"AI winters" follow when the hype backing artificial intelligence yields to the disappointment. Typically the purveyors of AI technologies are then banished until the next spectacular advance in computing capacity. This is not a story about life during an AI winter. It is a story of my life in 2017, that could only be described as an AI Summer. But it didn't start out that way.

What follows is a partial retelling of my personal and professional pathway through the year.

I recently test-drove a Tesla Model X, which was the first time I had ridden in an all-electric vehicle since my neighbor drove me around in his pre-production EV1 in the 90s. The Tesla experience cemented my view that the hype around electric vehicles is well-founded. However, a point of …

In the run up to the AI for Good Global Summit, the XPRIZE Foundation asked for my thoughts on how artificial intelligence can address 3 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

You can read the complete piece at the XPRIZE website.

Jesse Hostetler, Dan Garmat, and I recently hacked on DeepMind's implementation of a neural network for the Arcade Learning Environment. The above video shows the agent learning to play a game called Breakout, in which the objective is to break bricks at the top of the screen using a ball …

When you visit a website that looks like your bank's, how do you know that you are actually talking to your bank and not a scammer impersonating your bank? Typically you will look at the address bar of the browser and compare it to the address you remember from the …

I am just wrapping up at the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing. My paper appears in the proceedings and I presented on Monday. This has been my first Human Computer Interaction (HCI) conference, so I have been exploring the differences and similarities from my AI and FOSS …

For our forthcoming paper at the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing I built a visualization for testing and debugging optimization simulators and algorithms.

The visualization is built on d3js and runs in the web browser. If you visit mdpvis.github.io you can interact with a wildfire …

A hazard of working in computer security is you see the world through a security-focused lens. Suddenly, mundane tasks transform into interesting intellectual challenges: "That card shuffle did not consume enough entropy!"..."Posting this online will open me up to social engineering!"..."People can learn my bike lock combination through …

Static HTML generators are fun to play with, but they (obviously) suffer from a lack of dynamic content. Today I experimented with using URL shorteners as a distributed hash table as a means of commenting on static sites.

After five hours of dealing with eccentricities of various URL shorteners, I …

I attended a talk at Open Source Bridge titled "Open Source is Not Enough: The Importance of Algorithm Transparency". The TLDR of the presentation is that algorithms shape your view of the world which can lead to socially bad outcomes. Think filter bubbles, search manipulation, etc.

The presenter's prescription was …