DPL Reading List – November 10, 2017
Here are some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week.
Artificial Intelligence Beats CAPTCHA – “A CAPTCHA is considered broken if an algorithm can successfully solve it at least 1 percent of the time. Now San Francisco Bay Area startup Vicarious reveals its AI software can solve reCAPTCHAs at an accuracy rate of 66.6 percent, BotDetect at 64.4 percent, Yahoo at 57.4 percent and PayPal at 57.1 percent.”
How Netflix works: the (hugely simplified) complex stuff that happens every time you hit Play – “What isn’t as simple is what goes into running Netflix, a service that streams around 250 million hours of video per day to around 98 million paying subscribers in 190 countries. At this scale, providing quality entertainment in a matter of a few seconds to every user is no joke.”
Corporate innovation— the next chapter of digital transformation – “The state of digital transformation continues to take shape. Even though it’s fledgling, organizations in every industry must prioritize innovation as a mandate. Too many executives either downplay the need to innovate or falsely believe they are further along than they really are. This has to change. Decision-makers must recognize the need for change.”
How to Stay Focused If You’re Assigned to Multiple Projects at Once – “Switching attention between tasks takes time and saps your focus and energy. Moving between teams, you probably also need to adjust to different roles — you might be the boss on one but a junior member of another, for example — which changes not only your level of accountability but also your ability to juggle resources when a crunch time hits.”
Can AI learn to scare us? With Shelley, MIT researchers aim for goosebumps – “Shelley is a deep-learning powered AI who was trained on over 140K horror stories on Reddit’s infamous r/nosleep subreddit. She lives on Twitter; every hour, @shelley_ai tweets out the beginning of a new horror story, ending with #yourturn to invite a human collaborator. Anyone is welcome to reply to that tweet with the next part of the story; Shelley will reply again with the next part, and so on.”
The Board’s New Innovation Imperative – “Governing innovation is not for the faint of heart. The journey takes time and determination. It takes the courage to act in the long-term interests of the organization even when markets are more short-sighted. It takes the determination to fight the natural human aversion to risk and the fortitude to engage in creative abrasion.”
How AI will impact your routine as a designer – “There is a lot of conversation happening around Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and using algorithms to shape the future of Design and the role of the designer. But how is that changing the way we work in the near future?”
