Tech & Society
Fighting Fakes: Six algorithms that help news sites spot deepfakes
A supergroup of machine learning models flags manipulated photos. Jigsaw, a tech incubator owned by Alphabet, released a system that detects digitally altered images.
Feb 12, 2020
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch: Hotter Dating Profiles, Pandas in Love, Compute for Coronavirus, Deepfake Detection, Self-Driving Cars Run Amok
A student once asked me, “Can an AI ever love?”Since the early days of AI, people have wondered whether AI can ever be conscious or feel emotions. Even though an artificial general intelligence may be centuries away, these are important questions.
Letters
Can AI Fall in Love?
A student once asked me, “Can an AI ever love?”Since the early days of AI, people have wondered whether AI can ever be conscious or feel emotions. Even though an artificial general intelligence may be centuries away, these are important questions.
Tech & Society
Phantom Menace: Fake images can fool some self-driving cars.
Some self-driving cars can’t tell the difference between a person in the roadway and an image projected on the street. A team of researchers used projectors to trick semiautonomous vehicles into detecting people, road signs, and lane markings that didn’t exist.
Machine Learning Research
That Swipe-Right Look: Photofeeler-D3 AI chooses the best pics for dating profiles.
In an online dating profile, the photo that highlights your physical beauty may not be the one that makes you look smart or honest — also important traits in a significant other. A new neural network helps pick the most appealing shots.
Tech & Society
Tools For a Pandemic: Chinese tech giants provide resources for Covid research.
Chinese tech giants have opened their AI platforms to scientists fighting coronavirus. Alibaba Cloud and Baidu are offering a powerful weapon to life-science researchers working to stop the spread of the illness officially known as Covid-19: free access to their computing horsepower and tools.
Machine Learning Research
What Love Sounds Like: AI system recognizes the sounds of mating pandas.
Female giant pandas are fertile for only 24 to 36 hours a year: Valentine’s Day on steroids. A new neural network alerts human keepers when a panda couple mates.
Science
Extreme Weather Warning: Deep learning system helps predict extreme temperatures.
Severe heat waves and cold snaps are especially hard to forecast because atmospheric perturbations can have effects that are difficult to compute. Neural networks show promise where typical methods have stumbled.