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Artificial Intelligence Education Reading

Latest Read: Your Face Belongs to Us

Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup’s Quest to End Privacy as We Know It by Kashmir Hill.

Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup’s Quest to End Privacy as We Know It by Kashmir Hill

Kashmir holds a masters degrees in journalism from New York University. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker and The Washington Post. Kashmir is a technology reporter at The New York Times after having worked at Gizmodo Media Group, Fusion, Forbes Magazine, and Above the Law.

Perhaps of the most shocking books in fact that I have read in some time. Kashmir is documenting how a small AI company provided facial recognition to law enforcement, billionaires, and businesses. Yet, it should be no surprise this has eroded privacy as we know it.

Kashmir introduces readers to this chilling story as a skeptic. A tip regarding a mysterious app called Clearview AI held a claim it could with 99% accuracy identify anyone based upon a single photograph of their face. The app indeed provided a person’s online name, social media profiles, friends, family members, and their home address. This was just for starters and in the wrong hands, would be a very powerful surveillance tool.

Clearview AI was a start up run by Australian computer engineer Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz, a former Rudy Giuliani advisor. The company was funded by conservative provocateur Charles C. Johnson and billionaire Donald Trump backer Peter Thiel. In contrast, Google and Facebook chose that this type of tool was too dangerous to release. However, via private investors, Clerview AI would be pitched to thousands of law enforcement agencies around the world.

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Artificial Intelligence Education Reading

Latest Read: Generative AI : The Insights You Need

Generative AI: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review

Generative AI: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review

The world discovered Generative AI in the beginning of 2023. ChatGPT introduced over 100 million users to the possibilities of Generative AI. In less than 18 months society has shifted. With Wall Street and Madison Avenue literally banking on new markets, business, education and our globally connected society are witnessing transformation. Microsoft’s $10 billion investment in OpenAI is perhaps the strongest indicator of what GenAI will be expecting to produce. However, there certainly remains a big hill to climb.

New AI startups are creating GenAI business models around generating text, images, code and even animation and video via Sora at rather amazing speeds. GenAI is certainly altering how humans create content on a scale and speed not previously understood by society, government, business and education. So get ready for disruption.

This book will help understand the baseline of GenAI and the potential to change the world. Yet for the organization who decides to jump right in, make sure you understand Chapter 3:?A Framework for Picking the Right Generative AI Project. AI is not the web and GenAI is not html. Organizations must understand risk. Just ask Samsung and you will quickly understand why tech companies are banning GenAI within their internal networks.

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Artificial Intelligence Education Reading

Latest Read: Introduction to Generative AI

Introduction to Generative AI by Numa Dhamani and Maggie Engler.

Introduction to Generative AI by Numa Dhamani and Maggie Engler

Numa holds degrees in Physics and Chemistry from the University of Texas at Austin. She has served as the Principal Investigator on the United States Department of Defense’s research program. Today she is a Principal Machine Learning Engineer at Kungfu.ai.
Numa is an adjunct instructor at Georgetown University.

Maggie holds Masters in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. She is a safety team member at Inflection AI. Previously Maggie was a Data Science Fellow at the Center for New Data and a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Twitter. Maggie is also an adjunct instructor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Information.

Perhaps this book should be required reading for any organization’s AI planning team. Yes, your AI staff should have this well understood. However Numa and Maggie convey a grounded understanding of large language models (LLMs). In addition, you will understand the new rush for integrating generative AI (Microsoft and OpenAI) into your organizational workflows. To be fair, they also are addressing organizational benefits, risks, and limitations.

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Artificial Intelligence Education Reading

Latest Read: The Language of Deception

The Language of Deception: Weaponizing Next Generation AI by Justin Hutchens.

The Language of Deception: Weaponizing Next Generation AI by Justin Hutchens

He holds a masters in Computer Security Management from Strayer University and is a candidate Executive MBA at Texas A&M University.

Justin is a former Director, Cybersecurity Implementation & Operations at PwC and Cybersecurity Instructor at The University of Texas at Austin. Today he is a principal at Trace3.

Justin has written an insightful book. In fact, this should be recommended reading for everyone managing AI projects, they’re teams and of course cybersecurity professionals.

So, remember the hype cycle for AI peaked after OpenAI introduced ChatGPT in November 2022? The amazing explosion of ChatGPT’s adoption rate overshadow very basic security flaws within AI systems. Justin is addressing to reveal how AI services are not secure by the companies who are heavily promoting their AI services. And this allows for exploits to thrive since all the attention continues to focus on AI’s hype cycle.

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Artificial Intelligence Education Reading

Latest Read: Grokking Machine Learning

Grokking Machine Learning by Luis Serrano. He holds a Masters in Mathematics from the University of Waterloo and PhD in Mathematics from the University of Michigan.

Grokking Machine Learning by Luis Serrano

Luis worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratoire de Combinatoire et d’Informatique Mathématique at the University of Quebec at Montreal.

Today Luis is a research scientist in quantum artificial intelligence at Zapata Computing. He previously worked as a Machine Learning Engineer at Google, Lead Artificial Intelligence Educator at Apple, and Head of Content in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science at Udacity.

The opening chapters provide a good overview to Machine Learning before addressing linear regression. As with previous Grokking series books (below) readers will certainly be learning about supervised algorithms that classifying data.

However Luis is also addressing a much needed understanding of established methods to simplify data clean up in order to make reporting actionable. Likewise, an understanding the basics of Python will make this book’s examples easily understood. To his credit, Luis’ feels that anyone with high school algebra will be able to understand his book.