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...
Latest
Tech & Society
New Behaviors Derail Old Training: How Covid-19 impacted the AI behind online shopping
The pandemic has radically altered online shopping behavior, throwing a wrench into many AI systems. AI inventory trackers, recommendation algorithms, and fraud detection systems trained on pre-pandemic consumer behavior have been flummoxed by the different ways people now browse, binge, and buy.
Machine Learning Research
Small Data the Simple Way: A training technique that can outperform few-shot learning
Few-shot learning seeks to build models that adapt to novel tasks based on small numbers of training examples. This sort of learning typically involves complicated techniques, but researchers achieved state-of-the-art results using a simpler approach.
Tech & Society
Crowdsourcing a Cure: Covid Moonshot, the crowdsourced effort to find a cure
Researchers are drawing up blueprints for drugs to fight Covid-19. Machine learning is identifying those most likely to be effective. Covid Moonshot, an international group of scientists in academia and industry, is crowdsourcing designs for molecules with potential to thwart the coronavirus.
Tech & Society
AI’s Got Talent: The AI Song Contest replaced Eurovision during the pandemic.
Music that features a “singing” koala bear took the prize in one of Europe’s highest-profile AI competitions yet. A team of Australian programmers, designers, and musicians won the inaugural AI Song Contest with a koala-tinged track called “Beautiful the World.”
Machine Learning Research
Human-Level X-Ray Diagnosis: A research summary of CheXbert for labeling chest x-rays
Like nurses who can’t decipher a doctor’s handwriting, machine learning models can’t decipher medical scans — without labels. Conveniently, natural language models can read medical records to extract labels for X-ray images.
Tech & Society
Information Warfare Covid Edition: Facebook used humans and AI to spot false Covid claims.
Facebook’s AI can’t spot Covid-19 disinformation on its own. But with human help, it can slow the spread. Facebook uses a combination of humans and neural nets to crack down on messages that make false claims about Covid-19, which may have deadly consequences.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.