Tech & Society
Most deep learning applications run on TensorFlow or PyTorch. A new analysis found that they have very different audiences. A researcher at Cornell University compared references to TensorFlow and PyTorch in public sources over the past year.
Tech & Society
More than 900 indigenous languages are spoken across the Americas, nearly half of all tongues in use worldwide. A website tracks the growing number of resources available for natural language processing researchers interested in studying, learning from, and saving these fading languages.
Tech & Society
The French government plans to roll out a national identification service based on face recognition. Critics warn that the new system violates citizens’ privacy.
Letters
Last week, I saw a lot of social media discussion about a paper using deep learning to generate artificial comments on news articles. I’m not sure why anyone thinks this is a good idea. At best, it adds noise to the media environment. At worst, it’s a tool for con artists and propagandists.
Tech & Society
Basketball coaches sketch plays on a whiteboard to help players get the ball through the net. A new AI model predicts how opponents would respond to these tactics. A team of researchers in Taiwan trained a conditional generative adversarial network on data from National Basketball Association games.
Tech & Society
Amazon is writing what it hopes will become U.S. law governing use of face recognition technology. At a press event, Jeff Bezos told that his company’s lawyers are drafting a statutory framework to guide what he views as an inevitable federal crackdown on face recognition.
Tech & Society
Independent research lab OpenAI designed virtual agents to play hide-and-seek. They evolved increasingly clever strategies, eventually hacking the game world’s physics to gain advantage.
Tech & Society
As deep learning becomes more resource-intensive, labs with better funding tend to achieve better results. One consequence is that less wealthy organizations often can’t replicate state-of-the-art successes. Some observers are calling it a crisis.
Tech & Society
A growing number of nations use AI to track their citizens. A new report sheds light on who’s watching and how. “The Global Expansion of AI Surveillance” details which countries are buying surveillance gear, which companies are supplying it, and what technologies are most in-demand.
Tech & Society
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.
Tech & Society
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.
Tech & Society
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.