Letters
Staying Connected Amid the Pandemic
I recently received an email from one of you who lives far from the major AI hubs, saying, “I feel like I’m all alone.” I want to tell you all...
Letters
Letters
Covid-19 Transforms Industries
Inflection points in society create opportunities. The rise of online video was an inflection point that enabled scalable online education.
Letters
From Proof of Concept to Production
There has been a lot of excitement about the idea of using deep learning to diagnose diabetic retinopathy: That is by taking a photo of the retina and using AI to detect signs of disease.
Letters
Tips for Building Practical Machine learning systems
In an earlier letter, I wrote about the challenge of robustness: A learning algorithm that performs well on test data often doesn’t work well in a practical production environment because the real world turns out to be different than the test set.
Letters
Covid-19 and the Shift to Online Learning
I spoke on Tuesday at Coursera’s annual conference. It was the company’s most well-attended conference yet, and the first to be held online. Higher education is in for turbulent times.
Letters
Medical Applications of AI
This week’s issue of The Batch is all about medical applications of AI. Amid the current pandemic, the marriage of AI and medicine is more urgent than ever. My father is a practicing doctor, and I grew up seeing firsthand how the right...
Letters
Deep Learning Against Covid
Last week, I asked readers to tell me what they’re doing to address the Covid-19 pandemic. Many of you wrote to say you’re taking actions such as shopping for neighbors, making masks, and creating posters that promote Covid-safe practices...
Letters
Covid-19: How to Flatten the Curve
In the earlier weeks of Covid-19, I didn’t want to contribute noise, so that experts in infectious disease could be heard. But now the situation has worsened. I spoke yesterday with Eric Topol, a cardiologist at Scripps Institute and author of Deep...
Letters
Covid and the Remote Work Experiment
When I was younger, I was not a fan of working from home. Too many distractions! So I worked a lot in coffee shops. They turned out to be convenient places to talk to strangers and ask for feedback about products I was working on...
Letters
The Tech Community Fights Covid
The unfolding Covid-19 crisis calls for individuals and organizations to step up and contribute to the common good. I believe that the tech community has an important role to play in slowing the progress of the virus and shortening the time...
Letters
Conferences in the Time of Covid
The Covid-19 pandemic is a tragedy that demands urgent and humane response. It’s also pushing us toward new ways of gathering and sharing information — and that may be a faint silver lining that might grow brighter over time.
Letters
How Price Optimization Leads to Better Products and Worse Transparency
In addition to creating tremendous value, AI is creating tremendous concentrations of power. Our community is wrestling with what constitutes fair use of that power.