To quickly give someone a look at the state of computer vision, there is a fun demo on the Google Cloud Vision site. You just drag a photo onto it, and you can learn what the AI sees along a few key vectors. After seeing it easily recognize and classify my photos of poodles and cherry trees, I started playing with photos I’ve taken that are actually tricky for humans to parse. Playing that type of game helps define the limits of what’s possible today, and things that happen at the boundaries suggest very interesting possibilities for tomorrow. I found that Cloud Vision today can touch on the subjective experiences of viewing art, and also do a good job sorting out things that are merely odd as opposed to things truly expressing artistic intent.

In this photo I laid a Christmas wreath on top of a pizza box that had an illustration of Sasquatch wearing a Seattle Sonics headband.

Cloud Vision nails the Christmas decoration aspect of the photo, but I was delighted to see that it indicated that there was about a 50% chance that this was some kind of art.

I’ll admit that it’s not very good art, but when I put together my little tableau, I was trying to capture something about the quirkiness of Seattle with an artifact I could use to communicate to people not from here. Personally, I’d set the odds of it being granted the status of “art” at much less than 50% so I felt Cloud Vision’s assessment was generous.

After that discovery through experimentation, I figured I should establish a control before doing more tests. Below is a photo from the Microsoft art collection. It’s a graffiti covered piece of the Berlin Wall on display at the Microsoft Conference Center in Redmond.

It’s been about 40 years since anyone has questioned whether or not graffiti art is worthy of gallery status—a sensibility Cloud Vision is certainly aware of based on how it labeled this piece.

Below is a photo I took just because I was thinking, “I sure have some odd stuff in my yard.” The metal thing is a watering trough for livestock that is destined to be a planter. The black things sticking up out of it are foam gutter inserts that keep leaves from blocking your gutters but let water flow through.

As a thing, it could be a Philistine’s parody of modern art (it bears a slight resemblance to Typewriter Eraser, Scale X by Claes Oldenburg) but not even the rubes would mistake it for actual art. Although I was a little surprised Cloud Vision couldn’t identify a watering trough, it did offer some pretty valid labels.

Mostly, I was heartened that it didn’t try to slap the label “art” on it.

The image at the top of these pages is a painting by Andy Kehoe entitled The Assassination of Hope Fails Again. It’s an allegorical pun. The deer-looking animal is “Hope.” You can’t kill him, because he springs eternal. <rimshot>

I use it here because I am inherently an optimist, and I enjoy the humor of the painting. I also like that it reminds me of eastern Oregon, one of my favorite places.

But, I think I mostly use it because its colors complement the gray and white style of this WordPress theme. Likewise, the way it connotes the old west works well with the way this theme uses slab fonts.

And of course I use it because I love the painting. It hangs on my wall at home.

Most of my blogging for the past few years has been published to Microsoft sites, and this is actually the third time I’ve spun up a personal blog.

Microsoft posts

Below are a few of my highlights from the Microsoft Learning, Machine Learning and Azure blogs. I have to give a big shout out to my collaborator and editor Shannon Wright for these as well. Her contributions were essential.

AI for Education: Individualized Code Feedback for Thousands of Students This post describes the code grader the team created in collaboration with Microsoft Research so that we could provide useful evaluations for thousands of student projects in our Introduction to C# course. My favorite part was when the light went on for me in regard to creating AI that understands the semantic meaning of a program rather than merely the syntax. It felt like the payoff for all my time spent studying Wittgenstein and Benjamin back in grad school.

Serious about cloud security? Check out this new training on Azure Security Center This one is a good representative example of how we communicated the real world usefulness of the training we made available. There is no topic where it’s more important to establish yourself as a trusted resource than security, and a key way to do that is to promise and deliver on walking people through examples of exactly how to use the tools in the real world.

Microsoft Cognitive Services: “The real magic is in the API.” –Scott J. Peterson This one covers our courses for getting hands on with Microsoft’s Cognitive Services so that you can, among other things, quickly create an app that can see and index the content of a video or photo or translate languages. The fact that computers can do these tasks does feel almost uncanny, but like Scott says, what’s really magical is that the power to use them is so accessible.

Get your team certified on cloud-critical identity and access management skills The second of a series of four posts focused on the value of Microsoft’s professional certifications from a business decision maker’s point of view, I like the way this one charts the course from identity as a problem to identity as a solution. Our intention was to provide a CEO with enough conversational knowledge to have a meaningful discussion with his IT team about their roadmap.

Personal blogs

My first blog. My first blog was on Typepad, because I had recently seen Anil Dash speak at a conference and I was blown away by his presentation. (To this day he continues to impress me, and I still pay close attention to his work.) There aren’t any posts that I’d call out as highlights, but I was happy to see it’s still live even though I haven’t touched it in years.

N – 1 blog. Like this blog, my second was a WordPress site. The posts there were timely, and several were written as part of ongoing conversations where I had more to say than could fit in email, but out of context and out of time, they don’t really bear up to reading today.

Super Fan Facebook Graph, is the exception. I took a course on mapping social networks just so I could get a picture of what my personal social graph looked like after spending a few years deeply embedded in the culture around the reality show Big Brother. The former contestants had huge numbers of connections to each other and to fans; likewise, the biggest fans also had massive numbers of friends and followers. The comparison to my organic groups of “people I play bridge with” and “people I went to school with” still boggles. I refer people to this post often.