Letters
How to Learn Math for Machine Learning
How much math do you need to know to be a machine learning engineer? It’s always nice to know more math! But there’s so much to learn that, realistically, it’s necessary to prioritize.
Analytics DeepLearning.AI
Machine Learning Research
Sharper Attention: NLP transformer technique for more Efficient token usage.
Self-attention enables transformer networks to track relationships between distant tokens — such as text characters — in long sequences, but the computational resources required grow quadratically with input size.
Business
To Bee or Not to Bee: AI farm robots help to pollinate tomatoes.
Insects that spread pollen to fruiting plants are in trouble. A possible alternative: Robots. Farmers in Australia and the U.S. are using robots from Israeli startup Arugga Farming to pollinate greenhouse tomatoes.
Machine Learning Research
Smaller Models, Bigger Biases: Compressed face recognition models have stronger bias.
Compression methods like parameter pruning and quantization can shrink neural networks for use in devices like smartphones with little impact on accuracy — but they also exacerbate a network’s bias.
Tech & Society
Insurance Coverage for AI: Medicare covers AI stroke detection.
The U.S. government’s largest national health insurance plan will pay for hospital use of a deep learning model, building momentum for AI to become an integral part of the doctor’s toolkit.
Machine Learning Research
Upgrade for ReLU: The sin(x) activation function is an alternative to ReLU.
The activation function known as ReLU builds complex nonlinear functions across layers of a neural network, making functions that outline flat faces and sharp edges. But how much of the world breaks down into perfect polyhedra?
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch: Gunshot Detection Under Fire, AI At The Olympics, AlphaFold Goes Open-Source, Revenge Of The Perceptrons
Since the pandemic started, several friends and teammates have shared with me privately that they were not doing well emotionally. I’m grateful to each person who trusted me enough to tell me this. How about you — are you doing okay?
Letters
Are You OK? Taking Care of Emotional and Mental Health
Since the pandemic started, several friends and teammates have shared with me privately that they were not doing well emotionally. I’m grateful to each person who trusted me enough to tell me this. How about you — are you doing okay?
Tech & Society
Shots in the Dark: Evidence shows Shotspotter altered evidence for police.
A crime-fighting AI company altered evidence to please police, a new investigation claims — the latest in a rising chorus of criticism. ShotSpotter modified the system’s findings in some cases.
Tech & Society
Biomedical Treasure Chest: DeepMind open sources AlphaFold and protein databases.
DeepMind opened access to AlphaFold, a model that finds the shapes of proteins, and to its output so far — a potential cornucopia for biomedical research. The research lab, a division of Google’s parent company Alphabet, made AlphaFold freely available.
Tech & Society
Olympic AI: 2020 Tokyo Olympics times athletes using AI.
Computer vision is keeping a close eye on athletes at the Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo. Omega Timing, a Swiss watchmaker and the Olympic Games’ official timekeeper, is providing systems that go far beyond measuring milliseconds.
Machine Learning Research
Revenge of the Perceptrons: Perceptrons do some AI tasks on par with complex AI.
Why use a complex model when a simple one will do? New work shows that the simplest multilayer neural network, with a small twist, can perform some tasks as well as today’s most sophisticated architectures.