Tuesday, May 17, 2016

A Long Walk - Baratapuzha River, Kerala

It was sad to walk through the riverbed
Water is forming a pool here and there, but no flow

Almost entire riverbed is naked open

Kerala is indeed looking forward for long dry spell

Flying away towards the horizon

Wow - a dream view

Not a fav destination of migrant birds, bit there isn't much wetlands left for them

Walking through the water

Another round table conference?

Tirumittakodu Shiva temple on the banks of Bharatapuzha

Sajeev



In the name of Cows

Traffic blocks are nothing new in Bangalore. Hence I didn’t care when I stuck in one them. However, vehicles in other lanes were moving freely. Hence, I looked forward to see what is stopping our bus from moving forward. Interestingly, that was a pair of cows. No one cared about those wandering cows; it hardly mattered to anyone that they were in the middle of a busy road; and it is possible that a person rushing to home can hit one of them accidently.

You may be wondering why all of a sudden I am started talking about cows. Well here it is, now-a-days in India people are even ready to kill others in the name of cow. But, hardly anyone is ready to take care of those poor creatures; who in addition to being homeless are also eating lot of plastic waste.

Sajeev.

Wednesday, May 11, 2016

AI Powered Personal Assistant form Viv Labs


The buzz around AI is nothing new. Day by day we are moving slowly but steadily towards a world where more and more things are controlled by decisions taken by AI powered systems. This in not limited to stock purchases, twitter trend analysis, finding out quicker way to reach destination, or better ways to move logistics; but people also want AI to enter in to areas which are considered as uniquely human for a very long time such as write poetry, art etc.

Recently, founders of Siri (Siri was later sold to Apple for 200mn$) came up with a personal assistant – Viv - which can interact with humans.

MIT Technology Review states that, "it might connect weather and geographic knowledge with information from your contact book to respond to a query like: “If it’s going to rain tonight, find me a pizza restaurant near my brother’s place.”

During demo Viv also answered questions like,

“Will it be warmer than 70-degrees near the Golden gate bridge after 5pm the day after tomorrow?” etc.

As per Charlie Warzel of Buzzfeed, "Viv listens to your voice command and processes both the question and its intent. Then, it determines which programs it should call up to answer your question and writes a bespoke code for it in 10 milliseconds, rather than following a set of rigid, prewritten code scenarios that the user must follow, which is how most other AI assistants work."

It is yet to see what Viv is really capable of and how the new baby in the world of tech giants will fight against apps created by Facbook where the number of users is already 1bn.

Sajeev