Issue #160: Crisis requires co-ordinated digital response

In the News

Satya Nadella: Crisis requires co-ordinated digital response

The past two months have seen digitisation progression that would ordinarily take two years generated by the demands of remote working and the need for accurate data and intelligence.

In The News

Moxie Is the Robot Pal You Dreamed of as a Kid

Almost as soon as iRobot released the Roomba into the world, a community of autonomous vacuum enthusiasts started giving their Roombas names, backstories, and custom wardrobes.

‘I Could Solve Most of Your Problems’: Eric Schmidt’s Pentagon Offensive

Mr. Schmidt is pressing forward with a Silicon Valley worldview where advances in software and A.I. are the keys to figuring out almost any issue.

A Shiny Snack Bag’s Reflections Can Reconstruct the Room around It

You need to have a good appearance model to get the good lighting. Park says his team’s system can calculate the character of that light to “give you a very realistic estimate of the appearance of any viewpoint of the scene.” This process is called view reconstruction, or novel view synthesis.

Applied use cases

AI and Efficiency

Our results suggest that for AI tasks with high levels of recent investment, algorithmic progress has yielded more gains than classical hardware efficiency.

Don't Regulate Artificial Intelligence: Starve It

Today, there are hundreds of thousands of computers in use around the world that are more powerful than Deep Blue—and that doesn’t include millions of personal computers with access to the cloud. That country’s Social Credit System monitors the behavior of millions of its citizens, rewarding them...

AI as Instrument of Knowledge Extractivism

A training dataset for machine learning is usually composed through the following steps: 1) production: labour or phenomena that produce information; 2) capture: encoding of information into a data format by an instrument: 3) formatting: organisation of data into a dataset: 4) labelling: in...

Ethics

AI and the Far Right: A History We Can’t Ignore

These are firms that have access to extensive data about the activities of members of the public — for example, the state of Utah gave Banjo access to real-time data streaming from the state’s traffic cameras, CCTV, and 911 emergency systems, among other things, which the company combines with...

About positive psychology and ethics in AI

Creative Director and Co-Founder of the Nature 2.0 DAO Sovereign Nature Initiative Florian Schmitt and AI Ethicist John C. Havens talk about the importance of well-being and how AI can shape the future.

Research, ethics & societal impact

Lecture 1: Introduction to ethical theory Christine Mitchell, HMS Lecture 2: Responsible Research and the Human Brain Project Nikolas Rose, KCL Lecture 3: Computer ethics and the HBP Bernd Stahl, DMU Lecture 4: Scaling up neuroscience - Responsible Research and the big brain projects Nikolas Rose,...

Robotics

Covariant raises $40 million to bring robots to low-tech industries

Covariant today announced the close of a $40 million series B funding round to bring its robotic control systems to additional industries and create more systems capable of picking, placing, and unloading objects in warehouses.

This ‘Once-For-All’ Neural Network Could Slash AI’s Carbon Footprint

So MIT researchers found a way to train a single network that can run on many different kinds of processors.

Weekly Robotics #89

Stanford Student Robotics INFO: Pupper is an inexpensive ($600-$900) open-source quadruped robot that’s pretty damn cute. YouTube (Chris Boden) INFO: This YouTube playlist contains lots of videos from Chris Boden in which he builds a robot arm.

Research

Consistent Video Depth Estimation

Abstract We present an algorithm for reconstructing dense, geometrically consistent depth for all pixels in a monocular video. We leverage a conventional structure-from-motion reconstruction to establish geometric constraints on pixels in the video.

UC Berkeley researchers open-source RAD to improve any reinforcement learning algorithm

A group of University of California, Berkeley researchers this week open-sourced Reinforcement Learning with Augmented Data (RAD). This results in a visual representation that improves generalization, data-efficiency, and transfer learning.”

facebookresearch / nle

The NetHack Learning Environment (NLE) is a Reinforcement Learning environment based on NetHack 3.6.6. NetHack Gym Environment Starting with NLE environments is extremely simple, provided one is familiar with other gym environments: >>> import gym >>> import nle >>> env = gym.make("NetHackScore-v0")...