Tag Archives: AI

LFP176 – Sci-Fi Creeps Ever Nearer – Automated Detection of Emotion In Voice Audio w/Rana Gujral Behavioral Signals

Behavioral Signals aims to “turn your conversational data into actionable insights for your business” via the automated cross-cultural detection of emotions in the audio of conversations. This is a super-new front in machine language recognition and usage one which has to date been rather simplistically approached but one which as we all know every day is essential to real human interaction – witness all the confusion that for example emails can cause which would not occur if we saw people’s body language and heard the tone of what they were saying as well as simply the content in Times New Roman. Indeed it is this deficiency of the latter which led to the invention of emoticons to crudely add back some disambiguation.

Rana Gujral, CEO of Behavioral Signals, is a super-experienced veteran entrepreneur and CEO in Silicon Valley and in this episode he draws the curtain back on if not the final frontier then certainly a might important new one of man-machine interfacing.

Alexa and Siri can do an amazing job today compared to their predecessors a decade or two back, yet neither of them have any sense that they are dealing with a human being – they simply detect “words in Times New Roman” as it were and have no concept that the person asking is a human being for whom words are at times a small part of the bandwidth.

In this show Rana covers one Case Study of a usage of this technology in FS which ably demonstrated that when one is dealing with real technological innovation the use case innovation is itself also truly radical and requires large amounts of initiative and imagination to think beyond the obvious – after all if people already detect emotion how could a computer supplement that?

Topics discussed include: Continue reading

LFP134 – Bumper Episode! Hot Topics in AI/ML – Prediction, Explainability, Alt Data, Self-Learning & Much More w/Tristan Fletcher CEO ChAI

Tristan was last on the show some three years ago in LFP063 which has been solidly in the Top5 most downloaded episodes of all time even since. Today he joins us to update us on what is hot in AI/ML – and there’s a lot 😉 – along with predicting commodity prices.

Tristan is now CEO of ChAi who are creating insurance products for the commodity markets and at the forefront of some of the most interesting developments in AI/ML today.

In this episode we cover some of the key important developments and in particular dive into some amazing examples of how Alt Data is crucial to the developments. The focus in AI/ML is moving away from algorithms and onto data.

Topics discussed include: Continue reading

LFP063 – Special Episode! A Deep-Dive into AI, Machine Learning, Big Data & FS w/Dr Tristan Fletcher Research Director Thought Machine

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I am delighted to be joined today by Dr Tristan Fletcher Research Director at Thought Machine to talk about Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Financial Services. His Linkedin strapline is “I apply state of the art prediction methods from the Machine Learning (Artificial Intelligence) academic community to real world problems”

Tristan FletcherThis is a mega hot topic right now and also one all too often hyped beyond all belief and frankly credibility.

For some time I have been on the lookout for someone with real depth of knowledge in this area. When attending and also moderating a recent InSync event at the Tate Modern  I was impressed by Tristan’s deep understanding and also groundedness – the basic angle (or to be more precise my takeaways on his views ) being “all this stuff has been known to academics for a long time” and “many aspects of it are exaggerated and in many ways it has become more of a marketing tool”.

So the point of this show is to put it all back in proportion.

What is AI? I mean what is it really when one isn’t reading it in some journalistically overblown tech piece. What is machine learning? Are neural networks like the brain? How big is big data and does it contain all the answers? All these and more we will cover and I hope and am sure that you will go away far better briefed than before.

Tristan spans academia , FS and entrepreurialism. Academically he has studied at, or had fellowships with, Cambridge, Imperial, UCL and Sussex. FS-wise he has worked at senior levels in prestigious organisations in asset management and trading. Entrepreneurially and have worked with / founded start-ups in these domains.

Oh yes and apart from all this he has also applied machine learning to medicine (Imperial College London), supply chain management (Unilever) and even fine wine pricing.
So it’s another show where my teams of researchers have found me a guestwho is a collousus bestriding his world. And as always its another great show for my analyst who will have to hear me moaining more about my own punyness in the face of greatness.

Plenty discussed including: Continue reading