Letters
Staying Connected Amid the Pandemic
I recently received an email from one of you who lives far from the major AI hubs, saying, “I feel like I’m all alone.” I want to tell you all...
Analytics DeepLearning.AI
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch: Covid-19 Infects AI, Learning from Small Data, Generated Music Goes Mainstream, Fighting Pandemic Disinformation
I recently received an email from one of you who lives far from the major AI hubs, saying, “I feel like I’m all alone.” I want to tell you all: Even if it sometimes feels like you’re facing the challenges of work and life in isolation, you are not alone!
Tech & Society
Undercover Networks: Protecting neural networks from differential power analysis
Neural networks can spill their secrets to those who know how to ask. A new approach secures them from prying eyes. Researchers demonstrate that that adversaries can find out a model’s parameter values by measuring its power use.
Machine Learning Research
Flexible Teachers, Smarter Students: Meta Pseudo Labels improves knowledge distillation.
Human teachers can teach more effectively by adjusting their methods in response to student feedback. It turns out that teacher networks can do the same.
Science
Taxation With Vector Representation: A reinforcement learning approach to better tax policy
Governments have struggled to find a tax formula that promotes prosperity without creating extremes of wealth and poverty. Can machine learning show the way?
Tech & Society
An Archive Unearthed: Newspaper Navigator indexes visual elements in archival text.
An algorithm indexed photos, ads, and other images embedded in 170 years of American newspapers. Created by researchers at the University of Washington and U.S. Library of Congress, Newspaper Navigator uses object recognition to organize visual features of newspapers dating back to 1789.
Machine Learning Research
Listening to the Brain: NLP researchers used RNNs to translate brain waves into text.
AI has added an unlikely language to its catalog of translation capabilities: brain waves. Joseph Makin led a group from the University of California San Francisco to render a person’s neural signals as English text while the person while the person read a sentence aloud.
Tech & Society
Mask Monitor: Paris and Cannes used computer vision to detect face masks.
Cameras that detect face masks are helping French authorities to evaluate citizens’ adherence to government mandates intended to fight Covid-19. Starting this week, everyone riding public transportation in France is required to wear a face mask.
Letters
Covid-19 Transforms Industries
Inflection points in society create opportunities. The rise of online video was an inflection point that enabled scalable online education.
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch: Covid Mask Detection, Brain To Text Translation, AI Chooses Tax Brackets, Neural Network Security
Inflection points in society create opportunities. The rise of online video was an inflection point that enabled scalable online education. The rise of the GPS-enabled smartphones similarly enabled Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, and many other services.
Business
Asia’s AI Advantage: Asian companies show success in AI updake.
Asian companies lead the world in AI deployment, new research argues. Market research by MIT Technology Review Insights found that companies in the Asia-Pacific region are using machine learning faster and with better results than any other part of the world.
Machine Learning Research
RL and Feature Extraction Combined: CURL combines reinforcement with contrastive learning.
Which comes first, training a reinforcement learning model or extracting high-quality features? New work avoids this chicken-or-egg dilemma by doing both simultaneously.