AI with AI

In COVID-related AI news, Andy and Dave discuss an approach from FiveThirtyEight that uses a mini-model-ensemble to predict possible trajectories for the COVID-19 death toll. MIT Tech Review has released a tracker for COVID-19 tracing trackers, which includes information on how they work and what policies they have in place. In non-COVID-related AI news, DIU releases a solicitation for Vigilante Keeper, an AI solution for detecting behavioral changes that might indicate increased vulnerability. OpenAI releases an analysis that shows the amount of computation needed to train an ImageNet classifier decreases by a factor of 2 every 16 months, which suggests algorithm progress has resulted in more gains than increased hardware efficiency. The Library of Congress is using machine learning to digitize and organize photos from old newspapers. Microsoft unveils a new tool in Word that makes sentence-level suggestions. And MIT Tech Review Insights publishes an examination of Asia’s advantage in AI with a look at the Asia-Pacific region in the Global AI Agenda. In research, Andy and Dave discuss RTFM (Read to Fight Monsters) from Facebook, which uses roguelike procedural generation to dynamically create goals, monsters, and other attributes, which agents then attempt to fight. The book of the week comes from Miroslav Kubat, with the second edition of An Introduction to Machine Learning. The Australian Defense College has announced the winners of its 2020 Sci-Fi Writing Competition. The full documentary for AlphaGo – The Movie, is now available on YouTube. The proceedings are now available from a federal health virtual forum on AI for COVID-19 Response. CSET will host a discussion on lessons learned for Algorithmic Warfare in DoD on 27 May. And LessWrong by Stuart Armstrong takes a look at Kurzweil's predictions (from 1999) about 2019.