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Artificial Intelligence Education Innovation Network Reading

Latest Read: GANs in Action

GANs in Action: Deep learning with Generative Adversarial Networks by Jakub Langr and Vladimir Bok. Vladimir is a Data Product Manager at Intent. In addition, I really welcome his statement: Why I Donate All of My Book’s Proceeds to Girls Who Code. Jakub is Co-Found of Hypermile, a UK startup deploying AI across transportation solutions.

GANs in Action by Jakub Langr and Vladimir Bok

Jakub and Vladimir have certainly written a wonderful book on machine learning algorithms that generate realistic imaging. However, this book is really intended for readers who already have some experience with machine learning and neural networks.

Whereas many consumers view new imaging services as a kind of magic, super computing power delivered by AI. There are indeed large machine learning datasets in play that even make this imaging possible.

GANs in Action is a very worthy followup to John Kelleher’s Machine Learning, Melanie Mitchell’s excellent book Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, and Sean Gerrish’s How Smart Machines Think. Each author is in fact, addressing in various scales, the introduction to Neural Networks and GANs. Thankfully, Jakub and Vladimir have taken the necessary next step in delivering a wonderful introduction and coding deep dive to GANs.

In fact, for many consumers the Grokking series of books are a must read. Grokking Algorithms: An Illustrated Guide For Programmers and Other Curious People by Aditya Bhargava and Grokking Artificial Intelligence Algorithms: Understand and apply the core algorithms of deep learning and artificial intelligence by Rishal Hurbans. Thus, both are wonderfully illustrated books to begin anyone’s journey into understanding Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning.

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Education Reading Vietnam War

Latest Read: The Origins of the Vietnam War

The Origins of the Vietnam War by Fredrik Logevall. He is a Professor of History at Harvard University. His book, Embers of War won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize.

The Origins of the Vietnam War by Fredrik Logevall

Previously, Fredrik taught at UC Santa Barbara and co-founded the University of California, Santa Barbara Center for Cold War Studies. In 2004 he began teaching at Cornell University. In addition, from 2006-07 was a Mellon Senior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He is an associate of the London School of Economics IDEAS Cold War Studies Programme.

This publication is rather brief, yet delivers impactful, easy reading. This short work should be considered mandatory for high school curriculum.

Part One looks at the First Vietnam war, between the French and Vietminh. He provides the French historical view of attempting to simply gain credibility and new markets. Their military, certainly humiliated by Prussia in the late 1970s and both World Wars sought victory. In addition, French financial and business interests needed to create new markets.

Fredrick follows up in Part Two, providing the foundation for America’s entry into Indochina from the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu to July 1965 under President Johnson. This serves everyone well by simply introducing the research to support America’s position of continued war across Indochina. By today, all the major players in this timeframe have died. In addition, documents classified during this timeframe are now available.

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Artificial Intelligence Education Innovation Reading

Latest Read: Deep Learning

Deep Learning by John D. Kelleher. John is the Academic Leader of the Information, Communication and Entertainment research institute at the Technological University Dublin. He has previously taught at Dublin City University, Media Lab Europe, and DFKI (the German Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research).

Deep Learning by John D. Kelleher

This is a very good introduction to specific subsets of artificial intelligence that are indeed powering imaging, speech recognition, machine translation, and autonomous cars today.

Consumers may forget as they are engaging various technologies, their interactions are via Deep Learning systems. This includes interactions with Siri on iPhones, and Alexa on all things from Amazon. To a lesser extent is Cortana from Microsoft. Actually, John provides a wonderful glossary. This serves the reader well in helping to further develop their understanding of Deep Learning systems.

Likewise, his introduction illustrates how Deep learning delivers data-driven decisions from very large datasets. The key is Deep Learning deliver immediate ‘learning’ as the large datasets grow.

In addition, his insights on autoencoders, recurrent neural networks, and Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) are very stimulating. At the same time, addressing gradient descent and especially backpropagation is amazing in of itself.

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Education Reading Vietnam War

Latest Read: The Road Not Taken

The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam by Max Boot. A New York Times bestseller, The Road Not Taken was a 2019 finalist for Pulitzer Prize in biography.

The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam by Max Boot

Max is a former writer and editor for Christian Science Monitor and The Wall Street Journal. Today he is a Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. In addition, Max is a contributor to The Washington Post and writes for The Weekly Standard, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times.

In providing a detailed story of Edward Lansdale’s entire life, perhaps for the first time Max documents the history of American counterinsurgency in post World War II Asia.

Edward certainly had a talent for winning the loyalty of people with honesty, respecting their cultures, and viewing the world from his family’s strong Christian Science beliefs. In addition, Max repeats the idea that Edward is indeed the agent in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American.

The Road Not Taken certainly serves as a resource to understanding how the CIA established counterinsurgency and was very successful at first. Yet we see how Washington withdrew key support at critical stages in both Cuba and South Vietnam. It is no wonder that Edward was unable to fully apply proven lessons from The Philippines in partnership between CIA and US military operatives in confronting communist expansion in Laos and Vietnam.

Early life to College

Although, it would appear somewhat insignificant that Edward attended UCLA and began his career as an advertising executive, he would clash with Kennedy’s Ivy League White House. Yet, Edward would join the CIA (then known as The Office of Strategic Services) during World War II. Edward rose to become an advisor, then assigned as an intelligence officer deployed to across Southeast Asia. Edward clearly understood during his efforts how to successfully confront communist advances during the Cold War. Time has certainly proven the arrogance and lack of firsthand experience inside Kennedy’s White House drove Vietnam into the ditch. One of the stronger impressions is Edward establishing successful Asian counterinsurgency programs beginning in 1945.

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Design Education Innovation Reading

Latest Read: Hit Makers

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction
by Derek Thompson. Derek is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Hit Makers is the winner of the American Marketing Association’s Marketing Book Award for 2018. Derek launched the Plain English podcast and is now producing the Crazy/Genius podcast.

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by Derek Thompson

So, why do specific songs, movies, books, and even mobile apps became popular? Hit Makers is addressing how popularity increases sales or cultural status.

However, for a technology-driven focus, including a book cover with Facebook icons, Derek’s initial story about the most famous song in history is very ancient.

Brahms’s lullaby “Guten Abend, gute Nacht” known to Americans as “Lullaby and good night” is indeed a historical interesting story. However, it would be better to address Hit Makers in the post-iPhone era alone.

It am not convinced however that Generation Alpha will understand these ancient ‘hits’ regardless of how they were developed.

However, these hits will resonate with Gen X and Millennials. Then, Derek quickly jumps into the 1950s addressing the introduction and impact of television. This provides a certainly compelling story of ESPN and the market popularity this creates for Disney.

Yet, even his story about European painters with a famous collection is again from an era so long ago. This also lacks widespread availability at the time (beyond early museums) so the impact is not really addressed from a colonial era of pop culture, as it was fixed within specific circles and classes.

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