Letters
Unsupervised Learning Ascendent
Nearly a decade ago, I got excited by self-taught learning and unsupervised feature learning — ways to learn features from unlabeled data that afterward can be used in a supervised task.
Analytics DeepLearning.AI
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch: Chatbots Sue Telemarketers, Neural Nets See Around Corners, Police Read License Plates, Deep Learning Pioneers Speak
Nearly a decade ago, I got excited by self-taught learning and unsupervised feature learning — ways to learn features from unlabeled data that afterward can be used in a supervised task. These ideas contributed only marginally to practical performance back then, but I’m pleased
Tech & Society
Glimpse My Ride: How Los Angeles police used license plate readers
Police in the U.S. routinely use AI to track cars with little accountability to the public. Documents obtained by Wired revealed just how intensively police in Los Angeles, California, have been using automatic license plate readers.
Science
Extreme Weather Warning: Deep learning system helps predict extreme temperatures.
Severe heat waves and cold snaps are especially hard to forecast because atmospheric perturbations can have effects that are difficult to compute. Neural networks show promise where typical methods have stumbled.
Machine Learning Research
What Love Sounds Like: AI system recognizes the sounds of mating pandas.
Female giant pandas are fertile for only 24 to 36 hours a year: Valentine’s Day on steroids. A new neural network alerts human keepers when a panda couple mates.
Tech & Society
Tools For a Pandemic: Chinese tech giants provide resources for Covid research.
Chinese tech giants have opened their AI platforms to scientists fighting coronavirus. Alibaba Cloud and Baidu are offering a powerful weapon to life-science researchers working to stop the spread of the illness officially known as Covid-19: free access to their computing horsepower and tools.
Machine Learning Research
That Swipe-Right Look: Photofeeler-D3 AI chooses the best pics for dating profiles.
In an online dating profile, the photo that highlights your physical beauty may not be the one that makes you look smart or honest — also important traits in a significant other. A new neural network helps pick the most appealing shots.
Tech & Society
Phantom Menace: Fake images can fool some self-driving cars.
Some self-driving cars can’t tell the difference between a person in the roadway and an image projected on the street. A team of researchers used projectors to trick semiautonomous vehicles into detecting people, road signs, and lane markings that didn’t exist.
Letters
Can AI Fall in Love?
A student once asked me, “Can an AI ever love?”Since the early days of AI, people have wondered whether AI can ever be conscious or feel emotions. Even though an artificial general intelligence may be centuries away, these are important questions.
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch: Hotter Dating Profiles, Pandas in Love, Compute for Coronavirus, Deepfake Detection, Self-Driving Cars Run Amok
A student once asked me, “Can an AI ever love?”Since the early days of AI, people have wondered whether AI can ever be conscious or feel emotions. Even though an artificial general intelligence may be centuries away, these are important questions.
Machine Learning Research
Old Tools for New Synths: A summary of Differentiable Digital Signal Processing
Neural audio synthesizers like WaveRNN or GANSynth produce impressive sounds, but they require large, data-hungry neural networks. A new code library beefs up the neural music studio with efficient sound modules based on traditional synthesizer designs.
Tech & Society
Nowhere to Hide: How police in London and Moscow use face recognition
Real-time face recognition has become standard operating procedure for cops in a few cities, in both authoritarian and democratic countries. After years of trials, police departments in Moscow and London are using face recognition to scan the streets for suspected criminals.