Recent content on Jordan Burgess
This is my place to share with you any of my hacks, ideas, essays or product thoughts that won’t fit into 240 chars. I’m a machine learning researcher at Amazon. I work on NLP and deep learning, particularly to make Alexa better understand the meaning of what you say to it. All my views here are mine and mine alone, of course. I’m also the founder of Peak AI. A physical challenge…
I’ve become interested in how we might be able to bridge the gap between deep learning and the learning that humans are capable of. Deep learning continues to amaze me, but to train a classifier you typically need hundreds of examples — even if you use a pretrained network. I’ve been exploring how we could use the same architectures, but get the models to perform well with almost no…
I’ve written a report on the Rustat conference on bitcoin and blockchain technologies I attended in September. It features keynores and discussions from Balaji Srinivasan, David Yermack, the Bank of England among others. Figure drawn for the document, depicting how viable ‘killer apps’ for cryptocurrencies depend on the market penetration.
How different will the world be in 30 years? If we continue on our trajectory from the past 30, we may be only decades away from creating artificial intelligence vastly more powerful than humankind. Creating AI would be the most important event of human history. Everything that civilisation has created, good and bad, has been the result of our intelligence. As technology acquires a mind of its…
Twitter’s best feature is something they try to make as obscure as possible: lists. You can group together certain users and see a timeline of just their tweets and no ads . These lists can even be private, so you don’t need to signal with who you follow. Problem is, it’s hidden behind at least five clicks and it’s painful to use. So instead I made a web app to make…
A beam supported on the left hand edge, with downward force applied to the bottom right. The optimisation algorithm distributes the material in the way to minimise the deflection. You are watching an optimisation algorithm come up with the stiffest design completely automatically. The outcome is the stiffest shape possible for a given amount of material. Amazingly, it’s a nuanced truss that…
The raspberry pi is fully functional credit card-sized computer that is cheap enough ($25) that it can be used just for a single purpose. With this hack the computer imitates an airplay speaker, making it possible to send songs over to an old stereo wirelessly from your phone. The Raspberry Pi generated massive hype in nerdy circles this summer when it came out and we’re beginning now to see some…
A chrome extension to replace low resolution twitter avatars with a sharper retina-ready equivalent. Just to scratch my own minuscule itch that Twitter still looks so crap on retina displays I’ve created my very first chrome extension . It’s super simple right now – it just replaces the 48px avatars with their 73px equivalent. There are probably a few other higher resolution gains up…