Tech & Society
Ready or Not
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.
Analytics DeepLearning.AI
Letters
Passive Versus Active Learning
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
The Batch: Global Surveillance Survey, AI’s Crisis of Reproducibility, Construction Drones, Bots Cheat at Hide-and-Seek
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
Easing Cross-Border Collaboration
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
Working Through Uncertainty
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
My Chatbot Will Call Your Chatbot
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
Generative Models Rock
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
Speech Recognition With an Accent
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.
Business
Agbots Want Jobs Americans Don’t
Advances in computer vision and robotic dexterity may reach the field just in time to save U.S. agriculture from a looming labor shortage. CNN Business surveyed the latest crop of AI-powered farmbots.
Letters
Pie & AI in Kuala Lumpur
Over the weekend, we hosted our first Pie & AI meetup in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in collaboration with the AI Malaysia group, MDEC, and ADAX. The event was part of Malaysia’s AI & Data Week 2019.
The Batch Newsletter
Robot Farm Workers, Making Algorithms Rock, Automating Contract Negotiations, Recognizing Accented Speech
Over the weekend, we hosted our first Pie & AI meetup in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in collaboration with the AI Malaysia group, MDEC, and ADAX. The event was part of Malaysia’s AI & Data Week 2019. Several people traveled from neighboring southeast Asian countries to attend!
Business
Automation’s Frontier: Fast Food
Quick-service restaurants are experiencing record-high employee turnover, while labor advocates are pushing for higher wages. Some experts say these forces are propelling the fast food industry toward full automation.