Machine Learning Research
Misleading Metrics: Advances in metric learning may be illusions.
A growing body of literature shows that some steps in AI’s forward march may actually move sideways. A new study questions advances in metric learning.
Vision
Tech & Society
Outing Hidden Hatred: How Facebook built a hate speech detector
Facebook uses automated systems to block hate speech, but hateful posts can slip through when seemingly benign words and pictures combine to create a nasty message. The social network is tackling this problem by enhancing AI’s ability to recognize context.
Tech & Society
Who Was That Masked Protester?: Some face recognition can identify people in masks.
Vendors of face recognition are updating their tech as people don masks to protect against Covid-19. Police are bound to take notice. Companies that provide computer vision systems, including at least one that supplies law enforcement agencies, are training models to recognize obscured faces.
Machine Learning Research
Augmentation for Features: A technique for boosting underrepresented data classes
In any training dataset, some classes may have relatively few examples. A new technique can improve a trained model’s performance on such underrepresented classes. Researchers introduced a method that synthesizes extracted features of underrepresented classes.
Business
AI Does the Dishes: Dishcraft Robotics automatically cleans dishes and utensils.
A pioneer in dishwashing robots is reaching into commercial kitchens. Dishcraft Robotics uses machines equipped with computer vision to scrub dirties for corporate food services and, soon, restaurants.
Machine Learning Research
Another Look at YOLO: How YOLOv4 is different from earlier versions
The latest update of the acclaimed real-time object detector You Only Look Once is more accurate than ever. Researchers at Taiwan’s Institute of Information Science Academia Sinica offer YOLOv4 — the first version not to include the architecture’s original creators.
Hardware
Horsepower for Next-Gen Networks: Microsoft built OpenAI a custom AI supercomputer.
The for-profit research organization OpenAI has a new supercomputer to help achieve its dream of building the world’s most sophisticated AI. Microsoft engineered the new hardware network to train immense models on thousands of images, texts, and videos simultaneously.
Machine Learning Research
Small Data the Simple Way: A training technique that can outperform few-shot learning
Few-shot learning seeks to build models that adapt to novel tasks based on small numbers of training examples. This sort of learning typically involves complicated techniques, but researchers achieved state-of-the-art results using a simpler approach.
Machine Learning Research
Human-Level X-Ray Diagnosis: A research summary of CheXbert for labeling chest x-rays
Like nurses who can’t decipher a doctor’s handwriting, machine learning models can’t decipher medical scans — without labels. Conveniently, natural language models can read medical records to extract labels for X-ray images.
Tech & Society
Information Warfare Covid Edition: Facebook used humans and AI to spot false Covid claims.
Facebook’s AI can’t spot Covid-19 disinformation on its own. But with human help, it can slow the spread. Facebook uses a combination of humans and neural nets to crack down on messages that make false claims about Covid-19, which may have deadly consequences.
Tech & Society
Mask Monitor: Paris and Cannes used computer vision to detect face masks.
Cameras that detect face masks are helping French authorities to evaluate citizens’ adherence to government mandates intended to fight Covid-19. Starting this week, everyone riding public transportation in France is required to wear a face mask.
Tech & Society
An Archive Unearthed: Newspaper Navigator indexes visual elements in archival text.
An algorithm indexed photos, ads, and other images embedded in 170 years of American newspapers. Created by researchers at the University of Washington and U.S. Library of Congress, Newspaper Navigator uses object recognition to organize visual features of newspapers dating back to 1789.