Business
Solar Power Heats Up: How solar thermal plants use AI to maximize energy output
Solar-thermal power plants concentrate the sun’s energy using huge arrays of mirrors. AI is helping those arrays stay in focus.
Latest
Letters
Building Trustworthy AI
Recently I wrote about major reasons why AI projects fail, such as small data, robustness, and change management. Given that some AI systems don't work, users and customers sometimes rightly wonder whether they should trust an AI system.
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch: Google AI Explains Itself, Neural Net Fights Bias, AI Demoralizes Champions, Solar Power Heats Up
Recently I wrote about major reasons why AI projects fail, such as small data, robustness, and change management. Given that some AI systems don't work, users and customers sometimes rightly wonder whether they should trust an AI system.
Business
A Sleeping Giant Stirs: Sony launches three AI R&D centers.
Sony, the consumer-electronics powerhouse behind the PlayStation and other hit gadgets, is launching three research-and-design centers to focus on AI. Staffing up means competing with — and likely poaching talent from — frontrunners like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.
Machine Learning Research
Melding Transformers with RL: GTrXL combines transformers and reinforcement learning.
Large NLP models like BERT can answer questions about a document thanks to the transformer network, a sequence-processing architecture that retains information across much longer sequences than previous methods. But transformers have had little success in reinforcement learning — until now.
Hardware
Not Your Father’s GPU: Nvidia released two chips designed for AI.
Intel, which dominates the market for general-purpose processors, is shipping its long-awaited AI chips. The chip giant announced that two so-called neural network processors are available to data-center customers.
Machine Learning Research
Bias Goes Undercover: Adversarial attacks can fool explainable AI techniques.
As black-box algorithms like neural networks find their way into high-stakes fields such as transportation, healthcare, and finance, researchers have developed techniques to help explain models’ decisions. New findings show that some of these methods can be fooled.
Letters
AI Topics for Dinner-Table Discussion
I’ll be spending Thanksgiving with Nova and watching her taste turkey for the first time. To those of you who celebrate Thanksgiving, I hope you spend time with loved ones, reflect on what you are thankful for, and discuss some very important...
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch: Sony Goes AI, Intel's GPU Killers, Transformer Networks In Disguise, Malicious Models Fool Bias Detection
I’ll be spending Thanksgiving with Nova and watching her taste turkey for the first time. To those of you who celebrate Thanksgiving, I hope you spend time with loved ones, reflect on what you are thankful for, and discuss some very important topics around the dinner table...
Machine Learning Research
Beyond the Bounding Box: RPDet and RepPoints for object detection, explained
Computer vision models typically draw bounding boxes around objects they spot, but those rectangles are a crude approximation of an object’s outline. A new method finds keypoints on an object’s perimeter to produce state-of-the-art object classification.
Tech & Society
When Private Data is Not Private: Google trained Project Nightingale on private patient data.
Google spent the past year training an AI-powered health care program using personal information from one of the largest hospital systems in the U.S. Patients had no idea — until last week.
Tech & Society
Researchers Blocked at the Border: Some African AI researchers blocked from attending NeurIPS
Foreign researchers hoping to attend one of AI’s largest conferences were denied entry into Canada, where the event will be held. Most of those blocked were from developing nations.