Letters
A Different Approach to A/B Testing
When a lot of data is available, machine learning is great at automating decisions. But when data is scarce, consider using the data to augment human insight, so people can make better decisions.
Analytics DeepLearning.AI
Tech & Society
Medical AI’s Hidden Data: Why many medical AI devices are black boxes.
U.S. government approval of medical AI products is on the upswing — but information about how such systems were built is largely unavailable. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a a plethora of AI-driven medical systems.
Machine Learning Research
Facing Failure to Generalize: Why some AI models exhibit underspecification.
The same models trained on the same data may show the same performance in the lab, and yet respond very differently to data they haven’t seen before. New work finds this inconsistency to be pervasive.
Tech & Society
Computation as a National Resource: An effort to estimate computing capacity for 37 nations.
How much processing power do various nations have on hand to drive their AI strategy? An international trade group aims to find out. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is launching an effort to measure the computing capacity available in countries around the world.
Tech & Society
How Art Makes AI Feel: How an AI model feels about art.
An automated art critic spells out the emotional impact of images. Led by Panos Achlioptas, researchers at Ecole Polytechnique, King Abdullah University, and Stanford University trained a deep learning system to generate subjective interpretations of art.
Machine Learning Research
Better Zero-Shot Translations: A method for improving transformer NLP translation
Train a multilingual language translator to translate between Spanish and English and between English and German, and it may be able to translate directly between Spanish and German as well. New work proposes a simple path to better machine translation between languages.
Tech & Society
Autonomous Weapons Gain Support: A panel led by Eric Schmidt encouraged more military AI.
A panel of AI experts appointed by the U.S. government came out against a ban on autonomous weapons. A draft report from the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence recommends against a proposed international global prohibition of AI-enabled autonomous weapon systems.
Tech & Society
Fighting Fakes: Six algorithms that help news sites spot deepfakes
A supergroup of machine learning models flags manipulated photos. Jigsaw, a tech incubator owned by Alphabet, released a system that detects digitally altered images.
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch: Drivers Under Surveillance, What Is Fairness?, Cancer Treatment, Vision Improves Language, Trade In Your Gucci
Over the last several decades, driven by a multitude of benchmarks, supervised learning algorithms have become really good at achieving high accuracy on test datasets. As valuable as this is...
Letters
High Test-Set Accuracy Is Not Enough
Over the last several decades, driven by a multitude of benchmarks, supervised learning algorithms have become really good at achieving high accuracy on test datasets. As valuable as this is, unfortunately maximizing average test set accuracy isn’t always enough.
Tech & Society
Eyes On Drivers: Amazon watches delivery drivers with AI-powered cameras.
Amazon is monitoring its delivery drivers with in-vehicle cameras that alert supervisors to dangerous behavior. The online retail giant rolled out a ceiling-mounted surveillance system that flags drivers who, say, read texts, fail to use seatbelts, exceed the speed limit, or ignore a stop sign.
Machine Learning Research
Better Language Through Vision: Study improved Bert performance using visual tokens.
For children, associating a word with a picture that illustrates it helps them learn the word’s meaning. Research aims to do something similar for machine learning models. Researchers improved a BERT model’s performance on some language tasks by training it on a large dataset of image-word pairs.