AI with AI

The Joint Artificial Intelligence Center is up and running, and Andy and Dave discuss some of the newer revealed details. And the rebranded NeurIPS (originally NIPS), the largest machine learning conference of the year, holds its 32nd annual conference in Montreal, Canada, with a keynote discussion on “What Bodies Think About” by Michael Levin. And a group of graduate students have create a community-driven database to provide links to tasks, data, metrics, and results on the “state of the art” for AI. In other news, one of the “best paper” awards at NeurIPS goes to Neural Ordinary Differential Equations, research from University of Toronto that replaces the nodes and connections of typical neural networks with one continuous computation of differential equations. DeepMind publishes its paper on AlphaZero, which details the announcements made last year on the ability of the neural network to play chess, shogi, and go “from scratch.” And AlphaFold from DeepMind brings machine learning methods to a protein folding competition. In reports of the week, the AI Now Institute at New York University releases a 3rd annual report on understanding social implications of AI. With a blend of technology and philosophy, Arsiwalla and co-workers break up the complex “morphospace” of consciousness into three categories: computational, autonomy, and social; and they map various examples to this space. For interactive fun of generating images with a GAN, check out the “Ganbreeder,” though maybe not before going to sleep. In videos of the week, “Earworm” tells the tale of an AI that deleted a century; and CIMON, the ISS Robot, interacts with the space crew. And finally, Russia24 joins a long history of people dressing up and pretending to be robots.