In the News
Government paid AI firm to analyse UK citizens’ tweets
Privacy campaigners have expressed alarm after the government revealed it had hired an artificial intelligence firm to collect and analyse the tweets of UK citizens as part of a coronavirus-related contract.
Sponsor
Use the Orca Security 2020 State of Cloud Security Report to Benchmark Yourself Against Your Peers and Learn the 4 Things You Must Do Now to Avoid a Major Breach
For most orgs, cloud workload security is dependent upon the installation of security agents across all assets. Something that rarely happens, as this report shows. For example, 81% of organizations have at least one neglected internet-facing workload.
In The News
Baby-mounted cameras teach AI to ‘see’ through a child’s eyes
Ievgen Chabanov/Alamy The way that babies learn about and navigate the world could prove to be a good model for training artificial intelligence. AIs don’t learn as efficiently or flexibly as children.
Amazon's Machine Learning University is making its online courses available to the public
To help meet that demand, Amazon founded its in-house Machine Learning University (MLU) in 2016. The first three online courses cover natural language processing (the machine understanding of human language), computer vision (the machine understanding of images and video), and tabular data (machine...
Taming the Tail: Adventures in Improving AI Economics
Note: The focus of this post is AI companies and products that rely on machine learning – primarily supervised learning – to deliver a significant portion of their core functionality, not on ML tooling / infrastructure or traditional software that includes add-on ML features.
Applied use cases
Las Vegas Cops Used ‘Unsuitable’ Facial Recognition Photos To Make Arrests
According to documents obtained by Motherboard, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) used “non-suitable” probe images in almost half of all the facial recognition searches it made last year, greatly increasing the chances the system would falsely identify suspects, facial recognition...
The future of farming is one giant A/B test on all the crops in the world at once
John Deere subsidiary Blue River Technology is using computer vision and machine learning to make the farmers of tomorrow more efficient.
At Talkspace, Start-Up Culture Collides With Mental Health Concerns
After he wrote a general account of his therapy sessions on the company blog, an executive named Linda Sacco came to Mr. Lori with an intimate request.
Ethics
Killer Robots: Growing Support for a Ban
All countries have a duty to save humanity by retaining meaningful human control over the use of force and banning fully autonomous weapons.
Researchers say ‘The Whiteness of AI’ in pop culture erases people of color
“We argue that AI racialized as White allows for a full erasure of people of color from the White utopian imagery,” reads the paper titled “The Whiteness of AI,” which was accepted for publication by the journal Philosophy and Technology.
The Battle for the Robot Soul
Although we lack real-world equivalents of Terminators and Astro Boys, these examples nevertheless reveal Western fears and Japanese aspirations respectively for sentient machines.
Robotics
The Deck Is Not Rigged: Poker and the Limits of AI
Von Neumann, who died in 1957, viewed poker as the perfect model for human decision making, for finding the balance between skill and chance that accompanies our every choice.
Welcome to the Boston Chapter of Women in Robotics!
"Society, Robots and Us" is a biweekly speaker event to discuss the social implications of robotics technologies, moderated by Andra Keay of Silicon Valley Robotics.
Ro-man 2020
The conference covers a wide range of topics related to Robot and Human Interactive Communication, involving theories, methodologies, technologies, empirical and experimental studies.
Research
Adversarial robustness as a prior for better transfer learning
Transfer learning is also common in many computer vision tasks, including image classification and object detection, in which a model uses some pretrained representation as an “initialization” to learn a more useful representation for the specific task in hand.
OpenCV Sudoku Solver and OCR
Jump Right To The Downloads Section OpenCV Sudoku Solver and OCR In the first part of this tutorial, we’ll discuss the steps required to build a sudoku puzzle solver using OpenCV, deep learning, and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) techniques.
Senior Manager, Machine Learning (ML-Agents) AI@Unity
The ML-Agents team is an applied research team focused on developing technologies for creating intelligent character behaviors within Unity environments.