Issue #158: Leveraging AI to Battle This Pandemic

In the News

Leveraging AI to Battle This Pandemic — And The Next One

Throughout the pandemic, great emphasis has been placed on the sharing (or lack of it) of critical information across countries — in particular from China — about the spread of the disease.

In The News

A futurist on COVID-19 and business: Pandora's box is now open

Cyberwar expert P.W. Singer says the pandemic has raised the stakes on AI, automation and content moderation.

Specification gaming: the flip side of AI ingenuity

Specification gaming is a behaviour that satisfies the literal specification of an objective without achieving the intended outcome.

Applied use cases

India’s digital response to COVID-19 risks inefficacy, exclusion and discrimination

There are already more than a dozen government applications that use a combination of features, such as GPS surveillance, facial recognition and thermal imaging, to identify potential carriers of the virus and enforce quarantines and lockdowns.

How Facebook Works for Trump

During the 2016 election cycle, Trump’s team ran 5.9 million ads on Facebook, spending $44 million from June to November alone.

Widely Used AI Machine Learning Methods Don’t Work as Claimed

Researchers demonstrated the mathematical impossibility of representing social networks and other complex networks using popular methods of ‘low-dimensional embeddings.’

Ethics

AI Ethics #6 : Radioactive data, attacking deep RL, steering AI progress, sucker's list, AI ethics in marketing and more ...

Research: Let's look at some highlights of research papers that caught our attention at MAIEI: Integrating Ethical Values and Economic Value to Steer Progress in Artificial Intelligence by Anton Korinek

AI researchers propose ‘bias bounties’ to put ethics principles into practice

The kit for organizations creating AI models includes the idea of paying developers for finding bias in AI, akin to the bug bounties offered in security software.

Robotics

Andrej Karpathy - AI for Full-Self Driving

To watch more great speakers, go to scaledml.org and select [media archive]. Presented at the Matroid Scaled Machine Learning Conference 2020 Venue: Computer...

How human-centered tech can beat COVID-19 through contact tracing

Irrelevant contact data will needlessly consume precious human contact tracer time. To succeed, contact tracing programs require that people trust the entity to whom they are reporting.

MIT Cuts Ties With a Chinese AI Firm Amid Human Rights Concerns

MIT has terminated a research collaboration with iFlytek, a Chinese artificial intelligence company accused of supplying technology for surveilling Muslims in the northwestern province of Xinjiang.

Research

Nintendo Learning Environment

Is it yet another emulator? NO! I wrote a RL-oriented, high-performance, minimal Nintendo Gameboy emulator in C (~500 LOC) with 0 dependencies.

Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship 2020: Researchers in academia at the forefront of technology

The five fellowship recipients cover a broad spectrum of directions in their work: learning and intelligence in robotics, tools to help programmers write software that meets their intent, machine learning applied to large-scale data centers, optimization and computation theory, and systems to...

Announcing TorchServe, An Open Source Model Server for PyTorch

Model servers make it easy to load one or several models, automatically creating a prediction API backed by a scalable web server.