Want to command the crazy wages? Here’s what you need to bring.
Vishal Chatrath, co-founder and CEO of Prowler.io, an automation startup in Cambridge, England, hasn’t had trouble recruiting AI developers. “Talent hires talent,” he says. The important thing, he says, is to have intriguing problems to solve and some outstanding mathematicians and technicians already on staff to stoke expert interest. An added attraction is that Chatrath and his co-founders sold their previous company, voice recognition startup VocalIQ, to Apple Inc. in 2015.
Canadian Tech Sector Thrives, but Struggles to Keep Its Talent
Government seek to attract investment from big foreign players while stopping the brain drain
Mr. Trudeau has lamented a “brain drain” of Canada’s best tech minds, saying at a recent Google event in Toronto, “Quite frankly, we’re tired of Google poaching our best graduates from the University of Waterloo and sucking them down to California.”
.. Trudeau wrote to Mr. Bezos, asking him to consider Canada because of its inclusiveness, single-payer health-care system, and an immigration system designed to attract high-skilled talent.
.. Canada is widely considered to be at the nucleus of some world-leading research in areas such as machine learning and artificial intelligence.
.. Seminal work published by University of Toronto’s Geoffrey Hinton, University of Montreal’s Yoshua Bengio and others has spawned advancements in voice recognition and automated driving. Mr. Hinton published breakthrough research on “deep learning” in 2007 and 2012 that ushered in a new wave of AI and the potential it could have for smartphones, self-driving cars and other devices.
.. Canada’s AI talent pool is also the third biggest in the world behind the U.S. and the U.K., with about 1,100 researchers in the country
.. An Amazon move to Toronto might also end up being a “Trojan horse” that would draw Canadian workers to the company’s Seattle base rather than improve Canada’s economy
.. “The best and brightest Canadian engineers or marketers that operate under Amazon Canada will see their career path head down to Seattle, not in Canada,”
.. He says companies like Facebook have different needs than startups, noting that staff at Facebook’s AI lab in Montreal are focused on more advanced research.
.. Cole Clifford, a 23-year-old machine-learning engineer at Toronto-based startup DeepLearni.ng , said he received about 50 recruiter emails in his LinkedIn account last month, most of them from Silicon Valley firms
.. the Canadian government spent C$125 million last March to set up new AI “superclusters” in Toronto
.. The goal is to keep researchers in Canada and create 1,000 AI graduates in the next five years
.. “We aren’t realizing that the intellectual property developed by these individuals and all of those economic benefits are rarely in Canada and not taxed in Canada,” Mr. Ruffalo said. “That’s the problem.”
.. One potential avenue for keeping foreign companies in check is for Canada to withhold R&D tax incentives
.. Another option is to create a government-backed sovereign patent fund, similar to what South Korea, Japan and France have launched in recent years, which would protect smaller startups from patent claims by foreign companies
How A Former Pixar Designer Gave Life To Capital One’s Chatbot
Bot is gender-neutral with a sense of humor and won’t stand for rudeness
When Capital One Financial Corp. was developing its artificially intelligent chatbot during the past year, it drew on the experience of Audra Koklys Plummer, who spent six years helping to create fictional characters at The Walt Disney Co.’s Pixar Animation Studios.
Ms. Koklys Plummer, head of AI design at Capital One, has tried to imbue the bank’s text-based digital assistant, Eno, with compelling character traits like empathy and humor, similar to the way her teams at Pixar developed characters in films such as “Ratatouille.”
.. It also has traits such as a sense of humor, trustworthiness and empathy that could help create brand loyalty and eliminate some of negativity and fear associated with the way humans think and talk about their money, she said.
.. First, we made the deliberate decision to design Eno as gender-neutral. I felt strongly that we should challenge the industry trend of choosing female characters in voice and name for their bots.Does it matter how humans talk to bots?
I have three young children, and they were the best examples of why we need to be mindful of the conversation we’re establishing with AI. I would watch them in our home interact with [Amazon.com Inc.’s] Alexa. They began by commanding Alexa around and I realized we were establishing these communication patterns that carried through in the way they communicated with me.
.. How does Eno react when a human is disrespectful toward it?
We establish character boundaries for Eno because there’s an insane amount of people who abuse or harass their AI and I didn’t want Eno to just have a generic response. I wanted to establish boundaries and [have Eno] say ‘Hey, that’s inappropriate, let’s stick to focusing on your money.’
We as AI designers have a responsibility to not only the product we put out in the world but in being mindful of those conversation patterns that we establish with our customers. It’s not simple, because there are millions of different ways somebody can say something, and if we misinterpret that and we send the wrong response then we lose that trust.
How Facebook’s Master Algorithm Powers the Social Network
Instagram engineers faced a Herculean task in early 2016. Fearing that people would miss the most important posts, Instagram’s leadership asked the engineers to transform the chronological photo feed into a curated list of posts based on users’ individual preferences.
.. However much Instagram’s engineers tweaked it, the fact that most of what powers Instagram came straight from Facebook’s News Feed shows the dominance and success of this basic engine of social media. Think of it—and the endless, modular chunks of AI that go into it—as Facebook’s master algorithm
.. If telling us what to look at next is Facebook’s raison d’être, then the AI that enables that endless spoon-feeding of content is the company’s most important, and sometimes most controversial, intellectual property. A sorted, curated feed tuned for engagement is the product of a device that may someday be viewed by historians as a milestone on par with the steam engine.
.. Only this engine, built to capture human attention, has shown itself to be exploitable by bad actors and possibly detrimental to our democracy, even when it is functioning as advertised.
.. AI algorithms are inherently black boxes whose workings can be next to impossible to understand—even by many Facebook engineers. “If you look at all the engineers at Facebook, more than one in four are users of our AI platform,” says Mr. Candela. “But more than 70% [of those] aren’t experts.”
.. A team analyzed hundreds of thousands of posts in 10 languages, flagging offending headlines that either withheld information (“Here’s the one thing…”) or exaggerated (“…will blow your mind”). The resulting system autonomously scans links, suppressing the ones that match what it learned from the human-generated data.
.. teams add new features to Facebook’s master algorithm to “add value to social interactions.” Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg recently said the company’s goal was to “bring the world closer together.”
However it is phrased, it is measured in the way people engage with Facebook’s apps and networks, whether that is increasing the number of posts they like or comment on, or how useful they find machine-translated posts, or how often they use M, Facebook’s Messenger-based smart assistant, Mr. Candela says.
.. The unstated assumption behind the work of Facebook’s more than 20,000 employees is that getting people to use Facebook more is a good thing. It is certainly hard to imagine a world without it, given how it has become central to the way we connect, find news and keep up with friends and family.