GuideGeek is an AI-powered travel assistant that was launched by travel publisher Matador Network in April 2023 and is accessed by users through Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger to plan itineraries or provide travel tips and recommendations. It uses generative artificial intelligence technology from OpenAI. Matador Network is a San Francisco-based digital media company and online travel publication with millions of monthly visitors and social media followers. == Features == Users message GuideGeek questions about travel and receive customized answers and itineraries that are pulled from ChatGPT in addition to over 1,000 additional travel-specific integrations such as live flight, hotel and vacation rental data. Travelers can specify their budget and needs to generate custom itineraries. GuideGeek is not an app and does not require the user to download anything, instead relying on messaging apps such as Instagram to connect users with the AI. GuideGeek is free to use, doesn't include ads, and doesn't sell user data. Matador Network has a team of staff members monitoring conversations to correct them if the AI makes a false statement; for example, one user incorrectly inputted “Crete Freeze” instead of “Crete, Greece”, and the AI made up a fictional soft serve company. Using a technique known as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), the accuracy of GuideGeek increased to 98%, according to Matador Network CEO, Ross Borden. == Destination partnerships == Matador Network is monetizing GuideGeek via white-label partnerships with tourism bureaus and destination marketing organizations (DMOs). As of March 2024, it had over a dozen such clients. Estes Park, Colorado, was one of the first DMOs to partner with Matador for a custom version of GuideGeek called “Rocky Mountain Roamer.” For Discover Greece, Matador created Pythia, a custom AI named after the high priestess of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. As Borden explained to Travel + Leisure, “Visitors to the Discover Greece website will find Pythia in the bottom right corner, and they can converse with the AI like a friend who knows everything about Greece.” Other DMOs who have partnerships with GuideGeek include the Aruba Tourism Authority, Visit Reno Tahoe, Illinois Office of Tourism, and Tourism Richmond. == Awards == In recognition of GuideGeek, Fast Company named Matador Network to its 2024 list of Most Innovative Companies. Following growth driven by the launch of GuideGeek, Matador Network was ranked on the 2024 Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies in America. The 2024 Skift IDEA Awards recognized Matador Network as a finalist in the category of Best Use of AI for GuideGeek's customized AI for the travel industry. == Michael Motamedi experiment == Travel influencer and chef Michael Motamedi traveled the world with his wife Vanessa Salas and their 2-year-old daughter on a six-month trip (which was later extended to a full year) led by GuideGeek. The family started off in Morocco before heading to Spain and continuing east. The experiment became the basis of a web series called “No Fixed Address.” Motamedi used GuideGeek's AI to select countries the family visited, where they ate, and what sites they saw. Motamedi and Salas first tested out the technology in April 2023 while using the chatbot to plan a date night in Mexico City. GuideGeek provided speakeasy and drink recommendations as well as local history facts.
Comparison of machine learning software
The following tables are a comparison of machine learning software such as software frameworks, libraries, and computer programs used for machine learning. == Machine learning software == == Other comparisons == == Machine learning helper libraries and platforms == Apache OpenNLP — natural language processing toolkit CUDA — GPU computing platform used to accelerate machine learning and deep learning workloads Horovod — distributed training framework for deep learning Hugging Face Transformers — library of pretrained transformer models built on other machine learning frameworks Kubeflow — machine learning platform for Kubernetes Mallet — toolkit for natural language processing and text analysis NumPy — numerical computing library used in machine learning OpenCV — computer vision library with machine learning functions ONNX — open format for representing machine learning models pandas — data analysis and data preparation library used in machine learning PlaidML — tensor compiler and backend for machine learning frameworks Polars — Dataframe library used for machine learning data preparation and analysis PyArrow — columnar data library used in machine learning data processing ROOT (TMVA) — data analysis framework with machine learning tools SciPy — scientific computing and optimization library used in machine learning == Online development environments for machine learning == Google Colab — hosted Jupyter Notebook environment commonly used for machine learning and deep learning JupyterLab — notebook-based development environment for machine learning and data science Jupyter Notebook — interactive notebook environment used for machine learning and data science Kaggle — online data science and machine learning platform
Vlado Keselj
Vlado Keselj (Vlado Kešelj) is a Serbian-Canadian computer scientist known for his research in natural language processing and authorship attribution. He is a professor at Dalhousie University. == Education == As a high school student in Yugoslavia, Keselj competed in the 1987 International Mathematical Olympiad, earning a bronze medal. He earned his Ph.D. in 2002 at the University of Waterloo, with the dissertation Modular Stochastic HPSGs for Question Answering supervised by Nick Cercone. == Awards == Vlado Keselj is a recipient of the 2019 CAIAC Distinguished Service Award, awarded by the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association (CAIAC). == Selected publications == Kešelj, V., Peng, F., Cercone, N., & Thomas, C. (2003, August). N-gram-based author profiles for authorship attribution. In Proceedings of the Conference of the Pacific Association for Computational Linguistics, PACLING 2003 (Vol. 3, pp. 255–264).
Chelsea Finn
Chelsea Finn (born October 8, 1992) is an American computer scientist and assistant professor at Stanford University. Her research investigates intelligence through the interactions of robots, with the hope to create robotic systems that can learn how to learn. She previously worked for Google and currently is a co-founder of the startup Physical Intelligence. == Early life and education == Finn was an undergraduate student in electrical engineering and computer science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She then moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned her Ph.D. in 2018 under Pieter Abbeel and Sergey Levine. Her work in the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Lab (BAIR) focused on gradient based algorithms . Such algorithms allow machines to 'learn to learn', more akin to human learning than traditional machine learning systems. These “meta-learning” techniques train machines to quickly adapt, such that when they encounter new scenarios they can learn quickly. As a doctoral student she worked as an intern at Google Brain, where she worked on robot learning algorithms from deep predictive models. She delivered a massive open online course on deep reinforcement learning. She was the first woman to win the C.V. & Daulat Ramamoorthy Distinguished Research Award. == Research and career == Finn investigates the capabilities of robots to develop intelligence through learning and interaction. She has made use of deep learning algorithms to simultaneously learn visual perception and control robotic skills. She developed meta-learning approaches to train neural networks to take in student code and output useful feedback. She showed that the system could quickly adapt without too much input from the instructor. She trialled the programme on Code in Place, a 12,000 student course delivered by Stanford University every year. She found that 97.9% of the time the students agreed with the feedback being given. == Awards and honors == 2016 C.V. & Daulat Ramamoorthy Distinguished Research Award 2017 Electrical engineering and computer science rising star 2018 MIT Technology Review 35 Under 35 2018 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award 2020 Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology AI Researcher of the Year 2020 Intel Rising Star Faculty Award 2021 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award 2022 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Academic Career Award == Select publications == Finn, Chelsea; Abbeel, Pieter; Levine, Sergey (2017-07-17). "Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks". International Conference on Machine Learning. PMLR: 1126–1135. arXiv:1703.03400. Sergey Levine; Chelsea Finn; Trevor Darrell; Pieter Abbeel (2016). "End-to-End Training of Deep Visuomotor Policies". Journal of Machine Learning Research. 17 (39): 1–40. arXiv:1504.00702. ISSN 1533-7928. Wikidata Q90313375. Chelsea Finn; Ian Goodfellow; Sergey Levine (2016). "Unsupervised Learning for Physical Interaction through Video Prediction" (PDF). Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. Wikidata Q46993574.
Linguistics Research Center at UT Austin
The Linguistics Research Center (LRC) at the University of Texas is a center for computational linguistics research & development. It was directed by Prof. Winfred Lehmann until his death in 2007, and subsequently by Dr. Jonathan Slocum. Since its founding, virtually all projects at the LRC have involved processing natural language texts with the aid of computers. The principal activities of the Center at present focus on Indo-European languages and comprise historical study, lexicography, and web-based teaching; staff members engage in several independent but often complementary projects in these fields using a variety of software, almost all of it developed in-house. == History == The LRC was founded by Winfred Lehmann in 1961. In the early days, research efforts at the LRC concentrated on machine translation (MT) -- the translation of texts from one human language to another with the aid of computers, very developed nowadays in the field of language industry—funded by the USAF and other sponsors. The LRC concentrated on German English translation, though a copy of the Russian Master Dictionary was deposited at the LRC after the ALPAC report. After a general hiatus ca. 1975-78, new funding led to the development by Jonathan Slocum and others of a new system with the same name (the METAL MT system), but with new sets of tools for linguists and vastly greater success, resulting in the delivery a production prototype then later a full-fledged commercial MT system. MT R&D continued at the LRC, with funding by various sponsors, until well into the 1990s. From its early years to the present, the LRC has mounted a number of smaller projects resulting in the publication of significant works relating to Indo-European languages and/or their common ancestor, Proto-Indo-European. The hallmark of this work has been the use of computers to transcribe texts and prepare them for publication. A prominent example of the LRC using computers to prepare texts for print publication is the book by Winfred P. Lehmann, A Gothic Etymological Dictionary (Leiden: Brill, 1986). The final print-ready version was produced with the aid of a laser printer (exotic new technology, in those days) using, for the various languages included in the entries, approximately 500 special characters—many of them designed at the Center. This was the first major etymological dictionary for Indo-European languages to be produced with the aid of computers. Current LRC projects have concentrated on transcribing early Indo-European texts, developing language lessons based on them, and publishing on the web these and other materials related to the study of Indo-European languages, of their common ancestor Proto-Indo-European, and of historical linguistics more generally. == Alumni == Winfred Lehmann Rolf A. Stachowitz Jonathan Slocum Winfield S. Bennett John White
Computer audition
Computer audition (CA) or machine listening is the general field of study of algorithms and systems for audio interpretation by machines. Since the notion of what it means for a machine to "hear" is very broad and somewhat vague, computer audition attempts to bring together several disciplines that originally dealt with specific problems or had a concrete application in mind. The engineer Paris Smaragdis, interviewed in Technology Review, talks about these systems — "software that uses sound to locate people moving through rooms, monitor machinery for impending breakdowns, or activate traffic cameras to record accidents." Inspired by models of human audition, CA deals with questions of representation, transduction, grouping, use of musical knowledge and general sound semantics for the purpose of performing intelligent operations on audio and music signals by the computer. Technically this requires a combination of methods from the fields of signal processing, auditory modelling, music perception and cognition, pattern recognition, and machine learning, as well as more traditional methods of artificial intelligence for musical knowledge representation. == Applications == Like computer vision versus image processing, computer audition versus audio engineering deals with understanding of audio rather than processing. It also differs from problems of speech understanding by machine since it deals with general audio signals, such as natural sounds and musical recordings. Applications of computer audition are widely varying, and include search for sounds, genre recognition, acoustic monitoring, music transcription, score following, audio texture, music improvisation, emotion in audio and so on. == Related disciplines == Computer Audition overlaps with the following disciplines: Music information retrieval: methods for search and analysis of similarity between music signals. Auditory scene analysis: understanding and description of audio sources and events. Computational musicology and mathematical music theory: use of algorithms that employ musical knowledge for analysis of music data. Computer music: use of computers in creative musical applications. Machine musicianship: audition driven interactive music systems. == Areas of study == Since audio signals are interpreted by the human ear–brain system, that complex perceptual mechanism should be simulated somehow in software for "machine listening". In other words, to perform on par with humans, the computer should hear and understand audio content much as humans do. Analyzing audio accurately involves several fields: electrical engineering (spectrum analysis, filtering, and audio transforms); artificial intelligence (machine learning and sound classification); psychoacoustics (sound perception); cognitive sciences (neuroscience and artificial intelligence); acoustics (physics of sound production); and music (harmony, rhythm, and timbre). Furthermore, audio transformations such as pitch shifting, time stretching, and sound object filtering, should be perceptually and musically meaningful. For best results, these transformations require perceptual understanding of spectral models, high-level feature extraction, and sound analysis/synthesis. Finally, structuring and coding the content of an audio file (sound and metadata) could benefit from efficient compression schemes, which discard inaudible information in the sound. Computational models of music and sound perception and cognition can lead to a more meaningful representation, a more intuitive digital manipulation and generation of sound and music in musical human-machine interfaces. The study of CA could be roughly divided into the following sub-problems: Representation: signal and symbolic. This aspect deals with time-frequency representations, both in terms of notes and spectral models, including pattern playback and audio texture. Feature extraction: sound descriptors, segmentation, onset, pitch and envelope detection, chroma, and auditory representations. Musical knowledge structures: analysis of tonality, rhythm, and harmonies. Sound similarity: methods for comparison between sounds, sound identification, novelty detection, segmentation, and clustering. Sequence modeling: matching and alignment between signals and note sequences. Source separation: methods of grouping of simultaneous sounds, such as multiple pitch detection and time-frequency clustering methods. Auditory cognition: modeling of emotions, anticipation and familiarity, auditory surprise, and analysis of musical structure. Multi-modal analysis: finding correspondences between textual, visual, and audio signals. === Representation issues === Computer audition deals with audio signals that can be represented in a variety of fashions, from direct encoding of digital audio in two or more channels to symbolically represented synthesis instructions. Audio signals are usually represented in terms of analogue or digital recordings. Digital recordings are samples of acoustic waveform or parameters of audio compression algorithms. One of the unique properties of musical signals is that they often combine different types of representations, such as graphical scores and sequences of performance actions that are encoded as MIDI files. Since audio signals usually comprise multiple sound sources, then unlike speech signals that can be efficiently described in terms of specific models (such as source-filter model), it is hard to devise a parametric representation for general audio. Parametric audio representations usually use filter banks or sinusoidal models to capture multiple sound parameters, sometimes increasing the representation size in order to capture internal structure in the signal. Additional types of data that are relevant for computer audition are textual descriptions of audio contents, such as annotations, reviews, and visual information in the case of audio-visual recordings. === Features === Description of contents of general audio signals usually requires extraction of features that capture specific aspects of the audio signal. Generally speaking, one could divide the features into signal or mathematical descriptors such as energy, description of spectral shape etc., statistical characterization such as change or novelty detection, special representations that are better adapted to the nature of musical signals or the auditory system, such as logarithmic growth of sensitivity (bandwidth) in frequency or octave invariance (chroma). Since parametric models in audio usually require very many parameters, the features are used to summarize properties of multiple parameters in a more compact or salient representation. === Musical knowledge === Finding specific musical structures is possible by using musical knowledge as well as supervised and unsupervised machine learning methods. Examples of this include detection of tonality according to distribution of frequencies that correspond to patterns of occurrence of notes in musical scales, distribution of note onset times for detection of beat structure, distribution of energies in different frequencies to detect musical chords and so on. === Sound similarity and sequence modeling === Comparison of sounds can be done by comparison of features with or without reference to time. In some cases an overall similarity can be assessed by close values of features between two sounds. In other cases when temporal structure is important, methods of dynamic time warping need to be applied to "correct" for different temporal scales of acoustic events. Finding repetitions and similar sub-sequences of sonic events is important for tasks such as texture synthesis and machine improvisation. === Source separation === Since one of the basic characteristics of general audio is that it comprises multiple simultaneously sounding sources, such as multiple musical instruments, people talking, machine noises or animal vocalization, the ability to identify and separate individual sources is very desirable. Unfortunately, there are no methods that can solve this problem in a robust fashion. Existing methods of source separation rely sometimes on correlation between different audio channels in multi-channel recordings. The ability to separate sources from stereo signals requires different techniques than those usually applied in communications where multiple sensors are available. Other source separation methods rely on training or clustering of features in mono recording, such as tracking harmonically related partials for multiple pitch detection. Some methods, before explicit recognition, rely on revealing structures in data without knowing the structures (like recognizing objects in abstract pictures without attributing them meaningful labels) by finding the least complex data representations, for instance describing audio scenes as generated by a few tone patterns and their trajectories (polyphonic voices) and acoustical contours drawn by a tone (c
Kunihiko Fukushima
Kunihiko Fukushima (Japanese: 福島 邦彦, born 16 March 1936) is a Japanese computer scientist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks and deep learning. He is currently working part-time as a senior research scientist at the Fuzzy Logic Systems Institute in Fukuoka, Japan. == Notable scientific achievements == In 1980, Fukushima published the neocognitron, the original deep convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture. Fukushima proposed several supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms to train the parameters of a deep neocognitron such that it could learn internal representations of incoming data. Today, however, the CNN architecture is usually trained through backpropagation. This approach is now heavily used in computer vision. In 1969 Fukushima introduced the ReLU (Rectifier Linear Unit) activation function in the context of visual feature extraction in hierarchical neural networks, which he called "analog threshold element". (Though the ReLU was first used by Alston Householder in 1941 as a mathematical abstraction of biological neural networks.) As of 2017 it is the most popular activation function for deep neural networks. == Education and career == In 1958, Fukushima received his Bachelor of Engineering in electronics from Kyoto University. He became a senior research scientist at the NHK Science & Technology Research Laboratories. In 1989, he joined the faculty of Osaka University. In 1999, he joined the faculty of the University of Electro-Communications. In 2001, he joined the faculty of Tokyo University of Technology. From 2006 to 2010, he was a visiting professor at Kansai University. Fukushima acted as founding president of the Japanese Neural Network Society (JNNS). He also was a founding member on the board of governors of the International Neural Network Society (INNS), and president of the Asia-Pacific Neural Network Assembly (APNNA). He was one of the board of governors of the International Neural Network Society (INNS) in 1989-1990 and 1993-2005. == Awards == In 2020, Fukushima received the Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science. In 2022, Fukushima became a laureate of the Asian Scientist 100 by the Asian Scientist. He also received the IEICE Achievement Award and Excellent Paper Awards, the IEEE Neural Networks Pioneer Award, the APNNA Outstanding Achievement Award, the JNNS Excellent Paper Award and the INNS Helmholtz Award.