AI with AI

Andy and Dave discuss the update to the US National AI Research and Development Strategic Plan, which establishes 8 objectives for federally funded AI research. Meanwhile, the European Commission starts its pilot phase for ethics guidelines for trustworthy AI, with the first AI Alliance Assembly meeting in Brussels and the High-Level Expert Group of AI (AI HLEG). The Joint AI Center, in conjunction with CMU, CrowdAI, and DIU, plans to make available xBD (x-Building-Damage), an open-source labeled data set of satellite imagery of some of the largest natural disasters in the past decade; it will contain ~700k building annotations across over 5,000 km^2 of imagery from 15 countries. The JAIC also announced a partnership with Singapore’s Defence Science and Technology Agency to collaborate on AI in humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. A white paper by Pactera suggests that 85% of AI projects fail. A new DARPA program, Virtual Intelligence Processing (VIP) aims to explore “brain-inspired” methods for dealing with incomplete, spare, and noisy data. Facebook releases AI Habitat, an open-source environment for training and testing AI agents. And NIST’s RFI on AI Standards receives nearly 100 respondents. Researchers at Adobe Research and Berkeley use AI to detect facial image manipulations that were done by Photoshop’s “Face-Aware Liquify” feature; while humans were able to judge an altered face 53% of the time, the Convolutional Neural Network tool achieved results as high as 99%.