Science
Neural networks learned to tell one bird from another, enabling scientists to study their behavior in greater detail. Researchers from universities in Europe and Africa trained eural networks to recognize individual birds with up to 90 percent accuracy.
Tech & Society
A major retailer’s AI-powered surveillance program apparently targeted poor people and minorities. Rite-Aid, a U.S.-based pharmacy chain, installed face recognition systems in many of its New York and Los Angeles stores.
Machine Learning Research
Bias arises in machine learning when we fit an overly simple function to a more complex problem. A theoretical study shows that gradient descent itself may introduce such bias and render algorithms unable to fit data properly.
The Batch Newsletter
I spoke last week at the National Intergovernmental Audit Forum, a meeting attended by U.S. federal, state, and local government auditors. (Apparently some of the organizers had taken AI for Everyone.)
Tech & Society
A prosthetic leg that learns from the user’s motion could help amputees walk more naturally. Researchers from the University of Utah designed a robotic leg that uses machine learning to generate a human-like stride.
Machine Learning Research
Language models like Bert, Ernie, and Elmo have achieved spectacular results based on clever pre-training approaches. New research applies some of those Sesame Street lessons into image processing.
Hardware
Chips specially designed for AI are becoming much faster at training neural networks, judging from recent trials. MLPerf, an organization that’s developing standards for hardware performance in machine learning tasks, released results from its third benchmark competition.
Hardware
A high-profile semiconductor startup made a bid for the future of AI computation. UK startup Graphcore released the Colossus Mk2, a processor intended to perform the matrix math calculations at the heart of deep learning more efficiently than other specialized processors.
Letters
I spoke last week at the National Intergovernmental Audit Forum, a meeting attended by U.S. federal, state, and local government auditors. (Apparently some of the organizers had taken AI for Everyone.)
Machine Learning Research
Neural networks are famously bad at interpreting input that falls outside the training set’s distribution, so it’s not surprising that some models are certain that cat pictures show symptoms of Covid-19. A new approach won’t mistakenly condemn your feline to a quarantine.
The Batch Newsletter
Over the weekend, my family celebrated my grandfather’s 102nd birthday on Zoom. We dialed in from Hong Kong (my grandfather), the U.S. (myself), the UK, Singapore, and New Zealand.
Letters
Over the weekend, my family celebrated my grandfather’s 102nd birthday on Zoom. We dialed in from Hong Kong (my grandfather), the U.S. (myself), the UK, Singapore, and New Zealand.