Business
Agbots Want Jobs Americans Don’t
Advances in computer vision and robotic dexterity may reach the field just in time to save U.S. agriculture from a looming labor shortage. CNN Business surveyed the latest crop of AI-powered farmbots.
Latest
Machine Learning Research
Speech Recognition With an Accent
Models that achieve state-of-the-art performance in automatic speech recognition (ASR) often perform poorly on nonstandard speech. New research offers methods to make ASR more useful to users with heavy accents or speech impairment.
Tech & Society
Generative Models Rock
AI’s creative potential is becoming established in the visual arts. Now musicians are tapping neural networks for funkier grooves, tastier licks, and novel subject matter.
Business
My Chatbot Will Call Your Chatbot
Companies with large numbers of contractual relationships may leave millions of dollars on the table because it’s not practical to customize each agreement. A new startup offers a chatbot designed to claw back that money.
Machine Learning Research
Working Through Uncertainty
How to build robots that respond to novel situations? When prior experience is limited, enabling a model to describe its uncertainty can enable it to explore more avenues to success.
Tech & Society
Easing Cross-Border Collaboration
Tighter national borders impede progress in AI. So industry leaders are calling for a different kind of immigration reform. The Partnership on AI published a report calling out the corrosive effect of restrictive immigration policies and suggesting alternatives.
The Batch Newsletter
Robot Farm Workers, Making Algorithms Rock, Automating Contract Negotiations, Recognizing Accented Speech
Over the weekend, we hosted our first Pie & AI meetup in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in collaboration with the AI Malaysia group, MDEC, and ADAX. The event was part of Malaysia’s AI & Data Week 2019. Several people traveled from neighboring southeast Asian countries to attend!
Letters
Pie & AI in Kuala Lumpur
Over the weekend, we hosted our first Pie & AI meetup in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in collaboration with the AI Malaysia group, MDEC, and ADAX. The event was part of Malaysia’s AI & Data Week 2019.
Machine Learning Research
What Language Models Know
Watson set a high bar for language understanding in 2011, when it famously whipped human competitors in the televised trivia game show Jeopardy! IBM’s special-purpose AI required around $1 billion. Research suggests that today’s best language models can accomplish similar tasks right off the shelf.
Science
Chimp Recognition
AI is capable of picking faces out of the crowd — even if that crowd is squabbling over bananas in a jungle. Researchers at the University of Oxford developed a face recognition app that identifies individual chimpanzees in footage shot in the wilds of Guinea.
Tech & Society
Facing Down Deepfakes
Deepfakes threaten to undermine law and order, perhaps democracy itself. A coalition of tech companies, nonprofits, and academics joined forces to counter potential adverse impacts.
Machine Learning Research
Leveling the Playing Field
Deep reinforcement learning has given machines apparent hegemony in vintage Atari games, but their scores have been hard to compare — with one another or with human performance — because there are no rules governing what machines can and can’t do to win. Researchers aim to change that.