Jul 03, 2019
Teaching a computer meaningful associations between words and videos typically requires training on tens of thousands of videos painstakingly annotated by hand. That’s both labor-intensive and prone to inconsistency due to the often abstract relationship between video imagery and soundtrack.
Jul 03, 2019
Schools, prisons, and other public places have been relying on AI-enhanced microphones to detect signs of trouble. They may have been better off putting their money elsewhere.
Jul 03, 2019
Worries over deepfake technology have concentrated on the potential impact of computer-generated media on politics. But image-generation technology also can have a malign impact on private citizens. Consider DeepNude, an app that generates naked images from photos of clothed women.
Jul 03, 2019
If you’re pointing out an object, you don’t describe the background. Yet most object detection algorithms focus on a rectangle surrounding the object, not its precise boundary. New research offers a way to turn those boxes into tightly fitted curves.
The Batch Newsletter
AI is still compute-hungry. With supervised learning algorithms and emerging approaches to self-supervised and unsupervised learning, we are nowhere near satisfying this hunger.
Jun 26, 2019
Teaching a neural network to drive requires immense quantities of real-world sensor data. Now developers have a mother lode to mine.
Jun 26, 2019
Electrons are notoriously fickle things, orbiting one proton, then another, their paths described in terms of probability. Scientists can observe their travel indirectly using scanning tunneling microscopes, but...
Jun 26, 2019
Language models lately have become so good at generating coherent text that some researchers hesitate to release them for fear they'll be misused to auto-generate disinformation.
Jun 26, 2019
Experts in animal cognition may be the AI industry’s secret weapon. Tech giants like Apple and Google have added neuroscientists studying rodents, birds, and fish to teams working on voice processing, sound recognition, and navigation.
Jun 26, 2019
Jibo made the cutest household robots on Earth, jointed desk-lamp affairs that wriggle as they chat and play music. In March — a mere 18 months after coming to life — they said goodbye to their owners en masse.
Jun 26, 2019
Robots rely on GPS and prior knowledge of the world to move around without bumping into things. Humans don’t communicate with positioning satellites, yet they’ve wandered confidently, if obliviously, for millennia. A new navigation technology mimics that ability.
The Batch Newsletter
Last Friday, I attended the International Conference on Machine Learning. I spoke at the AI and Climate Change workshop on projects we’re doing to model methane emissions and on wind turbines. John Platt gave an overview of climate issues.