Leicester Codex: Leonardo’s Notes On Water Flow

“The painter is the rival of nature” __Leonardo da Vinci Leonardo Da Vinci spent many a day watching the water flow, hitting rocks and other obstacles along the way. He made a binder of his notes on water, popularly known as the Leicester Codex. In his observations of nature, he is said to have remarked […]

With Love, A.I: Self-Driving Cars (Part 3 of 3)

“To self-drive or not to self-drive is not the question” __Madhav SBSS Sensors play a key role in self-driving cars. Radars are widely used as they are good in different weather and lighting conditions and they are cheap. Lidars are high density sensors but are not cheap and are not good in poor lighting and […]

With Love, A.I: Self-Driving Cars (Part 2 of 3)

“To drive better than humans, autonomous vehicles must first see better than humans.” __Nvidia How does the technology we briefly reviewed in part 1 of this blog actually work to make self-driving possible? before jumping into how the tech comes together, we should understand the leveling up to become fully autonomous – Levels of autonomy […]

With Love, A.I: Self Driving Cars (Part 1 of 3)

“Google is working on self-driving cars and they seem to work. People are so bad at driving cars that computers don’t have to be that good to be much better” __Marc Andreessen What’s the big deal with self driving cars anyway. Why do we need them, can’t humans do any work anymore, are we so […]

With Love, A.I: Radiology

“If AI can recognize disease progression early, then treatments and outcomes will improve.” Isn’t it fascinating how little we understand about the brain?. A really good case for applying deep learning AI to recognize subtle patterns and changes to neuron activity can help in early diagnosis of Alzheimers disease. Using Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans […]

Playing Defence.

“You don’t need more time. You just need to decide” __Seth Godin Yes that’s defence as in the sport of Cricket. Defence is important, that’s the way you protect yourself from getting out to good deliveries but I just realized that I’ve been playing too much defence for too long. A good delivery needs to […]

With Love, A.I: Transcription (2 of 2)

Can a developer enhance Google’s Speech to Text system (GS2T)? Short answer is “Yes”. Let’s take a look how to go about it Google has what’s called language “hints”. By adding hints to the vocabulary, google speech-to-text is able to “understand” the audio and transcribe better. As I had shared in part 1 of this […]

1% Better Everyday And Other Lies

“You can paint a horse with numbers but you can’t whisper to the horse like a real artist!” __Madhav SBSS There is a trend now a days of talking about percentages, numbers and quantified wisdom. Trust me, I love numbers; at MIT, everything was numbers including our restrooms, desks, computers and classrooms. The issue with […]

With Love, A.I: Transcription (1 of 2)

tran·scrip·tion/ˌ tran(t)ˈskripSH(ə)n/a written or printed representation of something. Written representation of audio is normally considered as transcription. How does one go from audio to written word? We could listen to the audio word by word and note down the written representation of each word. This is a manual process and sometimes, we may need to […]

Can Psychedelics Cure Depression, Addiction and Cancer?

“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” –Carl Jung I’d have never thought I will be interested in entropy ever again after my thermodynamics classes during high school. Well who knew! I am reading up a bit of literature around entropic brain, psychedelics and experiments. Johns Hopkins, UC Davis and others schools are pursuing […]