Science
Deep Learning Tackles Skin Ailments
Skin conditions are the fourth-largest cause of nonfatal disease worldwide, but access to dermatological care is sparse. A new study shows that a neural network can do front-line diagnostic work.
Analytics DeepLearning.AI
Business
A Robot in Every Kitchen
Every home is different. That makes it difficult for domestic robots to translate skills learned in one household into another. Training in virtual reality, where the robot has access to rich information about three-dimensional objects, can make it easier to generalize skills to the real world.
Tech & Society
Want Your Pension? Send a Selfie
The French government plans to roll out a national identification service based on face recognition. Critics warn that the new system violates citizens’ privacy.
Machine Learning Research
Hidden Findings Revealed
Drugs undergo rigorous experimentation and clinical trials to gain regulatory approval, while dietary supplements get less scrutiny. Even when a drug study reveals an interaction with supplements, the discovery tends to receive little attention.
Business
Tesla Bets on Slim Neural Nets
Elon Musk has promised a fleet of autonomous Tesla taxis by 2020. The company reportedly purchased a computer vision startup to help meet that goal. Tesla acquired DeepScale, a Silicon Valley startup that rocesses computer vision on low-power electronics.
Letters
How Should We Manage AI threats?
Last week, I saw a lot of social media discussion about a paper using deep learning to generate artificial comments on news articles. I’m not sure why anyone thinks this is a good idea. At best, it adds noise to the media environment. At worst, it’s a tool for con artists and propagandists.
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch: Tesla Acquires DeepScale, France Backs Face Recognition, Robots Learn in Virtual Reality, Acquirers Snag AI Startups
Last week, I saw a lot of social media discussion about a paper using deep learning to generate artificial comments on news articles. I’m not sure why anyone thinks this is a good idea. At best, it adds noise to the media environment.
Machine Learning Research
Putting Text Generators on a Leash
Despite dramatic recent progress, natural language generation remains an iffy proposition. Even users of the muscular GPT-2 text generator have to press the button a number of times to get sensible output. But researchers are figuring out how to exert greater control over generated text.
Tech & Society
Amazon Prepares for a Crackdown
Amazon is writing what it hopes will become U.S. law governing use of face recognition technology. At a press event, Jeff Bezos told that his company’s lawyers are drafting a statutory framework to guide what he views as an inevitable federal crackdown on face recognition.
Tech & Society
Nothing but (Neural) Net
Basketball coaches sketch plays on a whiteboard to help players get the ball through the net. A new AI model predicts how opponents would respond to these tactics. A team of researchers in Taiwan trained a conditional generative adversarial network on data from National Basketball Association games.
Machine Learning Research
Anonymous Faces
A number of countries restrict commercial use of personal data without consent unless they’re fully anonymized. A new paper proposes a way to anonymize images of faces, purportedly without degrading their usefulness in applications that rely on face recognition.
Science
Quantum Leap
A leaked paper from Google’s quantum computing lab claims “supremacy” over conventional computers. The U.S. space agency NASA, whose scientists are collaborating with Google on a quantum computer, accidentally published a paper describing the breakthrough.