AI Colors Past Videos

“This is mind-blowing AI-restored footage (by HistoryColored) – from 1896 of the cities Paris and Lyon in France. You can see pedestrians and vehicles of the past in various locations across the two cities. This footage was primarily filmed and produced by pioneers of motion pictures, the Lumière brothers. Brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière created one of the first motion picture cameras, the Cinématographe Lumière. Locations featured in this video are: The Eiffel Tower, Place des Cordeliers, Place de la Concorde, and Place du Pont.” Link

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More about Decision Fairness

The question “Could we achieve fairness in our automatic decision-making?” continues to be on minds of many decision intelligence partitioners. Jacob Feldman in his new post “How decision models deal with fairness” looks at 7 real-world decision-making applications in development of which he was involved. Majority of these applications dealt with complex business problems in which “fairness” was presented (or not) in clearly defined business objectives. Geoffrey De Smet considers “What is fair?” in the context of employee scheduling. From cashiers to nurses to police officers: everyone demands a fair shift schedule. He refers to the new article “Load balancing and fairness in constraints” from Timefold in which they define constraints that penalize possible solutions based on their unfairness. The overwhelming interest in the above publications shows that decision fairness will continue to be a hot topic.

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Making decisions within an uncertain environment

Warren Powell provided interesting comments the the latest NY Times article “When it comes to math, AI is dumb” that states: “Early computers followed rules. AI follows probabilities. But in mathematics, there is no probable answer, only the right one”.

Probabilists will argue (correctly) that we have very elegant mathematics for describing probabilities. After all, the world is stochastic, and we need to model this uncertainty. Industries like airlines and hotels have mastered the art of modeling an uncertainty as part of their revenue management problems. @optimaldynamics models the uncertainty of shipper demands when planning fleets.

It is true that when making decisions, we ultimately have to pick a single decision despite having to consider its impact on an uncertain future. And in theory there is a single optimal decision, not just in terms of maximizing performance now, but which maximizes performance into an uncertain future. However, finding what we think (and hope) is the best decision, we absolutely have to model the uncertainties that affect how well this decision performs. Link

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Does software engineering get worse?

Ulrich Junker: “Imho, software engineering gets worse in each decade. Initially, computers were programmed by punch cards and programmers needed to execute their programs on paper to anticipate issues. This was tedious, but very instructive.

Next came PCs with compilers. People could quickly try out their programs. Execution on paper was replaced by the debugger. Interestingly, bug databases started to pop up in this phase. Software companies openly admitted that they shipped buggy software.

Then came open software, IDEs, frequent releases. Many programmers are simply stitching code fragments together and then walk through a debugger to understand the behavior. Bugs were considered inevitable and many bug reports simply constituted requests for feature refinements as most software lacks a clear specification of its behavior.

Now we are getting LLMs for code generation … let us see which kind of software we are getting thanks to them …
Link

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Gartner Says AI Ready For Decision Intelligence Market

David Pidsley from Gartner wrote today: “Decision intelligence (DI) is not about driving decisions with data; it’s about deriving data from decisions to achieve better business outcomes. Decision intelligence platforms (DIPs) are software used to create solutions that support, automate and augment decision making of humans or machines, powered by the composition of data, analytics, knowledge and artificial intelligence techniques. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 75% of global enterprises will apply decision intelligence practices for logging decisions for subsequent analysis.” David listed the following DIPs: 4Paradigm 第四范式, ACTICO, Aera Technology, Airin, Inc., Cogility Software, Corridor Platforms, CRIF, Decisions, Diwo, Cloverpop, Elemental Cognition, Faculty, FICO, FlexRule, IBM, InRule, Merlynn Intelligence Technologies, o9 Solutions, Inc., OpenRules, Inc., Palantir Technologies, ParetoSC, Quantexa, Rainbird Technologies, Rulex, SAS, Sparkling Logic, Inc, Spindox, Trisotech, Verteego, XpertRule Software. Link

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Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

Dan Selman wrote: “The key to Knowledge Representation and Reasoning is building your ontology. It doesn’t matter if you are reasoning using a Knowledge Graph, a rules engine or a relational database — you need to do the work of understanding the concepts in your domain, and their properties and relationships.

That is fundamentally different to “find me chunks of text similar to this chunk of text”.

I think folks are getting confused because an LLM can be a useful aid in understand the concepts in a domain, extracting instances of known domain concepts from text, and searching for text based on vector embedding, and they are a Swiss Army knife for data format transformation and text generation.

Let’s use the right tool for the right problem. LLMs are great at many things, but reasoning is not one of them.” Link

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5 Submissions for July’s Challenge “Smart Investment”

We’ve already received 5 submissions for Challenge July-2024 “Smart Investment“:

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The AI Summer

Ben Evans: “Hundreds of millions of people have tried ChatGPT, but most of them haven’t been back. Every big company has done a pilot, but far fewer are in deployment. Some of this is just a matter of time. But LLMs might also be a trap: they look like products and they look magic, but they aren’t. Maybe we have to go through the slow, boring hunt for product-market fit after all.” Link

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Automatically-generated ontology?

Ron Ross: “Automatically-generated ontology? In other words, can existing AI on its own assemble a meaningful, useful ontology from some corpus for a domain of knowledge that currently has no ontology? Based on our experiments and experience, I’d say no (not even close), though yes, it can assist in specifics.” Link

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Decision Modeling and Fairness

Could we achieve fairness in our automatic decision-making? This question was actively discussed in the presentation “How to make optimal decisions (that are unfair, biased and non-objective)” given by Dr. Guido Tack in May of 2024. While Guido used the famous Stable Marriage problem as an example, similar problems are everywhere: allocating teachers to classes, service personnel to customers, nurses to shifts, students to universities, donated organs to patients, etc. Guido pointed out that our decisioning algorithms may introduce bias and unfairness in subtle ways. He is discussing different ways to represent fairness as an optimization objective and makes attempts to achieve it following 3 approaches specified by Corrago Gini, John Rawls, and John Nash. Guido’s conclusion is not very optimistic: each particular problem may requires its own solution. Still this discussion brings some light to quite complex problems in decision modeling and it’s already incentivized our June-2024 Challenge.

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