Me + the Machine

This week several of my team and I visited our offshore team via Accenture in Bangalore, India. In addition to great food and hospitality we were given the opportunity to visit Accenture's 'Innovation Hub', a sprawling 11 floors of ground breaking tech being applied to both real-life and conceptual scenarios.

A highlight was the use of former collaborative industrial robot 'Baxter' as an intelligent marimba musician as an orchestra member and as an accompaniment to a solo musician. Whilst the orchestra performance is stunning it was the simpler duet set up, now in the Innovation Hub, was truly illuminating.

Baxter was trained over a 3 day period by learning via TensorFlow and many millions of music files. As a result, Baxter can create responses to inputs in what he sees as musical. At the Innovation Hub he now simply sits alongside a grand piano, waiting to duo with visiting piano players.

As was explained to us, it is suggested to view the human piano player's sounds as your 'enterprise data' and Baxter as an artificial intelligence driven application. A powerful analogy and one with many angles to consider. A few that jumped out were:

• The training set, influence of the size and diversity of it (Bach to Eminem)
• Role of a human actor in applications of AI (the pianist)
• When does music stop being an art form and become a manufacture? (can only a human have something interesting to say?)

A great experience, thank you to all the inspirational people we met - I'll be back!

Opinions are my own.