Tech & Society
As deep learning becomes more resource-intensive, labs with better funding tend to achieve better results. One consequence is that less wealthy organizations often can’t replicate state-of-the-art successes. Some observers are calling it a crisis.
Machine Learning Research
Not long ago, text-to-speech systems could read only a sentence at a time, and they were ranked according to their ability to accomplish that limited task. Now that they can orate entire books, we need new benchmarks.
Business
Construction projects require teams of surveyors who continually map blueprints to precise, real-world locations. Drones might do it faster, saving time and money.
Machine Learning Research
The latest language models are great at answering questions about a given text passage. However, these models are also powerful enough to recognize an individual writer’s style, which can clue them in to the right answers. New research measures such annotator bias in several data sets.
Tech & Society
Independent research lab OpenAI designed virtual agents to play hide-and-seek. They evolved increasingly clever strategies, eventually hacking the game world’s physics to gain advantage.
Letters
I read an interesting paper comparing the results of traditional passive learning (sitting in a lecture) versus active methods like the flipped classroom, where students watch videos at home and work on exercises in class.
The Batch Newsletter
I read an interesting paper comparing the results of traditional passive learning (sitting in a lecture) versus active methods like the flipped classroom, where students watch videos at home and work on exercises in class.
Tech & Society
Tighter national borders impede progress in AI. So industry leaders are calling for a different kind of immigration reform. The Partnership on AI published a report calling out the corrosive effect of restrictive immigration policies and suggesting alternatives.
Machine Learning Research
How to build robots that respond to novel situations? When prior experience is limited, enabling a model to describe its uncertainty can enable it to explore more avenues to success.
Business
Companies with large numbers of contractual relationships may leave millions of dollars on the table because it’s not practical to customize each agreement. A new startup offers a chatbot designed to claw back that money.
Tech & Society
AI’s creative potential is becoming established in the visual arts. Now musicians are tapping neural networks for funkier grooves, tastier licks, and novel subject matter.
Machine Learning Research
Models that achieve state-of-the-art performance in automatic speech recognition (ASR) often perform poorly on nonstandard speech. New research offers methods to make ASR more useful to users with heavy accents or speech impairment.