Jul 10, 2019
Picking Up the Pieces
Sorting data into the right categories is AI's bread-and-butter task. Now the technology is being used to sort recyclables into the right bins.
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Jul 10, 2019
Digital Rosetta Stone
Translating languages that haven't been understood since ancient times typically requires intensive linguistic research. It turns out that neural networks can do the job.
Jul 10, 2019
Then Their Eyes Locked — Not!
Eye contact is such an essential element in interpersonal communication that it’s considered rude in face-to-face conversation to avoid another person’s eyes. But a lowered gaze is standard in video chat, when the face on the screen is often several inches lower than the camera’s lens...
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch: Faking out FaceTime, deciphering lost languages, predicting scientific discoveries, reading body language, recycling with robots
If you wonder how often I take online courses myself, the answer is: Quite often. I have a longstanding interest in AI for healthcare.
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch: Predicting Violence, DeepNude, Preparing For Robots, Regulating Medical AI
As we were working on the latest course of the deeplearning.ai TensorFlow Specialization, instructor Laurence Moroney messaged me his LSTM-generated poetry, created by learning from a database of roughly 100 Irish song lyrics.
Jul 03, 2019
Where the Robots Will Land
Automatons will take 20 million manufacturing jobs globally by 2030 even as they drive substantial economic growth, according to a new study. Humans can get ahead of the curve by distributing the benefits where they’ll be needed most.
Jul 03, 2019
Rules For Medical AI
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulates medical devices from stents to diagnostic systems. Once approved, those things don’t change much. Now the agency is formulating standards for medical devices that take advantage of AI that's constantly learning.
Jul 03, 2019
What You See is What You Say
Teaching a computer meaningful associations between words and videos typically requires training on tens of thousands of videos painstakingly annotated by hand. That’s both labor-intensive and prone to inconsistency due to the often abstract relationship between video imagery and soundtrack.
Jul 03, 2019
Hearing Problems
Schools, prisons, and other public places have been relying on AI-enhanced microphones to detect signs of trouble. They may have been better off putting their money elsewhere.
Jul 03, 2019
Seeing Through Poor Uses of AI
Worries over deepfake technology have concentrated on the potential impact of computer-generated media on politics. But image-generation technology also can have a malign impact on private citizens. Consider DeepNude, an app that generates naked images from photos of clothed women.
Jul 03, 2019
Tight Fit
If you’re pointing out an object, you don’t describe the background. Yet most object detection algorithms focus on a rectangle surrounding the object, not its precise boundary. New research offers a way to turn those boxes into tightly fitted curves.
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch: Grieving for Dead Robots, Hacking Animal Brains, Navigating Without GPS, Watching Electrons
AI is still compute-hungry. With supervised learning algorithms and emerging approaches to self-supervised and unsupervised learning, we are nowhere near satisfying this hunger.