AI with AI

Andy and Dave take a look at the reintroduction of the "AI in Government Act," a bill that intends to get more AI technical experts into the US Government. San Francisco bans facial recognition software (but leaves the door open in the future), while Moscow announces plans to weave AI facial recognition into its urban surveillance net. Facebook opens up its data to academic researchers for analysis. DARPA announces the Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program, to automate air-to-air combat; DARPA also announces Teaching AI to Leverage Overlooked Residuals (TAILOR), to make soldiers fitter, happier, and more productive. And IARPA announces Trojans in AI (TrojAI), an effort to inspect AI for malicious code. In research, Andy and Dave discuss research from Frankle at MIT that proposes a "Lottery Ticket" hypothesis, which suggests only certain "winning combinations" are necessary for training neural networks, and that researchers have been training neural networks that are much larger than they need to be to increase the chances of includes one of these winning combinations. Leon Bottou at Facebook AI proposes a method for using AI to identify causal relationships in data (and which goes against the common modern practice of combining data sets into one giant dataset). And research from Cambridge, George IT, and the University of Pennsylvania demonstrates that Magic: the Gathering is officially the world’s most complicated game (and is Turing complete). In reports of the week, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute releases the Impact of AI on Strategic Stability and Nuclear Risk. IKV and Pax Christi release The State of AI. Analytics Vedhya has compiled a list of 25 open datasets for deep learning. Benedek Rozemberczki has curated a list of decision tree research papers. The IEEE Spectrum releases a report on Accelerating Autonomous Vehicle Technology. The May 2019 issue of The Scientist contains 15 articles on how Biology is tackling AI. David Kriesel provides A Brief Introduction to Neural Networks. COL Jasper Jeffers wins the 2019 Sci-Fi Writing Contest with AN41. The ICLR 2019 provides video on four talks, including Frankle’s Lottery Ticket hypothesis, and Bottou’s Casual Invariance. Melanie Mitchell gives a Ted Talk on the Collapse of AI and the possibility of an AI winter. And the National Academies-Royal Society Public Symposium will be meeting in DC on 24 May for an International Dialogue on AI.