Jun 19, 2019
Living Room Wars
Drone maker DJI released a toy robot tank that shoots splattering pellets, skitters on omnidirectional wheels, and learns to navigate the playroom battlefield.
Latest
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch: Easy Deepfakes, Sustainable AI, Biased Data, Realistic Image Generation
I spoke last week at re:MARS, Amazon's conference focusing on machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. I heard great talks from Jeff Bezos, Kate Darling, Ken Goldberg, Marc Raibert, and others.
Jun 12, 2019
Things Look Different Over There
The most widely used image-recognition systems are better at identifying items from wealthy households than from poor ones.
Jun 12, 2019
Better Than GAN?
Generative adversarial networks can synthesize images to help train computer vision systems. But GANs are compute-hungry and don’t always produce realistic output. Now there’s a more efficient and true-to-life alternative.
Jun 12, 2019
AI’s Steep Energy Cost
Here’s a conundrum: Deep learning could help address a variety of intractable problems, climate change among them. Yet neural networks can consume gargantuan quantities of energy, potentially dumping large amounts of heat-trapping gas into the atmosphere.
Jun 12, 2019
Vacation for Videographers
Another week, another way to make deepfakes. A team at Samsung recently proposed a model that generates talking-head videos by imposing facial landmarks over still images. Now a different team offers one that makes an onscreen speaker say anything you can type.
Jun 05, 2019
Drones Against Climate Change
In self-driving cars, the laser-radar hybrid known as lidar senses surrounding objects to determine the path of a vehicle. In drones, it’s being used to see through forests to evaluate the impact of climate change on the ground.
Jun 05, 2019
Probing Junk DNA
Deep learning helped geneticists find mutations associated with autism in vast regions of the human genome commonly known as junk DNA.
Jun 05, 2019
Fake News Detector
OpenAI hasn't released the full version of its GPT-2 language model, fearing the system would create a dark tide of fake news masquerading as real reporting. Now researchers offer a way to detect such computer-generated fancies.
Jun 05, 2019
Robots to the Rescue
Humanoid robots are notoriously ungainly, but nimble machines of roughly human size and shape could prove critical in disaster areas, where danger is high but architecture, controls, and tools are designed for homo sapiens. A new control system could help them move more nimbly.
Jun 05, 2019
10-Second Crystal Ball
Automated image recognition raises an ethical challenge: Can we take advantage of this useful technology without impinging on personal privacy and autonomy? That question becomes more acute with new research that uses imagery to predict human actions.
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch: Detecting Fake News, Fighting Climate Change, Seeing Into the Future, Rescue Robots, and More AI News
Healthcare is one of many sectors being transformed by AI. I have a personal interest in it, since my father worked on machine learning for diagnosis of liver diseases almost 40 years ago. It’s thanks partly to this work that I learned about AI from an early age.