Letters
Many of us apply labels to ourselves that shape our identity. Some say, “I’m a sports fan,” and this attitude motivates behaviors such as cheering for the home team. Others identify themselves as introverts, extroverts, vegetarians, gamers...
Business
Robots are moving into a job that traditionally required the human touch.What’s new: A commercial warehouse that ships electrical supplies deployed AI-driven robotic arms from Covariant, a high-profile Silicon Valley robotics firm.
Tech & Society
Androids may not dream of electric sheep, but some crack jokes about horses and cows. Meena, a 2.6-billion parameter chatbot developed by Google Brain, showed impressive conversational ability, discussing a variety of topics.
Science
A drug designed by AI has been approved for testing in humans. A UK startup focused on automated drug discovery teamed up with a Japanese pharmaceutical company to produce a new medicine for obsessive compulsive disorder.
Machine Learning Research
A protein’s biological function depends largely on its three-dimensional shape, but deducing its shape from its sequence of amino acids has been a longstanding problem. Researchers at DeepMind reveal how they used deep learning to solve the puzzle.
Tech & Society
Real-time face recognition has become standard operating procedure for cops in a few cities, in both authoritarian and democratic countries. After years of trials, police departments in Moscow and London are using face recognition to scan the streets for suspected criminals.
Machine Learning Research
Neural audio synthesizers like WaveRNN or GANSynth produce impressive sounds, but they require large, data-hungry neural networks. A new code library beefs up the neural music studio with efficient sound modules based on traditional synthesizer designs.
The Batch Newsletter
I just finished reading BJ Fogg’s new book, Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything. Fogg explains that the best way to build a new habit is to start small and succeed, rather than starting too big and giving up.
Letters
I just finished reading BJ Fogg’s new book, Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything. Fogg explains that the best way to build a new habit is to start small and succeed, rather than starting too big and giving up.
Tech & Society
A company that analyzes online information to predict epidemics spotted the upsurge in coronavirus at least a week ahead of public-health authorities. Canadian startup BlueDot alerted customers to the outbreak in he Chinese city of Wuhan on New Year’s Eve.
Machine Learning Research
School teachers may not like to hear this, but sometimes you get the best answer by peeking at your neighbor’s paper. A new language model framework peeks at the training data for context when making a prediction.
Tech & Society
A new tool connects novice programmers with projects that match their experience and interests. Github’s Good First Issues tool uses deep learning to find easy-to-fix issues among the collaborative software development platform’s multitude of open source projects.