James Ashley

TCSG Leadership Conference and Deepfakes

October 31, 2019November 5, 2019 James Ashley

I’d like to thank the Technical College System of Georgia for inviting me to deliver the talk “Who’s Afraid of Deepfakes” at their 2019 Leadership conference in Savannah, GA. It is a great pleasure to be able to deliver this material to people who are not already familiar with it. It was also a privilege to speak after Jason Poovey of Georgia Tech, who provided a fascinating overview of the current state of AI research and his vision for bringing business, math and technology together.

I also want to thank Adie Shimandle, Billie Izard and Steven Ferguson for organizing the talks. Thank you Elizabeth Strickler, Director, Media Entrepreneurship and Innovation at GSU, for introducing me to Adie.

Imposter Syndrome Reconsidered

October 3, 2019October 3, 2019 James Ashley

The term “imposter syndrome” is a meme that has captured the imagination of the technology sector – and for good reason; we are insecure people. The term may have made its way into the tech world in an illegitimate manner, however. This illegitimate use of the term is what I want to explore in this post, coupled with the rather obvious conclusion that “insecurity” is the better term in the vast majority of cases, despite its relative un-sexiness.

“Imposter syndrome” was first clinically described in 1978 in my adopted home city Atlanta, Georgia by Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Ament Imes in their paper The Impostor Phenomenon in High Achieving Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention. There are several salient features in the way it was originally understood which distinguish it from the way imposter syndrome is used today by software engineers.

First, the diagnosis was originally meant to describe the unique situation of professional women in a predominantly male-dominated professional world. In the 70’s we didn’t ask if men felt like phony’s, too. That would have been missing the point.

Second, the phenomenon covered successful women in particular – that is, women whose accomplishments were publicly recognized and not merely a matter of self-esteem. Today when we talk about imposter syndrome, by contrast (for instance in Scott Hanselman’s famous post I’m a Phony), the point is always that unaccomplished people should not feel like imposters because even successful people like X, Y and Z feel this way. In the original article, obviously, the term could only be applied to X, Y and Z. Other people, male or female, who felt unearned confidence without visible accomplishments, simply were imposters.

Third, imposter syndrome was a phenomenon tied to early family dynamics and requiring therapy to overcome. Today, no one says if you have imposter syndrome you should look for professional help to deal with it. Instead, recognizing the condition is meant to be in itself an instantaneous form of self-therapy, because if everyone has imposter syndrome then no one has imposter syndrome.

In 2019 imposter syndrome has moved well beyond its original carefully circumscribed bounds, to the point that 70% of professionals acknowledge feeling like imposters from time to time (this is an often cited statistic I have been completely unable to source). If this large number is meant to make us feel better about our own insecurities, it should nevertheless concern us that the people who run our banks, fill out our taxes, prescribe our medications, perform surgery on us, cook our food, fix our cars and run our government aren’t always sure they know what they are doing. I would question whether this is actually a good thing.

Imposter syndrome has found a home in technical communities. There are several obvious reasons for this. The sort of people who go into tech tend to be beset by social anxiety. At the same time, the most common communication strategy used in technology is bombastic and overconfident – sometimes described as bro culture. These two things together will cause a frequent sense of inadequacy in the face of often meaningless processes like behavioral interviews, fadish architectural trends and cargo-cult adherence to agile processes. And if agile isn’t working for you, then you are doing it wrong, so you should feel inadequate about that, too.

At the same time, the software industry is a young industry with characteristics that make it susceptible to real imposters. It is a complex profession lacking recognized standards of education or certification. After all, even hair dressers have to be licensed. The guy who writes your banking software, on the other hand, doesn’t. For a set of peculiar linguistic social and linguistic reasons, however, we have no easy way for technologists and business people to talk to each other and judge the relative merits of different approaches to writing software. This leaves the unlicensed software developers in a position of needing to police themselves, with mixed success. In philosophy, this is generally known as the crisis of legitimation.

Another problem is that software is very important in our current world. A lot of time and money is determined by whether we make good or poor software solution decisions. In the case of medical software, lives are literally at stake.

A third characteristic compounded by the crisis of legitimation and the high stakes involved is a tendency to love shiny new technology. Whenever things don’t go well with a project, we gravitate toward unknown and untested new platforms, frameworks and processes to fix our problems. This creates an inverted success strategy where the technology industry prefers mysterious, poorly understood solutions over acquired experience.

All of this leads to lots of tech people normalizing the process of talking about things they do not know anything about. Whereas in established professions, people know not to speak when they have that vertiginous sense that they are out of your depth, in technology, if no one contradicts us we accept this as license to continue bullshitting. Fake it till you make it.

Because other people’s money and potentially lives are on the line, however, we should recognize that this is dangerous behavior.

Moreover, the notion that everyone has imposter syndrome fails to recognize that in previous generations, that sense of being out of one’s depth is how professionals discovered their weaknesses in order to move from journeymen to experts in their craft.

In fact, there is a whole genre of literature known as Bildungsroman dedicated to exploring this basic aspect of the transition to adulthood. Novels as diverse as Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Dickens’s Great Expectations, Jane Austen’s Emma and Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye cover this difficult journey from naivete and unearned confidence to nuanced understanding and expertise. The most common hallmark of his genre is the recognition that error, misspeaking and insecurity are milestones in our path towards self-mastery. Being insecure is a good thing, not a bad thing, because it drives us to be better.

Insecurity is normal and good. This feature of the human condition tends to be masked and smoothed over by terms like imposter syndrome which helps us to ignore these moments of doubt, which is a shame.

For this reason, I prefer that people just say they feel unconfident about an idea or approach. When someone tells me this, I can help them evaluate their idea and potentially refine it so we both learn something.

When someone tells me they have imposter syndrome I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do. They obviously want me to say that everyone has imposter syndrome and so they should believe in themselves. But when the stakes are as high as they are in software engineering, this feels like a cop out.

If you are feeling like an imposter in tech, maybe that’s something worth exploring more deeply.

AI and The Creative Industries Friday Series

September 28, 2019October 15, 2019 James Ashley

Thank you to everyone who attended my Deepfakes and Ethics talk yesterday at the AI and the Creative Industries Friday Series. Thanks also to Dr. Adam Spring for driving downtown with me and taking a walking tour of some of the parking lot there.

The talk was filmed and should go up in a few weeks.

Zao’s Next Gen DeepFakes

September 12, 2019September 12, 2019 James Ashley

The Zao app, by Changsha Shenduronghe Network Technology Co Ltd, was released on the Chinese iTunes store a week ago and was popularized in a tweet by Allan Xia.

It is not currently available through iTunes in the U.S. but with a bit of hard work I was finally able to install a copy. I was concerned that the capabilities of the app might be exaggerated but it actually exceeded my expectations. As a novelty app, it is fascinating. As an indicator of the current state and future of deepfakes, it is a moment of titanic proportions.

As of a year ago, when the machine learning tool Fake App was released, a decent deepfake took tens of hours and some fairly powerful hardware to generate. The idea of being able to create one in less than 30 seconds on a standard smartphone seemed a remote possibility at the time. Even impossible.

The Zao app also does some nice things I’ve never gotten to work well with deepfakes/faceswap or deepfacelab – for instance like handling facial hair.

… or even no hair. (This is also a freaky way to see what you’ll look like in 15-20 years.)

What is particularly striking is the way it handles movement and multiple face angles as with this scene from Trainspotting and a young Obi Wan Kenobi. In the very first scene, it even skips over several faces and just automatically targets the particular one you specify. (In other snippets that include multiple characters, the Zao app allows you to choose which face you want to swap out.)

All this indicates that the underlying algos are quite different from the autoencoder based ones from last year. I have some ideas about how they have managed to generate deepfakes so quickly and with a much smaller set of data.

Back in the day, deepfakes required a sample of 500 source faces and 500 target faces to train the model. In general, the source images were rando and pulled out of internet posted videos. For the Zao app, there is a ten second process in which selfies are taken of you in a few different poses: mouth closed, mouth open, raised head, head to the left and blinking. By ensuring that the source images are the “correct” source images rather than random ones, they are able to make that side of the equation much more efficient.

While there is a nice selection of “target” videos and gifs for face swapping, its is still a limited number (I’d guess about 200). Additionally, there is no way to upload your own videos (as far as I could tell with the app running on one phone and Bing translator running on a second phone in the other – the app is almost entirely in simplified Chinese). The limited number of short target videos may simply be part of a curation process to make sure that the face angles are optimized for this process, mostly facing forward and with good lighting. I suspect, though, that the quantity is limited because the makers of the Zao app have also spent a good amount of time feature mapping the faces in order to facilitate the process. It’s a clever sleight of hand, combined with amazing technology, used to create a social app people are afraid of.

The deeper story is that deepfakes are here to stay and they have gotten really, really good over the past year. And deepfakes are like a box of chocolates. You can try to hide them because they are potentially bad for you. Or you can try to understand it better in order to 1) educate others about the capabilities of deepfakes and 2) find ways to spot them either through heuristics or CV algorithms.

Consider what happened with Photoshopping. We all know how powerful this technology is and how easy it is, these days, to fake an image. But we don’t worry about it today because we all know it can be done. It is not a mysterious process anymore.

Making people more aware of this tech, even popularizing it as a way of normalizing and then trivializing it, may be the best way to head off a deepfake October surprise in the 2020 U.S. elections. Because make no mistake: we will all be seeing a lot of deepfakes in October, 2020.

10 Questions with Noah A S

September 3, 2019 James Ashley

Every group of friends has one person who holds the others together. In the world of Magic Leap, this person is Noah Aubrey Schiffman.

When the HoloLens first came out, the HoloLens team tried to create their own community website and forums. But people felt more comfortable hanging out in the HoloDevelopers Slack group that Jesse McCulloch created (and now Jesse works at Microsoft). When the Magic Leap came out at the end of 2018, a friend and I started a Slack group for it while others created a Discord channel to gather the community.

However, it was the twitter thread and #leapnation tag that Noah created which eventually became the gathering spot for MR developers, hobbyists and fans.

Why? you might ask. I think communities develop around people whose sincere enthusiasm reflects and reveals the common purpose inside the rest of us. In the world of magic leap, this hearth keeper is Noah, unofficial community ambassador to the magicverse, first of his name. Long may he reign.

What movie has left the most lasting impression on you?

Terminator II: Judgement Day (with the fear of Skynet) Or The Matrix (the idea of living in a simulation)

What is the earliest video game you remember playing?

It might have been something on an old-style Mac. Probably the game Sockworks which is for young toddlers.

Who is the person who has most influenced the way you think?

Probably my mother or a few of my friends.

When was the last time you changed your mind about something?

I do it a lot.. so I guess it was this week.

What’s a skill people assume you have but that you are terrible at?

ah a skill I don’t have that people assume I have.. Development, in something. It could be javascript I’ve not made much anything yet.

What inspires you to learn?

More learning, I guess, Isn’t it a cycle?

What do you need to believe in order to get through the day?

I don’t really need to believe very much I’m good when it comes to coping? Is this the question?

What’s a view that you hold but can’t defend?

It’s when I know something is coming or on the way but I signed an NDA so I cannot talk about it.

What will the future killer Mixed Reality app do?

– Something social! *Or* It will give you news! (doesn’t twitter do both?)

What book have you recommended the most?

Snow Crash.

10 Questions With Charles Poole

August 22, 2019 James Ashley

Charles Poole, the owner of IS Studios, is currently one of the most experienced mixed reality developers in the business. Like many of the other people well known for their development chops on the HoloLens and Magic Leap One, he fell into it accidentally. Through a combination of determination and blind luck, as well as the ability to pick up a new UX paradigm that requires technical acumen with both .NET and Unity, he is currently one of those rare people with 3+ years of hands-on MR design, development and project management experience. You’ll have to ask him yourself for the full story, but it basically comes down – as with so many others – to getting his hands on a very expensive device and learning to make it hum (ideally using spatial audio).

Charles is soft spoken and kind. One of the very interesting things about his background is that he is a mathematician – and so in that small subclass of software developers who actually knows math! There’s nothing nicer in the world of programming than having a friend you can hit up when you are having problems with an algorithm or with your matrix math.

What movie has left the most lasting impression on you?

Hackers, I think watching Hackers in 95/96 shaped my childhood and later choices when it came to education and what I spent my time on.

What is the earliest video game you remember playing?

Super Mario Brothers on the NES, or Sky Kid, also on NES. I remember playing it for hours just to get to the 3rd or 4th level, then watching my father get a lot further.

Who is the person who has most influenced the way you think?

Maybe Buckminster Fuller, Neal Stephenson maybe Michael Crichton. I read a lot as a child, I feel as though all the views I was exposed to through fiction and non-fiction had a big influence in how I see the world and approach problems. In general the problems seem really big, cause a lot of drama, are entertaining to read and experience, then the solution just happens to come together from a character that has the experience to pull a solution out of their ass.

When was the last time you changed your mind about something?

A big one recently, and kind of mild, was using Photon for the multiplayer aspects of my work. I was against Photon for a long time, I wanted to be in control of every aspect of what I was building. So I’d do things like make a custom socket server, write the server in Dark rift, use WebRTC. One of the most important things about freelancing is using every tool you have to accelerate development, while keeping it altogether. We had to make a decision recently about a multiplayer backend that could scale to thousands of users, but still be self hosted, and the time-frame was extremely compressed, so I revisited Photon, specifically PUN2 which had been released since the last time I had used PUN, and it felt like it had come a long way in the time since I had used it last.

Simpler and more personal – My daughter’s kindergarten teacher had been pushing for her to repeat kindergarten. I was staunchly against it, she was getting top marks, won the science fair over 5th graders, and with something she had actually done and came up with on her own, we only bought the materials. But she just wasn’t emotionally ready for the pace to get quicker in first grade, and her teacher made her excited about helping out for another year. So, we agreed to have her repeat kindergarten, because she loves to learn, and we didn’t want to make school into something she hated.

What’s a skill people assume you have but that you are terrible at?

Managing my time, I’m terrible at managing my time, I tend to get sucked into a project and neglect everything else. I would work every day from 9am – 9pm or later. I had to step back and put a rigid stop time on my day so I would spend time with my kids and not just work through their whole childhood.

What inspires you to learn?

I want to do everything myself, and push myself outside my developer comfort zone everyday. I’ll say ‘yes’ to things just for the challenge of figuring it out.

What do you need to believe in order to get through the day?

That things can only get better. I started off this dev journey making a thousand bucks a month, living in a tiny apartment with my wife and two kids. Every day, week, month feels like things have gotten better for us, at some point I want to turn around and help make other people’s lives better too.

What’s a view that you hold but can’t defend?

That anything is possible with enough hard work. I have an applied math background, and have seen sparks of insight and intuition I know I’d never have, but I still feel like I’d get there eventually if I put enough hours into it.

What will the future killer Mixed Reality app do?

Something agent based, an intelligent agent that acts as your exocortex. AI/ML is the future of Human Computer Interaction, the killer app won’t feel like an app, it will just be part of your life.

What book have you recommended the most?

Rainbow’s End by Vernor Vinge, it’s shaping up to be the most prescient book I’ve read. It was written in 2006 but the trends he wrote about are what we’re starting to see today, the nascent AR technology.

12 Questions With Simon “Darkside” Jackson

August 8, 2019August 8, 2019 James Ashley

Simon is one of the main contributors to the Microsoft MRTK framework for HoloLens and also to the XRTK framework for cross-platform mixed reality development. He is the author of several technical books on Unity. He is keeper of the flame on the Unity-UI Extensions source code.

Simon basically really intimidates me. He knows the Microsoft coding stack as well as the Unity stack, which makes him formidable. He’s currently working on extending the XRTK framework to support the Oculus Quest, which means if you have built your HoloLens or Magic Leap app on the XRTK, your app will automagically also run on the Quest thanks to Simon. That’s some seriously cool stuff.

He also happens to be a very nice person who is genuinely concerned about the well being of the people around him – which I found out the easy way over many online and in-person interactions. I’m not totally sure why he promotes himself as of the Darkside since he is clearly more of a Gray Jedi – but that’s not one of the 10 questions, so we may never know. Without further ado, here are Simon’s answers to the 10 Questions:

What movie has left the most lasting impression on you?

“The Matrix, it shows us how to stand tall, to face adversity with strength and uncover meaning in this world we call life.”

What is the earliest video game you remember playing?

“Given I have to recognise I’m getting old, my earliest game I recall was Pong on the Atari 2600. First game console our family owned. First games would be the penny shuffle machines in the arcades of old .”

Who is the person who has most influenced the way you think?

“William Shatner, for showing us how to boldly go and give us a glimpse of the world I’d like to see us aspire to.”

When was the last time you changed your mind about something?

“Whenever the wife decides something and I have no other option but to agree.”

What’s a skill people assume you have but that you are terrible at?

“Recruiters are constantly sending me offers for jobs developing in JavaScript or Java, which I’ve avoided for most of my developer life.”

What inspires you to learn?

“My life’s goal is to always learn something new each and every day, to grow and develop. If we no longer aspire to develop ourselves we cease to be.”

What do you need to believe in order to get through the day?

“I have to believe the coffee will not run out, else the world becomes a much more vicious place. I also hope to defeat ignorance, but ignorance always finds new ways to baffle me.”

What’s a view that you hold but can’t defend?

“I have long held the belief that humankind will eventually realise its insignificance and start to work towards the betterment of ourselves and the planet we live on. However, I’m proven wrong each and every day (for now). Basically, I want the world of Star Trek, not the world of Star Wars.”

What will the future killer Mixed Reality app do?

“Once mixed reality technology finally becomes affordable enough and cool enough to wear all day long, I believe the killer experience will be something that integrates with our everyday. An app/experience that will enrich the world around us, show us new sights and experiences, and offer us new ways to interact. Be it a simple experience that adds wonder to a shopping centre experience, or uses geo location whilst visiting historic sights and completely immerse us whilst learning (in stead of just reading signs as we do now).”

What book have you recommended the most?

“Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson, it opens up so many new possibilities and levitates towards the dangers of being “plugged in” too much. Giving us a sense of wonder and danger in equal measure, leading us to live in a world augmented by technology but not driven by it.”

And then Simon volunteered two more unsolicited questions:

Favourite quote?

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
— Albert Einstein (as well as others).”

Most used phrase?

“Because… unity.”

10 Questions with Suzanne Borders

July 31, 2019July 31, 2019 James Ashley

Suzanne is the CEO of BadVR – which IMO wins the prize for best company name and probably could easily make a top 10 list for band names, also. Suzanne’s company works with the fascinating world of data visualizations in VR and MR. She is also the recipient of one of the coveted 2019 Magic Leap grants and is a member of Magic Leap’s Independent Creator Program. I met her briefly at an MR event in Mountain View, CA in early 2019 and besides being an amazing advocate for the importance of true 3D data visualizations in spatial experiences, has successfully shown everyone how to be a leader and promoter of mixed reality in the XR world.

What movie has left the most lasting impression on you?

This one is tough! I’m a huge film buff and there have been so many movies that have deeply impacted me and altered my understanding of the universe.

That being said, I think the most impactful film I’ve ever watched is “The Holy Mountain” by Alejandro Jodorowsky. It’s such an explosion of creativity, a surrealistic fever dream that functions on so many levels as a commentary on the human desire to seek truth and enlightenment. Jodorowsky is unlike any other filmmaker out there, a true magician that makes film into high art without losing the ability to make impactful statements about the universal human condition. Any of his films could really be considered my favorite but “The Holy Mountain’ in particular speaks to me the most because it best captures the hero’s journey; our collective desire to seek something greater from life than what we’re given. A lot of surrealistic film is just weird for the sake of being weird and therefore loses impact because it doesn’t use the symbolism of surrealism to make any sort of deeper statement. Jodorowsky is a surrealist in the best sense of the term – all his bizarre unexpected images convey meaning and activate archetypical feelings, drives, and desires in his audience. He’s a master of the subconscious and knows how to access and wield communicative power in this area. Because of this, he’s my creative hero and I look to his work often for inspiration, especially when attempting to craft products that have the ability to touch user’s subconscious. I think this is key when unlocking broad market appeal for products or film or art in general. To really touch and impact a wide audience the experience, the artist or creator must touch on, and involve, a universal archetype. Jodorowsky’s films taught me this lesson and showed me how to execute on it. I want to give a big shout-out and thank you to my filmmaker friend Ryan, who introduced me to them. He, in many ways, has fundamentally changed how I approach any creative challenge by showing me Jodo’s work.

Beyond “The Holy Mountain,” I’m a big fan of “Belladonna of Sadness” (you will not find a more beautifully animated film ever), “Apocalypse Now” (Brando as Kurtz and his monologue at the end talking about the clarity of evil is a perennial favorite; combining Conrad’s “The Heart of Darkness” with the Vietnam war was a stroke of pure genius), “Funeral Parade of Roses” (a Japanese film that sets the ancient story of Oedipus into the transgender alternative subculture in 1960s Japan; I love it for its ability to utilize archetypical images and stories in an unexpected and creative way), “Hiroshima Mon Amour” (any media by Marguerite Duras is an automatic favorite), and “Last Tango in Paris” (I adore Brando, he’s an absolute legend, and this film touches on so many truths of the human existence, our longing for connection, the power of anonymity, my own personal life makes this film more powerful to me than it will to many, but none the less I adore it). And of course, the visual style and occult symbolism of Dario Argento’s films is a forever favorite (“Suspiria” being the pinnacle of Argento’s work IMO).

Lastly, Fellini’s “8 1/2” was the first film I watched as a child that really unlocked for me the power of cinema and storytelling. Prior to watching it, I had dismissed film as some inferior commercial medium. I saw it as cheap mindless entertainment for the masses without substance or meaning. For me at that time, my understanding of film was limited to boring and poorly made summer blockbusters. I remember clearly popping in the 8 1/2 VHS tape at age 17 without any expectation, just another mindless story to pass the long summer hours of adolescence. But the story that jumped out from the screen – starting with Fellini’s infamous opening dream sequence – absolutely captivated me. I found myself profoundly touched at the end of the film, crying even, and realized that I had been changed forever for having watched it. The message of the film – our flawed desire for human connection and all the broken and dysfunctional ways we pursue it – resonated with me at such a level that I have, decades later, never forgotten that moment. From that point on, I considered film and storytelling a high art that held the potential to change the world. Of course, not all film or stories rise to this potential and I’ve continued to be disappointed by mainstream commercial film in such a major way that I don’t even engage with it anymore. But 8 1/2 made me realize the potential of film as a medium for spiritual transformation. It showed me the power of storytelling had to bring humanity together and demonstrated the medium’s ability to hold up to the audience a mirror of themselves, helping them pursue a deeper understanding of both themselves the world around them.

Obviously, I adore film. It is one of my biggest sources of creative inspiration for all my technical work. I love immersive tech because one builds experiences, not screens. MR holds the same potential to affect deep spiritual change and transformation in users and that interests me immensely.

What is the earliest video game you remember playing?

LOOM! I remember playing it on the first computer my father bought for our family, when I was 6 or 7 years old. I remember spending hours and hours sitting in front of the computer playing, captivated by the beautiful game art. LucasFilm games are the best, but in particular Loom really did it for me. I loved (and still love) that the primary way Bobbin Threadbare (main character) interacted with his world was through music and sound. Such an original and creative idea!

Plus, you could cast spells to literally rip apart the fabric of existence, calling forth the lord of the dead, ripping open cemeteries to speak to the souls of the deceased. You could exist beyond space and time and your character could visit this beautiful lake floating in the void, populated by swans who spoke to you in parables of truth. As a goth kid and a lover of poetry, this was beyond transformative for me. I wanted to live in Loom! Additionally, the game came with this amazing backstory about a world full of guilds and weavers of destiny. I used to listen to the backstory tape, complete with a dramatic reenactment, and pretend I was Bobbin Threadbare. Loom will forever be my favorite game of all time.

Myst is a very close second!

Who is the person who has most influenced the way you think?

This is a difficult one – there have been so many amazing mentors in my life and each one of them has taught me something important, about myself, about my experience of the world.

As mentioned, Jodorowsky has been a major influence on me and all that I create. I’ve followed him around the world and I’ve actually met him in real life. I was fortunate enough to have him read my tarot in Paris and that reading truly changed my life. I won’t go into details because it was a deeply personal reading, but it transformed me without doubt. I also was lucky enough to meet him again at the Egyptian Theater in Los Angeles and at this event he dropped many nuggets of wisdom as well.

I’ve also learned a lot from the coterie or filmmaker friends that I’ve developed here in Los Angeles. The one in particular who introduce me to Jodorowsky has taught me a lot about the creative journey. He’s taught me how to dive into my creative subconscious to identify those valuable universal, broadly resonate true ideas. I’ve always been fascinated with the ability to broadly affect so many different types of people with one single idea and I wanted to translate that to my products. When you talk to someone who wrote or directed a hugely successful film, you find they have this ability to take a concept and distill it down into its most basic form. However, instead of that process being reductive or simplistic, you find that this distillation strengthens the idea and makes it more crystalline and clear and most importantly, universally accessible. The ability to take complex, nuanced, ideas and make them resonate with the broadest audience possible is one that I value highly. I’m very glad to have had a group of people who’ve helped teach me this skill. Regardless of the difference in our industries.

When was the last time you changed your mind about something?

Whew boy, I change my mind all the time, constantly, on a second to second basis! I’m always ingesting data about my world, through experiences, books, travel, websites, music, films, poems, and products. Even subconsciously, my mind is always picking up on new data about my world, which then changes my understanding of the universe. Plus, I believe everything constantly changes, so I have to keep pace with this change and adjust my thoughts and theories to mesh with the latest information.

A system that runs off absolutes and stasis is brittle and bound for failure. Only by being nimble and changeable can any system truly be strong and resilient. As such, I agree very much with Nassim Nicholas Taleb and his concept of anti-fragility. Anti-fragility involves growth through stress and I’d like to think all of my internal world models fall into this category by being responsive in real time to new data that stresses their limits, structures, and boundaries.

What’s a skill people assume you have but that you are terrible at?

Everyone assumes I’m skilled at math because my company works with data. But I’m actually numerically dyslexic (yes, it’s a real thing) and numbers have always been a real struggle for me. That’s one of the many inspirations for BadVR – my desire to work with data but my lack of technical skill with which to do so. I am in many ways the non-technical person for whom my product is built; I am my user. This gives me the power and the passion to build and also gives me the empathy needed to deliver an effective product that makes data accessible to everyone.

Of course, being acutely aware of this shortcoming I’ve assembled a team of very highly talented mathematical geniuses that augment my own weaknesses. So, to allay any question about my company’s ability to deliver a highly technical product, I want to underscore the idea that my company is not solely comprised of me. The heart and soul of BadVR is our team, and they are deeply capable in all the ways that I am not. That variety of skills and talent is what makes us powerful. We all balance each other’s weaknesses and strengths and, in doing so, create something better than any of us could ever achieve independently.

What inspires you to learn?

I don’t need inspiration for this! I’m endlessly curious about everything, all the time. I never learned to stopped asking “why?” Learning is my default state of being. Anytime I see anything, or experience anything, it inspires me to ask more questions, to dig deeper, to understand further. My google search history is full of things like “how did dinosaurs procreate? What is dirt? Why is dark meat dark?” I just wonder and google and learn all the time. Every experience is an impetus for learning; a reason to dive into the whys, hows, and whats of yet another line of inquiry.

What do you need to believe in order to get through the day?

I have to believe that life doesn’t end with death. That I will again see the people I love who I’ve lost. If there isn’t an afterlife or there isn’t an alternate timeline we’re we meet again, I can’t continue. I’ve lost too many loved ones to be able to function without the belief that I will see them again. It goes without saying then that I believe in reincarnation, in the broadest sense. I strongly believe that the people we love never leave us and that in some way we end up back together. It’s not an evidence-based belief – besides anecdotal evidence anyways – but I must believe it. I do believe it. I will always believe it. Other, the loneliness is crushing, overwhelming; the feeling akin to being forever a planetary stranger at the very end of the world.

What’s a view that you hold but can’t defend?

I have plenty of beliefs that don’t have scientific, evidence-based support. I can always defend every belief I have if you allow anecdotal evidence or emotional appeals. Some examples include my belief in the tarot, in astrology, in dream work, psychic powers, aliens, the collective subconscious, Bigfoot, the Missouri Skunk Ape, and ghosts. I’d be more than happy to argue their existence on an emotional and anecdotal level with anyone. But science of course doesn’t support or embrace such parapsychology and cryptozoology. This doesn’t stop me from believing, though. Many of the most important questions in life cannot be answered by science. I think the scientific method is important for lesser questions but for the big questions of life like “Why are we here? What is our purpose? What is the meaning of life?” — science fails. I’m more interested in the answers offered by faith and spirituality than I am in the answers offered by science, for these sorts of questions. In the face of the eternal, science can seem so small and pedantic. But of course, for the mundane it is very important.

What will the future killer Mixed Reality app do?

Visualize data and allow for immersive analysis! Data is the killer app for mixed reality. I firmly believe that, and I fully believe my company, BadVR, will be the industry standard tool for working with data immersively. I may be biased as BadVR is my company, but hey that’s what I believe! Our unique approach, mixing art with logic, the abstract with the concrete, is exactly the way this product needs to be approached. In the future, everyone will be able to easily see and interact with incredibly large, abstract and geospatial datasets with ease. We will think of data as an oracle; a source of truth. It’s important that everyone be able to access such a powerful product, which is a major focus of BadVR – universal accessibility.

What book have you recommended the most?

“The Panic Fables” by Alejandro Jodorowsky. A book of spiritual comics that delivers small truths via 1-page comics. It’s an easy entry point into the Jodo-sphere!

“Narcopolis” by Jeet Thayil. One of my all-time favorite passages can be found in this novel. It’s about a large cast of characters who frequent an opium den in Bombay (before it became Mumbai). Thayil is one of the few writers who can write prose that reads like poetry. I am a forever a huge fan!

“The Hour of the Star” by Clarice Lispector. She deconstructs language and storytelling to deliver a narrative about a poor Brazilian girl and her search for meaning and transcendence in a world that doesn’t want or even see her. It is a visceral gut-punch of truth. Anything by Lispector is wonderful, but this story in particular is my favorite.

I will leave you with a quote from Lispector:

“I do not know much. But there are certain advantages in not knowing. Like virgin territory, the mind is free of preconceptions. Everything I do not know forms the greater part of me. And with this I understand everything. The things I do not know constitute my truth.”

EUE-Connect–An Ideal Dev Conference in Utrecht

July 7, 2019July 7, 2019 James Ashley2 Comments

I have a new favorite conference, EUE-Connect in Utrecht, Holland. EUE-Connect is an invitation only annual event held for two days each year. It brings together software developers, 3D modelers, FX specialists and experience agency people to share knowledge about the state of the art where all these professions meet. I got invited to add mixed reality to the mix this year and hopefully grow that aspect of the conference out in the future.

EUE-Connect is the brain child of Joep van der Steen, who is also the beating heart and conscience of the conference. He has managed to create an ongoing and organic event that remains friendly without ever being bureaucratic or fake – really the ultimate goal of any conference, though one that is difficult to maintain.

Part of the secret to this is the FrienDA policy that Joep maintains. What this means, first of all, is that I can’t show you pictures or slides taken inside the Florin pub, where the event is held – so I’ll be showing you pictures of some tasty meals I had in London the following week. The other thing it means is I can’t talk specifically about the content of the talks I heard. This is all so that the speakers, some of whom are fairly well placed in some major corporations in the software, gaming and 3D modeling industries, feel free to talk about what they are most passionate about.

The reason this is a FrienDA rather than an NDA is to make clear why we follow these loose guidelines. It is to be friendly and respectful of others who are going out their way to share what they know, to be a bit vulnerable by giving their opinions, and to allow people the freedom to be wrong. This is a civilized way to maintain confidences.

Coming from a Microsoft conference world, this seems like a much better way to treat one another and a much more successful way to keep faith with one another. In the Microsoft world, NDAs tend to be used not to maintain technical or product secrets anymore, but to broadly maintain corporate and personal reputations. It is at a state where no actually useful information is actually disseminated by Microsoft to their partners anymore, yet every trivial email is surrounded in secrecy for perpetuity. Which is a bit silly.

The other remarkable thing I ran into at the conference, as a typical Microsoft developer, was that this is a community built around non-Microsoft tools like Unreal, 3DS Max and to some extent Unity. It had never occurred to me before that there are other tools out there that people build their careers and reputations around in much the same way developers become knowledgeable and at the same time dependent upon certain Microsoft technologies.

In fostering this wonderful conference, Joep used some important tools that I think others might learn from. First, when some large vendors who sponsored the event in the past began to dominate the sessions, he simply cut back their participation. It is natural to become beholden to someone who gives your event lots of money, but at the same time the quality and sincerity of the event can suffer from it. Joep saw this happen in the past and simply arranged to operate on a different budget. Second, when he felt the conference was getting too large, he cut back attendance. This is rather the opposite of the ethos of most conference who see their goal as one of scaling up in size rather than scaling up in quality. Bucking that trend is quite something.

So over the next year, if you should be fortunate enough to receive an invitation to the EUE-Conference out of recognition for your excellent work in the FX, gaming, or software industries – or simply through good luck as I did – do not hesitate to accept. It will be a conference going experience like none other.

Extending Chatbots with Azure Cognitive Services

June 3, 2019June 11, 2019 James Ashley1 Comment

Microsoft Bot Framework is an open source SDK and set of tools for developing chatbots. One of the advantages of building chatbots with the Bot Framework is that you can easily integrate your bot service with the powerful AI algorithms available through Azure Cognitive Services. This is a quick and easy way to give your chatbot super powers when you need them.

Microsoft Cognitive Services is an ever-growing collection of algorithms developed by experts in the fields of computer vision, speech, natural-language processing, decision assistance, and web search. The services simplify a variety of common AI-based tasks, which are then easily consumable through web APIs. The APIs are also constantly being improved and some are even able to teach themselves to be smarter based on the information you feed them.

Here is a quick highlight reel of some of the current Cognitive Services available to chatbot creators:

Language

People have a natural ability to say the same thing in many ways. Intelligent bots need to be just as flexible in understanding what human beings want. The Cognitive Service Language APIs provide language models to determine intent, so your bots can respond with the appropriate action.

The Language Understanding Service (LUIS) easily integrates with Azure Bot Service to provide natural language capabilities for your chatbot. Using LUIS, you can classify a speaker’s intents and perform entity extraction. For instance, if someone tells your bot that they want to buy tickets to Amsterdam, LUIS can help identify that the speaker intends to book a flight and that Amsterdam is a location entity for this utterance.

While LUIS offers prebuilt language models to help with natural language understanding, you can also customize these models for particular language domains that are pertinent to your needs. LUIS also supports active learning, allowing your models to get progressively better as more people communicate with it.

Decision assist services

Cognitive Services has knowledge APIs that extend your bot’s ability to make judgments. Where the language understanding service helps your chatbot determine a speaker’s intention, the decision services help your chatbot figure out the best way to respond. Personalizer, currently in preview, uses machine learning to provide the best results for your users. For instance Personalizer can make recommendations or rank a chatbot’s optional responses to select the best one. Additionally, the Content Moderator service helps identify offensive language, images, and video, filtering profanity and adult content.

Speech recognition and conversion

The Speech APIs in Cognitive Services can give your bot advanced speech skills that leverage industry-leading algorithms for speech-to-text and text-to-speech conversion, as well as Speaker Recognition, a service that lets people use their voice for verification. The Speech APIs use built-in language models that cover a wide range of scenarios with high accuracy.

For applications that require further customization, you can use the Custom Recognition Intelligent Service (CRIS). This allows you to calibrate the language and acoustic models of the speech recognizer by tailoring it to the vocabulary of the application and to the speaking style of your bot’s users. This service allows your chatbot to overcome common challenges to communication such as dialects, slang and even background noise. If you’ve ever wondered how to create a bot that understands the latest lingo, CRIS is the bot enhancement you’ve been looking for.

Web search

The Bing Search APIs add intelligent web search capabilities to your chatbots, effectively putting the internet’s vast knowledge at your bot’s fingertips. Your bot can access billions of:

· webpages

· images

· videos

· news

· local businesses

Image and video understanding

The Vision APIs bring advanced computer vision algorithms for both images and video to your bots. For example, you can use them to recognize objects, people’s faces, age, gender, or even feelings.

The Vision APIs support a variety of image-understanding features. They can categorize the content of images, determining if the setting is at the beach or at a wedding. They can perform optical character recognition on your photo, picking out road signs and other text. The Vision APIs also support several image and video-processing capabilities, such as intelligently generating image or video thumbnails, or stabilizing the output of a video for you.

Summary

While chatbots are already an amazing way to help people interact with complex data in a human-centric way, extending them with web-based AI is a clear opportunity to make them even better assistants for people. Easy to use AI algorithms like the ones in Microsoft Cognitive Services remove language friction and give your chatbots super powers.