spend considerable time on nerdier corners of the internet probably already know what’s going on. To everyone else: No,…

Tech Explainer: The New Face of Cyberthreats

CYBERCRIME IS A multibillion-dollar international industry. Each year sees an exponential increase in risk, as these bad actors threaten to bankrupt organizations, shut down critical infrastructure, and even conduct espionage or sabotage missions against other nations. Traditional systems of cybersecurity can’t possibly hold back the tide of cyberattacks, and…

The Democratization of Data: Modern AI and Automated Machine Learning

Recognition of emotions is one of the great white whales of modern AI. It’s innate for humans. We can look at someone’s face and understand how they’re feeling. Transferring that skill to machines has proven far trickier. Companies and academics worldwide are laboring to refine their data science techniques and produce more accurate…

New Adventures in AI: A Time Machine Recap

Questions both as grandly philosophical as the nature of self, and as nuts-and-bolts pragmatic as how automation will transform the energy industry, were considered by leading minds from across a host of industries gathered in Austin for two days last November. There, they discussed the myriad ways artificial intelligence…

Jobs, Morality and Getting a Seat: The Biggest AI Questions at SXSW

Since its inception in 1986 as a regional music festival, Austin’s South by Southwest — better known as SXSW — has ballooned into one of the country’s most celebrated events for technology, music and film. Just last year, its speakers included Christiane Amanpour, Elon Musk and Steven Spielberg. The…