In the News
How 2020 Democratic candidates would regulate facial recognition
To find out how 2020 Democratic candidates would use their presidential powers to address different aspects of technology, we sent seven key questions to every campaign.
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In The News
AI Can Do Great Things—If It Doesn't Burn the Planet
It was a remarkable research feat, but it required more than 1,000 desktop computers plus a dozen machines running specialized graphics chips crunching intensive calculations for several months.
AI's hardest problem? Developing common sense
By Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis Artificial Intelligence has seen radical advances of many kinds over the last years, roundly beating human champions in games like Go and poker that once seemed out of reach.
AI Ethics: Artificial Intelligence, Robots, and Society
Like the title says, an attempt to simplify and improve on the systems for representing emotions and drives I wrote with Emmanuel Tanguy and Phil Rolphshagen (the Dynamic Emotion Representation (DER) and Fexible Latching respectively, see below).
Applied use cases
70,000 Tinder Photos of Women Just Got Dumped on a Cyber-Crime Forum
More than 70,000 photos of Tinder users are being shared by members of an online cyber-crime forum, Gizmodo has learned, raising concerns about the potential for abusive use of the photos.
EU eyes temporary ban on facial recognition in public places
The draft document points to the right under the general data protection regulation for EU citizens “not to be subject of a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling”.
Microsoft will be carbon negative by 2030
We are also launching an initiative to use Microsoft technology to help our suppliers and customers around the world reduce their own carbon footprints and a new $1 billion climate innovation fund to accelerate the global development of carbon reduction, capture, and removal technologies.
Ethics
‘Short window’ to stop AI taking control of society, warns ex-Google employee
Meredith Whittaker warns we are becoming lab animals in a giant tech experiment The big news in tech this week is the announcement that Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are stepping down as executives of parent company Alphabet, founded in 2015 with the goal of making it “cleaner and...
Black-Boxed Politics:
In their recently published guidance on ‘Explaining AI decisions’ (hereafter ICO-AT Guidance), the UK’s ICO and Alan Turing Institute define black boxes as “any AI system whose inner workings and rationale are opaque or inaccessible to human understanding” and then provide a detailed explanation of...
Soft ethics, the governance of the digital and the General Data Protection Regulation
The mangrove society: from digital innovation to the governance of the digital Today, in any mature information society [1], we no longer live online or offline but onlife, that is, we increasingly live in that special space, or infosphere, that is seamlessly analogue and digital, offline and...
Robotics
Not Bot, Not Beast: Scientists Create First Ever Living, Programmable Organism
Future versions may be built from a patient’s own cells to repair tissue or target cancers. Legal and Ethical Questions Conversely, xenobots raise legal and ethical concerns.
Ag robotics startup Tortuga comes out of stealth with Tesla co-founder Tarpenning on board
A lot of the technology is just too delicate and fiddly; durability is a big one in the farm environment.” Marc Tarpenning, cofounder of the renowned electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla, is talking to AFN about his new board position at Tortuga Agtech, a farm robotics startup that’s just coming out...
Robotics and AI will create millions of jobs by 2030 and we barely know what they are yet!
Next SVR or SVR Member Events: Robot Startup Speakers - Homebrew Robotics at Google - Jan 29 Robot Build Night - Circuit Launch - Jan 30 Bots & BBQ - Circuit Launch - Jan 31 Women's Monthly HackDay - Circuit Launch - Feb 2 Circuit Launch Open Tour - Circuit Launch - Feb 4 Bots&Beer - TBC - Feb 5...
Research
5 Reasons to Read Hands-On Machine Learning by Aurélien Géron (Book Review)
That’s why whenever someone asks me how to learn machine learning, the first resource I recommend them is “Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow: Concepts, Tools, and Techniques to Build Intelligent Systems” by Aurélien Géron.
A Sober Look at Bayesian Neural Networks
Proponents of Bayesian neural networks often claim that trained BNNs output distributions which capture epistemic uncertainty.
Deep Learning Illustrated: Building Natural Language Processing Models
It begins by loading a number of dependencies: import nltk from nltk import word_tokenize, sent_tokenize from nltk.corpus import stopwords from nltk.stem.porter import * nltk.download('gutenberg') nltk.download('punkt') nltk.download('stopwords') import string import gensim from...