Four short links: 16 December 2016
Designing Bots, Security Priorities, Generating Chorales, and Why Indie.vc
- Designing Bots — Adopting a solid design process is tricky and uncomfortable for a lot of tech companies, especially if they’re racing each other to be “first,” but it’s especially important for AI. A lot of the things we are pioneering spend most of their time in the R&D phase and then hit users too fast. Designers are not just comfortable with process, but they thrive and offer their best value when they can do things like frame problems for a team, prototype solutions with them, and advocate for users.
- Bruce Schneier’s Priorities for the Next Four Years — I am choosing to proceed as if this were cowpox, not smallpox: fighting the more benign disease today will be much easier than subjecting ourselves to its more virulent form in the future. (via BoingBoing)
- DeepBach: a Steerable Model for Bach chorales generation — Users can constrain the generation by imposing some notes, rhythms, or cadences in the generated score. This allows users to reharmonize user-defined melodies. DeepBach’s generation is fast, making it usable for interactive music composition applications.
- indie.vc and Focus (Marc Hedlund) — [S]eeing two black women walk into the quarterly meeting, both CEOs from two portfolio companies out of the eight companies attending, was a great signal that the normal Valley biases did not hold as strongly here.
