Robin Hill

Jan 7, 2025 | cacm.acm.org | Doug Meil |Ted Selker |Mark Halper |Robin Hill

Public cloud computing platforms have made delivering data and analytics easier than ever. They are certainly easier and more powerful compared to when such solutions were deployed on-premise not long ago, but not always necessarily easy. There are still many decisions to be made. It is also worth reflecting on how these choices have evolved in the past 10-15 years, as well as the principles that haven’t changed.

Jan 6, 2025 | cacm.acm.org | Thomas Haigh |Ted Selker |Mark Halper |Robin Hill

In the first four parts of this Communications Historical Reflections column series, I have followed the artificial intelligence (AI) brand from its debut in the 1950s through to the reorientation of the field around probabilistic approaches and big data during the AI winter that ran through the 1990s and early 2000s. Aside from the brief flourishing of an expert system industry in the 1980s, the main theme of that long history was disappointment.

Jan 6, 2025 | cacm.acm.org | Ted Selker |Mark Halper |Robin Hill

Our recent posts have considered different ways of using Generative AI to help you think. We started with a bunch of faces, a bunch of disciplines, a bunch of roles. These were surprising uses of Generative AI in that they aren’t what people have been thinking of using it for. Let’s turn to the wonderous thing we do to get started on any project. Making lists is a hard skill to learn, but it serves us well in so many situations.

Oct 21, 2024 | cacm.acm.org | Vasant Dhar |R. Colin Johnson |Marc Rotenberg |Robin Hill

Artificial intelligence (AI) captured the world’s attention in 2023 with the emergence of pre-trained models such as GPT, on which the conversational AI system ChatGPT is based. For the first time, we can converse with an entity, however imperfectly, about anything, as we do with other humans. This new capability provided by pre-trained models has created a paradigm shift in AI, transforming it from an application to a general-purpose technology that is configurable to specific uses.

Oct 18, 2024 | cacm.acm.org | R. Colin Johnson |Marc Rotenberg |Robin Hill |Sam Greengard

Deep fake videos have become so convincing that we now depend on human fact checkers to flag them for us (for instance, this Kari Lake deep fake). Contemporary researchers have also recently uncovered the fact that voice alone can be subtly manipulated to persuade people to adopt favored opinions using vocal cues including pitch shifting, tempo adjustments, stereotypical phonation, speech-pattern alterations, and vowel-enunciation alterations.