Letters
I just finished reading BJ Fogg’s new book, Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything. Fogg explains that the best way to build a new habit is to start small and succeed, rather than starting too big and giving up.
The Batch Newsletter
I just finished reading BJ Fogg’s new book, Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything. Fogg explains that the best way to build a new habit is to start small and succeed, rather than starting too big and giving up.
Tech & Society
YouTube is a great place to learn about new ideas — including some that have been thoroughly discredited. YouTube’s recommendation algorithm is helping spread misinformation about climate change, according to research by Avaaz, a self-funded activist group.
Machine Learning Research
Softmax commonly computes probabilities in a classifier’s output layer. But softmax isn’t always accurate in complex tasks — say, in a natural-language task, when the length of word vectors is much smaller than the number of words in the vocabulary.
Tech & Society
For some college graduates, landing a first job means making a good impression on a chatbot. University guidance counselors around the U.S. are preparing students for interviews with AI-powered screening algorithms.
Tech & Society
What if you could identify just about anyone from a photo? A controversial startup is making this possible. Hundreds of U.S. law enforcement agencies are using a face ID service that matches photos against a database of billions of images.
Machine Learning Research
End-to-end backpropagation and labeled data are the peanut butter and chocolate of deep learning. However, recent work suggests that neither is necessary to train effective neural networks to represent complex data.
Science
When artificial intelligence meets biology, even the simplest life forms can be mind-blowing. Researchers at Tufts and the University of Vermont programmed an evolutionary algorithm to design virtual organisms with specific capabilities.
Letters
Last week brought reports that the European Union is considering a three- to five-year moratorium on face recognition in public places. Face recognition is a problematic technology with significant potential for misuse, and I celebrate the...
The Batch Newsletter
Last week brought reports that the European Union is considering a three- to five-year moratorium on face recognition in public places. Face recognition is a problematic technology with significant potential for misuse, and I celebrate the EU’s effort to...
Tech & Society
The Trump administration announced a hands-off policy for regulating artificial intelligence. The White House unveiled an executive order instructing federal agencies to minimize rule-making related to AI businesses.
Machine Learning Research
AlphaGo Zero demonstrates superhuman performance playing Go, chess, and shogi. Models like R2D2 do the same playing classic Atari titles. A new approach to deep reinforcement learning is the first to achieve state-of-the-art results playing both board and video games.