Letters
Values for the AI Community, Part 3: Ethical AI
Like many people in the AI community, I am saddened by the sudden departure from Google of ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru. Timnit is a tireless champion of diversity and fairness in AI.
Tech & Society
Tech & Society
Cataloging AI Gone Wrong: The AI Incident Database tracks machine learning mistakes
A new database tracks failures of automated systems including machine learning models. The Partnership on AI, a nonprofit consortium of businesses and institutions, launched the AI Incident Database, a searchable collection of reports on the technology’s missteps.
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Phantom Menace: Fighter pilot trains against augmented reality jet.
A fighter pilot battled a true-to-life virtual enemy in midair. In the skies over southern California, an airman pitted his dogfighting skills against an AI-controlled opponent that was projected onto his augmented-reality visor.
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Very Short, Did Read: TLDR generates short summaries of scientific articles.
A new summarization model boils down AI research papers to a single sentence. TLDR from Allen Institute for AI creates at-a-glance summaries of scientific research papers. It’s up and running at Semantic Scholar, a research database, where searches now return its pithy precis.
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Washington Wrestles with AI: U.S. federal agencies lag at AI uptake
The U.S. government’s effort to take advantage of AI has not lived up to its promise, according to a new report. Implementations of machine learning systems by federal agencies are “uneven at best, and problematic and perhaps dangerous at worst".
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Charting the AI Patent Explosion: AI patents doubled between 2012 and 2019.
A new study used AI to track the explosive growth of AI innovation. Researchers from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office deployed natural language processing to track AI’s increasing presence in four decades of patent data.
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Unsupervised Prejudice: Image classification models learned bias from ImageNet.
Social biases are well documented in decisions made by supervised models trained on ImageNet’s labels. But they also crept into the output of unsupervised models pretrained on the same dataset.
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That Kid Looks Like a Criminal: Conarc face recognition contained children's personal info.
In Argentina, a municipal face recognition system could misidentify children as suspected lawbreakers. Authorities in Buenos Aires are scanning subway riders’ faces to find offenders in a database of suspects but the system mixes criminal records with personal information about minors.
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AI Versus Voters: The companies using AI to predict elections
Major polling organizations took a drubbing in the press after they failed to predict the outcome in last week’s U.S. elections. At least one AI-powered model fared much better.
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Propaganda Watch: How military contractors fight disinformation with AI
The U.S. military enlisted natural language processing to combat disinformation. Primer, a San Francisco startup, is developing a system for the Department of Defense that sifts through news, social media, research, and reports to spot propaganda campaigns.
Tech & Society
GPT-3 Is No MD: GPT-3 lacks medical problem solving skills.
The world’s most sophisticated language model won’t replace your doctor anytime soon. Researchers at Nabla, an AI-enabled healthcare platform, found that GPT-3 lacks the logical reasoning skills to be a useful medical chatbot.
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Face Recognition Face-Off: How activists identify police with face recognition
Private citizens are using AI-driven surveillance to turn the tables on law enforcement. Activists are using face recognition to identify abusive cops, according to The New York Times.