Tech & Society
Deepfakes for Good: Tencent on the commercial value of deepfakes
A strategy manifesto from one of China’s biggest tech companies declares, amid familiar visions of ubiquitous AI, that deepfakes are more boon than bane.
Latest
Machine Learning Research
All Examples Are Not Equal: An algorithm for improved semi-supervised learning
Semi-supervised learning — a set of training techniques that use a small number of labeled examples and a large number of unlabeled examples — typically treats all unlabeled examples the same way. But some examples are more useful for learning than others.
Tech & Society
Near-Miss Detection: Traffic monitoring AI predicts odds of collisions.
AI is helping avert traffic accidents by assessing the risk of car crashes at specific intersections. MicroTraffic, a Canadian video analytics company, predicts the odds that accidents will occur at intersections that traditional methods overlook.
Letters
Values for the AI Community, Part 2: Readers Respond
Last week, I asked what values the AI community stands for. Thank you to everyone who replied! The email responses in aggregate ran to 55 pages of text, and I enjoyed reading all of them.
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch: Predicting Car Crashes, Profiting From Deepfakes, Piloting Drone Swarms, Grading Data
Last week, I asked what values the AI community stands for. Thank you to everyone who replied! The email responses in aggregate ran to 55 pages of text, and I enjoyed reading all of them.
Machine Learning Research
When Optimization is Suboptimal: How gradient descent can sometimes lead to model bias
Bias arises in machine learning when we fit an overly simple function to a more complex problem. A theoretical study shows that gradient descent itself may introduce such bias and render algorithms unable to fit data properly.
Tech & Society
Retail Surveillance Revealed: How Rite-Aid used face recognition for security
A major retailer’s AI-powered surveillance program apparently targeted poor people and minorities. Rite-Aid, a U.S.-based pharmacy chain, installed face recognition systems in many of its New York and Los Angeles stores.
Science
Birdwatching With AI: A computer vision system recognizes individual birds.
Neural networks learned to tell one bird from another, enabling scientists to study their behavior in greater detail. Researchers from universities in Europe and Africa trained eural networks to recognize individual birds with up to 90 percent accuracy.
Machine Learning Research
Hidden in Plain Sight: Researchers make clothes that fool face recognition.
With the rise of AI-driven surveillance, anonymity is in fashion. Researchers are working on clothing that evades face recognition systems and designed a t-shirt that tricks a variety of object detection models into failing to spot people.
Letters
Values for the AI Community
Earlier this week, I asked a question on social media: What is the most important problem that the AI community should work on? Thousands of you responded. The most frequently mentioned themes included...
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch: Apple's AI Strategy, Retail Surveillance, Clothes That Fight Face Recognition, Suboptimal Optimizers
Earlier this week, I asked a question on social media: What is the most important problem that the AI community should work on? Thousands of you responded. The most frequently mentioned themes included...
Hardware
New Horsepower for Neural Nets: UK startup Graphcore released its Colossus MK2 chip for AI.
A high-profile semiconductor startup made a bid for the future of AI computation. UK startup Graphcore released the Colossus Mk2, a processor intended to perform the matrix math calculations at the heart of deep learning more efficiently than other specialized processors.