Issue #168: Conversation on racism and robotics

In the News

Conversation on racism and robotics

There is systemic racism in America, and this does have an impact on robotics and roboticists in many many ways.

In The News

MIT apologizes, permanently pulls offline huge dataset that taught AI systems to use racist, misogynistic slurs

Thanks to MIT's cavalier approach when assembling its training set, though, these systems may also label women as whores or bitches, and Black and Asian people with derogatory language.

A deep learning pioneer’s teachable moment on AI bias

In response to a colleague calling the Obama photo an example of the dangers of AI bias, LeCun asserted that “ML systems are biased when data is biased.” Analysis of a portion of the data set found far more White women and men than Black women, but people quickly took issue with the characterization...

Unpredictability of Artificial Intelligence

We prove that it is impossible to precisely and consistently predict what specific actions a smarter-than-human intelligent system will take to achieve its objectives, even if we know terminal goals of the system.

Applied use cases

Fiber: Distributed Computing for AI Made Simple

To enable future generations of large-scale computation for algorithms like these, we developed Fiber, a new distributed computing library that helps users scale local computation methods to hundreds or even thousands of machines with ease.

OpenVX API for Raspberry Pi

OpenVX for computer vision OpenVX™ is an open, royalty-free API standard for cross-platform acceleration of computer vision applications developed by The Khronos Group.

Ethics

The Art of AI: An interview with Kai-Fu Lee

Here, he discusses with Project Syndicate the global AI race, the current state of the field, and what may – and should – come next.

AI gatekeepers are taking baby steps toward raising ethical standards

REUTERS/Thomas Peter For years, Brent Hecht, an associate professor at Northwestern University who studies AI ethics, felt like a voice crying in the wilderness. The impacts of academic ethics requirements are likely to extend beyond the ivory tower.

AI Ethics Reading List

This is a compilation of books, papers, and resources that AI Ethicists recommend to help you manage your AI initiatives responsibly or to in general get to know AI ethics better.

Robotics

‘Robotics for Infectious Diseases’ and other resources

Open Source Medical Supplies (OSMS) was formed in March 2020 to research and disseminate open source plans for medical supplies used to treat and reduce the spread of COVID-19 that could be fabricated locally.

The Fine Line between Industrial and Collaborative Robots: It’s Smaller than You Think

Originally made popular by the introduction of Rethink Robotics’ Baxter, so-called collaborative robots have created a lot of excitement around the industry over the last few years.

Event Code of Conduct: https://svrobo.org/about-us/code-of-conduct/

Moderated by Andra Keay, Managing Director of Silicon Valley Robotics, with guest speakers: David Pakman, Partner at Venrock Deborah Weinswig, Founder at Coresight Research Steven K. Platt, Founder of Platt Retail Institute and RAC Retail Robotics Lab Elizabeth Yin, General Partner at Hustle Fund...

Research

Building AI Trading Systems

Lessons learned building a profitable algorithmic trading system using Reinforcement Learning techniques.

(Re)Discovering Protein Structure and Function Through Language Modeling

In our study, we show how a language model, trained simply to predict a masked (hidden) amino acid in a protein sequence, recovers high-level structural and functional properties of proteins.

Twitter A.I. guru who worked for Magic Pony is set to join Cambridge University

“I can confirm that I’m taking up a role at Cambridge,” Huszár told CNBC via email. Video compression Magic Pony developed technology to improve the quality of compressed videos so they may be enjoyed at higher quality when limited bandwidth is available.