Letters
I just replaced my two-year-old phone with a new one and figured out how to take long-exposure photos of Nova even while she’s asleep and the lights are very low. This piece of technology brought me a surprising amount of joy!
Business
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.
Machine Learning Research
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.
Tech & Society
The French government plans to roll out a national identification service based on face recognition. Critics warn that the new system violates citizens’ privacy.
Business
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.
Science
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.
Business
AI startups are being scooped up at an accelerating pace, many by companies outside the tech sphere. A report by CB Insights shows that, as of August, 2019 was on track to surpass last year’s record number of AI startup acquisitions.
The Batch Newsletter
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.
Letters
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.
Science
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.
Tech & Society
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.
Tech & Society
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.