All the Blogs

Note that some older blogs have yet to be resurrected here.  Will get to eventually 😉

AAAI-15 Conference – Summary – Here are some of my take-aways from the AAAI-15 artificial intelligence conference this year. How Far Has AI Come?  Having come from some involvement in AI back in the 90’s, it is very interesting to note that there is a bit of AI here that looks a whole lot like AI did back then, especially in […]

AAAI-15 Conference – Day 4 – My observations from the 4th full day of sessions at the AAAI-15 artificial intelligence conference in Austin, Texas. von Neumann’s Dream Talk by Michael Bowling discussing games and applicability to AI, etc.  3 weeks ago Bowling’s team was able to announce that “poker has been solved”. Stats on game history:  2007 checkers “solved”.   1996 Kasparov loses. […]

AAAI-15 Conference – Day 3 – My observations from the 3rd full day of sessions at the AAAI-15 artificial intelligence conference in Austin, Texas. Intelligent Decisions I missed most of this particular talk, so a bit of this is second-hand.  Here’s what I’ve been able to gather from it. Talk is mostly about what has been happening with IBM research, most of […]

AAAI-15 Conference – Day 2 – My observations from the 2nd full day of sessions at the AAAI-15 artificial intelligence conference in Austin, Texas. “Statistical Parsing with a Context-Free Grammar and Word Statistics” (no show) “Task-Oriented Planning for Manipulating Articulated Mechanisms Under Model Uncertainty” Task of cooking involves many subtasks.  Many household objects have mechanical constraints: “articulated”.  Here we’re looking at […]

AAAI-15 Conference – Day 1 – My observations from the 1st full day of sessions at the AAAI-15 artificial intelligence conference in Austin, Texas. Hot Talk: General Game Playing This talk involved taking a look at the utility of using game playing as an outlet for proving out AI.  Gave contrast between typical approaches that presume too much, but more realistically have […]

AAAI-15 Conference – Day 0 (Open House) – My observations from the AAAI-15 Open House, 1/26/2015 in Austin, Texas. “Leveraging Multi-modalities for Egocentric Activity Recognition” Using Google glass and similar tech, combined various techniques to improve accuracy of activity recognition; e.g. whether you are brushing your teeth or doing laundry. “Cogsketch: Sketch Understanding for Cognitive Science and Education” This was a pretty interesting […]

SXSW Interactive – 2012 – Summary This was my first experience at SXSW, so I had only a vague idea of what I was getting myself into.  My first glance at the session options beforehand made it seem like it was going to be overwhelming, and, well, it was.  For any given hour of the day there were probably 30+ […]

ASCAP Expo 2010: Day 1 – I went to the ASCAP Expo in Hollywood!  I met a number of interesting people, and the sessions were very informative.  I was there mostly to see how viable a career as a singer-songwriter would be and to hear other people’s stories about their experiences in this industry. Here’s the blow-by-blow of my interpretation of the things […]

Making music again – I have been writing music since the age of 16, and have made various attempts through the years to record and play live.  In all that time I’ve never managed to create an album, which is kinda sad, because there have been a whole lot of years between 16 and now.   It’s always one excuse or another:  […]