Mariya Yao, Chief Technology Officer and Head of Research & Design (R&D)

Author: Mariya Yao

Chihuahua OR Muffin? Searching For The Best Computer Vision API

You’ve probably seen this internet meme demonstrating the alarming resemblance of chihuahuas and muffins. Everyone in the AI industry (including myself) loves putting the image in their presentations. But, one question I haven’t seen anyone answer rigorously is: just how good IS modern AI at disambiguating between a chihuahua and a muffin? For your entertainment and education, I’ll be investigating this question today. Binary classification has been possible ever since the perceptron algorithm was invented in 1957. If you think AI is hyped now, the New York Times reported in 1958 that the invention was the beginning of...

Can AI Make Anyone An Artist?

Posted by Mariya Yao

Can art be distilled into math? Classical architecture and Renaissance art reveal elegant proportions at the core of their design, with some of world’s finest designers like Leonardo da Vinci deliberately incorporating computational elements such as the golden ratio and the Fibonacci series in their creative process. Harnessing recent advances in AI research, creative startups and established players like Adobe, Autodesk and Google push the mathematics of art further by infusing the design process with varying doses of artificial intelligence. The rise of “creative” machines Drawing from trillions of data assets, Adobe Sensei claims to know human faces...

Despite AI Hype, True General Intelligence Still Out Of Reach

Posted by Mariya Yao

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has left the confines of science fiction to shape the contours of our lives. While Cortana, Siri, Alexa and other “intelligent assistants” help us perform all sorts of tasks, tech startups relentlessly launch other AI-driven products to tackle a growing list of human concerns — from personal finance (robo advisors) and customer service (chatbots) to romance (dating bots) and health (medical bots). Given the spreading influence of AI, Alphabet’s Eric Schmidt recently remarked that we’re inexorably heading towards the “Age of Intelligence.” But, have we truly imbued machines with intelligence? The answer depends on how you...

Collaborative Design Is Critical For AI

Posted by Mariya Yao

The trope “there’s an app for that” is quickly becoming “there’s an AI for that.” Want to assess the narrative quality of a story? Disney’s got an AI for that. Got a shortage of doctors but still need to treat patients? IBM Watson prescribes the same treatment plan as human physicians 99% of the time. Tired of waiting for George R.R. Martin to finish writing Game of Thrones? Rest easy, because a neural network has done the hard work for him. But is all this rapid-fire progress good for humanity? Elon Musk, our favorite AI alarmist, recently took down...

Future Factories: How AI Enables Smart Manufacturing

Posted by Mariya Yao

Today’s consumers are pickier than ever. They want customized, personalized, and unique products over standardized ones and prefer local, smaller producers over large-scale global manufacturers. At the same time, they also expect locally-produced products to be as cheap and reliable as those industrially produced. Factories, power plants, and manufacturing centers around the world must rely on automation, machine learning, computer vision, and other fields of AI to meet these rising demands and transform the way we make, move, and market things. Pain Can Drive Progress Since the industrial revolution, factories have been optimized to mass produce a...