Tag Archives: machine learning

Balance, a sustainable personal finance app

A few months back, I took some time to explore a product idea that had been in the back of my head for a while, looking at a problem that is dear to my heart: climate change. I spend a few months exploring it, working on the business model, talking to potential users, and building out a technical POC to de-risk some of the core mechanics behind the product design. I learned a lot and I think it’s worthwhile to document where I got while it’s all fresh in memory.

The question we’re trying to answer is if we wanted to help individuals make meaningful long term behavior changes to lower their carbon footprint, how could we do it?

The rest of this post will take you through a video demo, the pitch, as well as details on the mechanics behind the product design. I won’t be touching on the business model in this post.

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Epic Goal Celebration Hack Update: ESPN coverage

Something exciting happened related to the original Epic Goal Celebration Hack project! ESPN did a mini-documentary on it with our friends at Hodge Films. It was quite a fun experience at the end result is really nice!

Check it out below!

Human augmentation through artificial intelligence

Last week, I published two posts that relate to a very interesting and socioeconomically relevant machine learning topic: human augmentation through artificial intelligence. There have been many examples that made their way in the mainstream media where we’ve seen AI push the limits of what was possible, especially since deep learning really took off. One of the big recent examples is of course, AlphaGo.

But human augmentation isn’t about what AI can do by itself. Rather, it’s about how AI can be used to assist a human so that he or she can be much more efficient at performing a given task. It can be to make humans faster at it, or allow them to produce work of higher quality. It’s about using AI as a tool, just like any one of the hundreds of tools we all use in our everyday life.

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Hacking an epic NHL goal celebration with a hue light show and real-time machine learning

See media coverage of this blog post.

In Montréal this time of year, the city literally stops and everyone starts talking, thinking and dreaming about a single thing: the Stanley Cup Playoffs. Even most of those who don’t normally care the least bit about hockey transform into die hard fans of the Montréal Canadiens, or the Habs like we also call them.

Below is a Youtube clip of the epic goal celebration hack in action. In a single sentence, I trained a machine learning model to detect in real-time that a goal was just scored by the Habs based on the live audio feed of a game and to trigger a light show using Philips hues in my living room.

The rest of this post explains each step that was involved in putting this together. A full architecture diagram is available if you want to follow along.

 

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The Too Good To Be True Filter

I just published a new post on the Datacratic blog: The Too Good To Be True Filter.

At Datacratic, one of the product we offer our customers is our real-time bidding (RTB) optimisation that can plug directly into any RTBKit installation. We’re always hard at work to improve our optimisation capabilities so clients can identify valuable impressions for their advertisers. Every bid request is priced independently and real-time feedback is given to the machine learning models. They adjust immediately to changing conditions and learn about data they had not been exposed to during their initial training. This blog post covers a strange click pattern we started noticing as we were exploring optimized campaign data, and a simple way we can use to protect our clients from it. Read more…