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
Covid-19 Will Accelerate the AI Health Care Revolution
Disease diagnosis, drug discovery, robot delivery—artificial intelligence is already powering change in the pandemic’s wake. That’s only the beginning.
Research
Workshop on biological AND artificial reinforcement learning
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms learn through rewards and a process of trial-and-error. However, artificial agents still struggle with a number of difficulties, such as learning in changing environments and over longer timescales, states abstractions, generalizing and transferring...
Open-sourcing Submitit: A lightweight tool for Slurm cluster computation
At Facebook AI Research (FAIR), we use a Slurm-administrated cluster with thousands of GPUs on which our researchers train neural networks.
fast.ai releases new deep learning course, four libraries, and 600-page book
We are releasing: fastai v2: A complete rewrite of fastai which is faster, easier, and more flexible, implementing new approaches to deep learning framework design, as discussed in the peer reviewed fastai academic paper fastcore, fastscript, and fastgpu: Foundational libraries used in fastai v2,...
Applied use cases
Algorithms Are Automating Fascism. Here’s How We Fight Back
Across the country and around the world, calls to defund police departments have revived efforts to ban technologies like facial recognition and predictive policing, which disproportionately affect communities of color.
Need Healthcare? AI Startup Curai Has an App for That
“The accessibility of Google is the level of accessibility we need.” Curai’s efforts to lower the barrier to entry for healthcare for billions of people center on applying GPU-powered AI to connect patients, providers and health coaches via a chat-based application.
Why a Microsoft-backed start-up pivoted to a fitness app after helping Fortune 500 firms to build machines that can ‘see’
The app contains a virtual fitness trainer called Allie who is there to guide the user through workouts. The company previously sold its computer vision software to Fortune 500 firms but they struggled to use it.
Market News
GPT-3, Bloviator: OpenAI’s language generator has no idea what it’s talking about
Tests show that the popular AI still has a poor grasp of reality. But accuracy is not its strong point. If you dig deeper, you discover that something’s amiss: although its output is grammatical, and even impressively idiomatic, its comprehension of the world is often seriously off, which means you can never really trust what it says.
National Science Foundation awards $20M to launch artificial-intelligence institute
The National Science Foundation has awarded a five-year, $20 million grant to a team of scientists, including eight from Harvard, to create a new research institute aimed at exploring the use of artificial intelligence in fundamental physics.
Ethics
Rights for Robots Artificial Intelligence, Animal and Environmental Law
Table of Contents 1 Rights for Robots: Making sense of the machine question 2 Getting to Rights: Personhoods, statuses, and incidents 3 The Rights of Animals: In search of humanity 4 The Rights of Nature: Ethics, law, and the Anthropocene 5 Rights for Robots in a Posthuman Ecology Author(s)...
Councils scrapping use of algorithms in benefit and welfare decisions
Councils are quietly scrapping the use of computer algorithms in helping to make decisions on benefit claims and other welfare issues, the Guardian has found, as critics call for more transparency on how such tools are being used in public services.
The term ‘ethical AI’ is finally starting to mean something
Earlier this year, the independent research organisation of which I am the Director, London-based Ada Lovelace Institute, hosted a panel at the world’s largest AI conference, CogX, called The Ethics Panel to End All Ethics Panels.
Robotics
A new ‘brain swap’ makes iRobot’s Roomba vacuum way smarter
That shift starts today with an overhaul for the iRobot Home app and a related suite of new cleaning features that the company is calling “iRobot Genius.” iRobot Genius is free to iRobot users.
Facebook Wants to Make Smart Robots to Explore Every Nook and Cranny of Your Home
Last week the company announced new work focused on advancing what it calls “embodied AI”: basically, a smart robot that will be able to move around your house to help you remember things, find things, and maybe even do things.
Dusty Robotics CEO Tessa Lau Discusses Robotics Start-Ups and Autonomous Robots for Construction
Dusty’s FieldPrinter autonomous mobile robots prints layout plans directly onto the floors of job sites using information from building information models (BIM) as a guide.