AI with AI

Andy and Dave discuss Rodney Brooks' predictions on AI from early 2018 and his (on-going) review of those predictions. The European Commission releases a report on AI and Ethics, a framework for "Trustworthy AI." DARPA announces the Knowledge-directed AI Reasoning over Schemas (KAIROS) program, aimed at understanding "complex events." The Standardized Project Gutenberg Corpus attempts to provide researchers with broader data across the project's complete data holdings. And MORS announces a special meeting on AI and Autonomy at JHU/APL in February. In research, Andy and Dave discuss work from Keio University, which shows that slime mold can approximate solutions to NP-hard problems in linear time (and differently from other known approximations). Researchers in Spain, the UK, and the Netherlands demonstrate that kilobots (small 3 cm robots) with basic communication rule-sets will self-organize. Research from UCLA and Stanford creates an AI system that mimics how humans visualize and identify objects by feeding the system many pieces of an object, called "viewlets." NVIDIA shows off its latest GAN that can generate fictional human faces that are essentially indistinguishable from real ones; further, they structure their generator to provide more control over various properties of the latent space (such as pose, hair, face shape, etc). Other research attempts to judge a paper on how good it looks. And in the "click-bait" of the week, Andy and Dave discuss an article from TechCrunch, which misrepresented bona fide (and dated) AI research from Google and Stanford. Two surveys provide overviews on different topics: one on the safety and trustworthiness of deep neural networks, and the other on mini-UAV-based remote sensing. A report from CIFAR summarizes national and regional AI strategies (minus the US and Russia). In books of the week, Miguel Herman and James Robins are working on a Causal Inference Book, and Michael Nielsen has provided a book on Neural Networks and Deep Learning. CW3 Jesse R. Crifasi provides a fictional peek into a combat scenario involving AI. And Samim Winiger has started a mini-documentary series, "LIFE," on the intersection of humans and machines.