Pictures

  • A-To-Z of The Internet Minute in 2021

    As I get older, time seems to move faster … but it's also true that as I get older, more is accomplished every minute. 

    Technology is a powerful force function. In fact, the amount of data in the digital universe effectively doubles every two years

    Every couple of years, I revisit a chart about how much data is generated every minute on the internet.  

    In reverse chronological order, here's 20182015, and 2011

    Here's an excerpt from 2015 for some perspective: 

    Compared to 2008 here is what's happened with social networks:

    • The number of people online has more than doubled from 1.4 billion to over 3 billion (2021 #: 5.2 billion) 
    • Facebook has gone from 80 million users to more than 1.4 billion (2021 #: 2.89 billion
    • Twitter had 2 million accounts and now it is 300 million and counting. (2021 #: 206 million ACTIVE users after a big bot deletion)
    • The number of smartphones was 250 million in 2008 and today there are more than 2 billion. That is an 800% increase! (2021 #: 6.37 billion)

    Today this is what happens every minute on the web.

    • 4 million search queries on Google
    • Facebook users share 2.46 million pieces of content
    • Email users send 204 million messages

    Throughout its (pretty short) history, the internet has been arguably the most important battlefield for relevancy and innovation. 

    So, what does the internet look like in 2021?

    Data-never-sleeps-9-1.0-1200px-1

    DOMO via visualcapitalist 

    Looking at the list, we see new editions like Clubhouse and Strava. Partially due to the quarantine, you're still seeing an increase in digital cash transfers with tools like Venmo, an increase in e-commerce shops like Shopify, and an increase in (you guessed it) collaboration tools like Zoom or Microsoft Teams. 

    Just to pick out some of the key figures in the chart this year. 

    • Amazon users spend $283,000
    • 6M people shop online
    • TikTok users watch 167M videos
    • and, Zoom hosts 856 minutes of webinars. 

    Before 2020, I already thought that big tech had a massive influence on our lives. Yet, somehow this past year has pushed their impact even higher. 

    One other thing this chart also helps put into perspective is the rapid rate of adoption. As you look at different year's charts, you can see how quickly apps have become part of the cultural zeitgeist. 

    How do you think these numbers will grow or change in 2022? 

  • How Normal Is Your Face?

    Project SHERPA recently released an AI-powered tool that analyzes your face and reveals how average it is. 

    It's called How Normal Am I?

    Screen Shot 2020-10-10 at 1.01.31 AMvia How Normal Am I?

    It's an interactive video that uses your webcam to walk you through the various assessments on BMI, emotion, beauty, etc.  At the end, it'll give you your life expectancy, and then your "normal score".

    It's not the most complex use of AI, but it provides interesting insights, and is becoming increasingly prevalent. 

    Governments, police stations, retail stores, etc. all use this technology to track individuals, and if you remember one of my previous articles – there are plenty of cameras to go around

    If you did the demo, were you surprised by the results?

    Interesting stuff!

  • Sea-Thru Sea

    An engineer and oceanographer, Derya Akkaynak, created an algorithm that removes the water from underwater images – meaning it takes away the haze & tint that come with most underwater photos. It doesn't require a color chart either (though it does need distance information it gathers through numerous photographs from different angles). 

    Check it out. 

     

    via ScientificAmerican 

    From the abstract: 

    The Sea-thru method estimates backscatter using the dark pixels and their known range information. Then, it uses an estimate of the spatially varying illuminant to obtain the range-dependent attenuation coefficient. Using more than 1,100 images from two optically different water bodies, which we make available, we show that our method with the revised model outperforms those using the atmospheric model. Consistent removal of water will open up large underwater datasets to powerful computer vision and machine learning algorithms, creating exciting opportunities for the future of underwater exploration and conservation.

    Essentially, the algorithm goes through every pixel and color balances the image based on collected data on distance/color degradation.

    T0xSYRV

    As with most algorithms of this type – the more data we feed it, the better it gets. Sea-thru already has great applications for furthering ocean-based research, but the follow-up question is can this algorithm be extrapolated outward to deal with other atmospheric conditions outside of water – smog, etc. 

    What other uses can you imagine?  It is not hard to imagine how this could be applied to market data either … Interesting stuff! 

  • This Week in AI: AI’s Weaknesses

    AI has plenty of weaknesses – I've talked about some before, and I'll continue to talk about them in the future, but two specific weaknesses were brought to my attention this week. 

    AI Portraits – Won't Steal Your Data, But Might Steal Your Soul Dorian Gray-Style

    I assume most of you have seen the FaceApp trend – people age-ifying their photos and unwittingly giving the rights to their photos to a shadowy Russian tech company.  You've also likely seen AI paintings selling for ridiculous money. 

    But have you seen their lovechild AI Portraits – a more wholesome experiment run by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. AI Portraits uses approximately 45,000 different Renaissance-esque 15th-century portraits and General Adversarial Networks to translate your selfie into an artistic masterpiece. It's novel because instead of simply drawing over your face it's generating new features and creating an entirely new version of your face.

     

    Mauro Martino via YouTube

    It's impressive because it determines the best style for your portrait based on your features, your background, and more. 

    However, it's not without "flaw". The choice of 15th-century portraiture creates a couple of clear biases. At the time, portraits of smiling or laughing individuals were rare, so your smile will likely not transfer. As well, there's a clear bias towards anglo-saxonification. 

    Screen Shot 2019-07-22 at 2.53.22 PM

    via AI Portraits

    My son got excited while playing with the app and sent several of his coworkers, friends, and family through the app. If you look at the bottom right, you'll see my lovely wife Jen's portrait. 

    Most of you have seen my wife and know that she is Indonesian, something that is very much removed from the translation. 

    You can also see it in Beyonce's AI portrait. 

    AI Portraits of Beyoncé

    via MyModernMet

    All photos are immediately deleted from their servers after creating your image, so your privacy is safe (this time!)

    All biases can be considered quirks of this current iteration of the program – which I do earnestly believe is interesting. 

    Later, you can imagine an AI choosing between various different styles of art based on a cornicopia of factors – or off human selection – but you have to walk before you can run, and this is a fun way to get people excited about AI. 

    Computer Answering Systems – No, The Answer Isn't 42

    “Yes…Life, the Universe, and Everything. There is an answer. But I’ll have to think about it…the program will take me seven-and-a-half million years to run.” – Deep Thought, Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy

    Think of the global excitement when IBM's Watson first beat Ken Jennings in Jeopardy … it's widely considered one of the holy grails of AI research to create a machine that truly understands the nuances of language and human thought. Yet, if you've talked to Alexa recently, you know there's a long way to go. 

    Today's question answering systems are basically glorified document retrieval systems. They scan text for related words and send you the most relevant options. Researchers at the University of Maryland recently figured out how to easily create questions that stump AI (without being paradoxical, impossible to answer, requiring empathy etc.) in order to enhance those systems.

    A system that understands those questions will be a massive step toward a real understanding and processing of language. 

    So what's the secret to these "impossible" questions?

    From the University of Maryland article

    The questions revealed six different language phenomena that consistently stump computers. These six phenomena fall into two categories. In the first category are linguistic phenomena: paraphrasing (such as saying “leap from a precipice” instead of “jump from a cliff”), distracting language or unexpected contexts (such as a reference to a political figure appearing in a clue about something unrelated to politics). The second category includes reasoning skills: clues that require logic and calculation, mental triangulation of elements in a question, or putting together multiple steps to form a conclusion […]

    For example, if the author writes “What composer's Variations on a Theme by Haydn was inspired by Karl Ferdinand Pohl?” and the system correctly answers “Johannes Brahms,” the interface highlights the words “Ferdinand Pohl” to show that this phrase led it to the answer. Using that information, the author can edit the question to make it more difficult for the computer without altering the question’s meaning. In this example, the author replaced the name of the man who inspired Brahms, “Karl Ferdinand Pohl,” with a description of his job, “the archivist of the Vienna Musikverein,” and the computer was unable to answer correctly. However, expert human quiz game players could still easily answer the edited question correctly.

     

    The main change is increasing the complexity of the questions by nestling another question. In the above example, the second question forces the AI not only to decide the composer inspired by Karl Ferdinand Pohl, but also to decipher who is inspiring (hint: It's Karl Ferdinand Pohl). 

    AI isn't great yet at mental triangulation; at putting together multiple steps to form a conclusion. While AI is great at brute force applications – we're still coding the elegance. 

     

    An Elegant Use Of Brute Force_GapingVoid

    via Gaping Void

  • 75th Anniversary of D-Day

    June 6th, 1944 … the day we stormed the beaches of Normandy.  It was the largest seaborne invasion in history. The invasion created a foothold that allowed Allied forces to expand through France. 

    The memorial in France this year was a particularly touching event with the many surviving World War 2 soldiers being well into their 90s. 

    "A generation whose unconquerable spirit shaped the post-war world. They didn't boast. They didn't fuss. They served" – Theresa May

    A 97-year old veteran paratrooper, Tom Rice, commemorated the day by once again dropping into the field he landed in on that fateful night. 

    Check out the video. It's an inspiration. 

     

    via TIME

    Seems like a friendlier welcome than a sea of German soldiers. As an extra fun fact, Teddy Roosevelt stormed the beaches of Normandy at 56 with a heart condition,  arthritis, and a cane. He was the oldest man to take part in the invasion. 

    Our society is built on the backs of many strong men! I'm thankful for their sacrifices. 

  • Social Media Is Changing Everything: A Reprisal

    I came across a post from 2009 about social media. 10 years later, with the knowledge of how much data we use today, it's quite a read.

    Here it is in its full glory. 

    Social Media Is Changing Everything: October 18th, 2009

    My son won't use e-mail the way I did. So how will people communicate and collaborate in the next wave of communications?

    Here is a peek into the difference that is taking hold.  I was looking at recent phone use.  The numbers you are about to see are from the first 20 days of our current billing cycle.

      • My wife, Jennifer, has used 21 text messages and 38 MB of data.
      • I have used 120 text messages and 29 MB of data.
      • My son, at college, used 420 text messages, and is on a WiFi campus so doesn't use 3G data.
      • My son, in high school, used 5,798 text messages and 472 MB of data.

    How can that be?  That level of emotional sluttiness makes porn seem downright wholesome. 

    But, of course, that isn't how he sees it.  He is holding many conversations at once.  Some are social; some are about the logistics of who, what, when, where and why … some are even about homework.  Yet, most don't use full sentences, let alone paragraphs.  There is near instant gratification.  And, the next generation of business people will consider this normal.

    Is social media a fad? Or is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution?

    Welcome to the World of Socialnomics.  This video has a bunch of interesting statistics … and is fun to watch. 

     

     

    Other Resources:

    Social Media Is Changing Everything: April 20th, 2019 

    Looking at the stats from 2009 is pretty funny

    • My son was using 472 MB of data a month
    • Hulu had grown from to 373 million total streams in April 2009
    • Only 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video on their phone

    For some context, I looked up the comparative numbers for 2018. 

    • I picked a random month in 2018 … in August my son used 10.85 GB of data. He doesn't text as often – but has sent/received 282,000 snapchats since downloading it 5 years ago.
    • Hulu has over 20 million subscribers who streamed more than 26 million hours a day in 2018 
    • People spend over five hours a day on their smartphones on average. 70% of web traffic happens on a mobile device, and more than 50% of videos are watched on mobile (93% of twitter videos). 

    Here's what happens every minute of every day on the internet

    D0-86c4XcAMTmla

    via Lori Lewis and Chadd Callahan

     

    A little different than 2009 …

  • The Bizarre and Surreal Works of Deep Learning AI

    One thing that Deep Learning excels in is analyzing pictures & videos, and creating facsimiles or combining styles. If you want to create art with deep learning look no further than the Deep Dream Generator or deepart.io which use Convolutional Neural Networks to combine your photo with an art style (if you want to do it on your phone another cool tool to check out is Prisma). 

    Downloadvia SubSubRoutine

    Deepfake is it's exactly what it sounds like … the use "Deep Learning" to "Fake" a recording.  For example, a machine learning technique called a Generative Adversarial Network can be used to superimpose images onto a source video.  That is how they made this fun (and disturbing) Deepfake of Jennifer Lawrence and Steve Buscemi.

     

    via YouTube

    While this is a fun example, Deepfakes create very real concerns. They're often used for more "nefarious" purposes (e.g., to create fake celebrity or revenge porn and to otherwise make important figures say things they never said).  It's likely you've seen videos of Trump or Obama created with this technology.   But it is easy to imagine someone faking evidence used at trial, trying to influence business transactions, or using this to support or slander causes in the media.

    As fakes get better and easier to produce, they will likely be used more often.  So, as a reminder, don't trust everything you see on the internet

    But also … Technology is pretty freaking cool. Right?

     

  • Some Things Never Change …

    This week I went to Chicago to speak at my old alma mater – Kellogg.

    It was great to talk with professors and spend time with MBA students interested in trading and how the business of trading is changing. 

    I plan on spending more time there to benefit research and recruiting.

     

    1212018 Kellogg Speech

     

    Unsurprisingly, deep dish pizza is still delicious.  We were going to eat at a steakhouse.  However, Jennifer and I remembered that the only thing better than gorging on meat … is gorging on meat and cheese. 

    While some things haven't changed, others have.

    The Universe must be trying to tell me something.  The day I got back, I found my old ID card … and, apparently, some things have changed in the past thirty years. 

     

    180120 HMG NU ID From 1987

     

    Onwards.

  • How Many People Lie To You On Social Media?

    Social Media often becomes a "best-of" reel of our lives … carefully curated to show off our best selves. 

    Imagine what that leads to for us and our children … ??

    It is tough to live up to your social media standards (let alone to keep up with others').

    This  Instagram model (apparently, that's a thing now) with over half a million followers took to changing her captions to display the falsehoods

     

    anti-social-media-lets-be-game-changers-essena-oneill-2

    via The Guardian

     

    How tempting is it to photoshop (or embellish) a little?  In a recent survey of 2000 British people, more than 75% admitted to lying about themselves on social profiles.

    Here is a chart ranking the most common topics people are most dishonest about.

     

    1-Infographic-Web-Of-Lies-Most-Common-Falsehoods-Told-On-Social-Media2

    via 10Awesome

     

    Fake photos, fake ownership, and relationship lies top the list.  

    There was something magical about taking a trip back before everything was a camera.