Machine learning and your car insurance

Here's another super-interesting post from the blogs on MATLABCentral.org.

http://blogs.mathworks.com/headlines/2016/06/07/your-car-doesnt-have-to-be-smart-to-be-a-privacy-concern/

A group at the University of California San Diego has analyzed data collected from standard sensors that are already embedded (and active!) in modern cars. Machine learning detected 'signatures' in the driving patterns of the participants and these could be used to identify the driver with near 100% certainty in a separate series of tests.

It will be interesting to see how this technology develops. Will insurance companies start to use these techniques to determine if it was you, or your teenage child, that backed into the garage door? Will society decide that this is an invasion of privacy.

I don't know, but then again, I bike to work :-)

Ken

Update on WTFIT

A few weeks ago I blogged about an amazing new bot that was developed by the incomparable Ming Cheuk.

Since then, I've been wondering exactly how it works. Ming's interesting post on Medium provides some answers.

Finally, just for the record, and to keep things in perspective, I should point that WTFIT doesn't always work exactly like you'd hope.

Here's a picture I tested it with. The main character in the image is Ming.

Image recognition and a new bot

Ming Cheuk, an exceptionally talented PhD student at the University of Auckland, has created a bot to identify objects in pictures. He calls it WTFIT.

I thought I'd give it a try. You just log in with Facebook and send it a picture. Here's what I got.

Amazing. Try it yourself at http://www.wtfitbot.com/

Neural networks for beginners

I've been thinking a little about machine learning recently so this blog post caught my attention.

http://blogs.mathworks.com/loren/2015/08/04/artificial-neural-networks-for-beginners/?s_eid=PSM_da

It's a beautiful post that starts with a concrete example focused on using artificial networks to recognize digits and ends with a program that solves Soduko puzzles.