AI with AI
Episode 3.34: D/Generative
In COVID-related news, Nature publishes a review of COVID-19 AI tools, emphasizing that most tools are still in development and largely unproven. Inserm selects Expert System's AI support for its COVID-19 research and its group of over 10,000 researchers. Researchers provide in open-source a large annotated dataset of CT and X-ray images from COVID-19 patients, called the BIMCV COVID-19+. In regular AI news, Microsoft announces that it will not sell its facial recognition technology to police departments in the US until a national law is in place to help govern its use. On that note, a new federal bill in development, the Justice in Policing Act, contains policy guidelines on the use and limitations of facial recognition technology for police. OpenAI releases a commercial product API for accessing its AI models, to include the 175B parameter GPT-3, although other researchers are expressing concern over the lack of accountability on bias. Facebook announces the winner of its Deepfake Challenge, where the winning model achieved at 65% accuracy on a set of 10,000 previously unseen clips. And Boston Dynamics makes its robot dog, Spot, available for sale at $74,500 plus tax. In research, a team at Duke University introduces PULSE, which sharpens blurry images, in essence by exploring the space of plausible high-res images that could result in the blurry image. The report of the week comes from Perry World House, who published the results of a Policy Roundtable on AI hosted last fall. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and the International Committee of the Red Cross offer their take on Limits on Autonomy in Weapon Systems, by identifying the practical elements of human control. The review of the week from University of Waterloo provides an overview of text detection and recognition in the wild. MacroPolo provides a snapshot of Global AI Talent, using participants from the 2019 NeurIPS. Spring-Verlag provides yet another free text, from Eiben and Smith, on an Introduction to Evolutionary Computing. And NavyCon 2020 provides brief snapshots on "navies, science fiction, and great power competition" from a host of participants.