Tech & Society
AI Truths, AI Falsehoods: How police used face detection to ID Jan 6 rioters.
Face recognition is being used to identify people involved in last week’s assault on the U.S. Capitol. It’s also being misused to support their cause.
Analytics DeepLearning.AI
Machine Learning Research
Striding Toward the Minimum: A faster way to optimize the loss function for deep learning.
When you’re training a deep learning model, it can take days for an optimization algorithm to minimize the loss function. A new approach could save time.
Tech & Society
The Fax About Tracking Covid: A deep learning system for sorting critical Covid-19 cases.
A pair of neural networks is helping to prioritize Covid-19 cases for contact tracing. The public health department of California’s Contra Costa County is using deep learning to sort Covid-19 cases reported via the pre-internet technology known as fax.
Machine Learning Research
It’s a Small World Model After All: More efficient world models for reinforcement learning
World models, which learn a compressed representation of a dynamic environment like, say, a video game, have delivered top results in reinforcement learning. A new method makes them much smaller.
Letters
How AI Can Strengthen Democracy
Last Wednesday, the U.S. Capitol building was overrun by insurrectionists at the moment when members of Congress were certifying the results of a national election.
Tech & Society
Tell Me a Picture: OpenAI's two new multimodal AI models, CLIP and DALL·E
Two new models show a surprisingly sharp sense of the relationship between words and images. OpenAI, the for-profit research lab, announced a pair of models that have produced impressive results in multimodal learning: DALL·E.
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch: Clues to Mental Illness, Enterprise AI, Bias in Compressed Models, U.S. AI Strategy
In my letter last week, I alluded to the way AI tends to concentrate power and wealth. This tendency worries me, and I believe it deserves more attention.
Tech & Society
Online Clues to Mental Illness: NLP model spots signs of mental illness in Facebook posts.
Can social media posts reveal early signs of mental illness? A new machine learning model shows promising results. Researchers developed a model that analyzes messages and images posted by Facebook users for indicators of psychological problems.
Tech & Society
U.S. New Year’s Resolutions for AI: All the AI programs authorized in the 2021 NDAA.
U.S. lawmakers authorized a slew of national programs that promote artificial intelligence research, development, and deployment, and support efforts to make sure the results are ethical and trustworthy.
Science
Algorithms For Elephants: How AI tracking collars help protect endangered wildlife.
An AI-powered collar may help protect wild elephants from poachers, hunters, and other hostile humans. Ten ElephantEdge wireless tracking collars will be fitted onto African elephants next year, TechCrunch reported.
Business
Enterprise AI on the Rise: A 2021 survey of how business leaders are using AI.
A survey of AI in large companies sees boom times ahead — if AI teams can get past issues that surround implementation. Businesses of all sizes are using more machine learning, spending more on it, and hiring more engineers to wrangle it.
Letters
AI Concentrates Power and Wealth
In my letter last week, I alluded to the way AI tends to concentrate power and wealth. This tendency worries me, and I believe it deserves more attention. The U.S. government has been looking into these winner-take-most dynamics at a few leading technology companies...