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Ethical AI, de-biasing job-matching AI, and more!

Last Week in AI #122

Last Week in AI

Jun 28, 2021

searching for new job opportunity — Image Credits: Ms Tech | Envat via MIT Tech Review

Mini Briefs

DeepMind scientist calls for ethical AI as Google faces ongoing backlash

After a number of departures from its Ethical AI team, Google has faced significant backlash for its perceived lack of commitment to AI ethics and diversity. As Google has faced criticism from within and without, another prominent voice entered the conversation when Raia Hadsell, research scientist at Google DeepMind, gave a talk where the argued that "responsible AI is a job for all." While Hadsell touched on the role of interdisciplinary work during the talk, she stated her focus on what researchers and scientists can do to build responsible, and detailed some of the resistance she's met.

LinkedIn’s job-matching AI was biased. The company’s solution? More AI.

Sites like LinkedIn use algorithms to match candidates with job opportunities--a few years ago, LinkedIn found its recommendation algorithms produced bias results. In particular, those algorithms ranked candidates on the basis of how likely they were to apply for a position or respond to a recruiter. This resulted in men being more frequently referred to open roles because of their higher aggressiveness in seeking opportunities on average. How did LinkedIn attempt to fix the problem? By building another AI system to counteract the bias in the first. This second algorithm ensures that before referring matches curated by the original engine, the recommendation system includes a representative distribution of users across gender.

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News

Advances & Business

Tool around in a real-time generated AI version of 'GTAV' - "Last month, you may have seen that a group of researchers created a machine learning system that could transform the presentation of Grand Theft Auto V into something that looks almost photorealistic."
Tesla unveils its new supercomputer (5th most powerful in the world) to train self-driving AI - "Tesla has unveiled its new supercomputer, which is already the fifth most powerful in the world, and it’s going to be the predecessor of Tesla’s upcoming new Dojo supercomputer. It is being used to train the neural nets powering Tesla’s Autopilot and upcoming self-driving AI."
Language models like GPT-3 could herald a new type of search engine - "The way we search online hasn’t changed in decades. A new idea from Google researchers could make it more like talking to a human expert"
Baidu Inc. to Deploy 1,000 ‘Apollo Moon' Level-4 Robotaxis Over the Next 3 Years in China - "China's Baidu revealed its next-generation electric robotaxi called “Apollo Moon", which the company Baidu says is a monumental milestone in the large-scale commercialization of fully autonomous ride-hailing services in China."
Hyundai acquires controlling stake in U.S. robotics firm Boston Dynamics for $880 million - "The deal was initiated last year in December, where the automaking firms will buy a share of $880 million. The deal will involve Hyundai and its affiliates, including Hyundai Motor Co., Hyundai Mobis Co., and Hyundai Glovis Co. "
A Social and Environmental Certificate for AI Systems - "Impression Figure by Margaret Watts Hughes, pigment on glass. Source: Public Domain Review.As more countries realize the potential AI has to offer in terms of economic opportunities, large societal problems have also been lumped under the category of things that can be “solved” using AI."
Nvidia’s Vid2Vid Cameo brings ‘talking heads’ to videoconferences - "Where does your enterprise stand on the AI adoption curve? Take our AI survey to find out. Nvidia today took the wraps off of Vid2Vid Cameo, an AI model that uses generative adversarial networks (GANs) to create realistic “talking-head” videos using a single photo of a person."
AI Creates False Documents That Fake Out Hackers - "Hackers constantly improve at penetrating cyber defenses to steal valuable documents. So some researchers propose using an artificial-intelligence algorithm to hopelessly confuse them, once they break in, by hiding the real deal amid a mountain of convincing fakes."
Same or Different? The Question Flummoxes Neural Networks. - "For all their triumphs, AI systems can’t seem to generalize the concepts of “same” and “different.” Without that, researchers worry, the quest to create truly intelligent machines may be hopeless."
Does Your AI Model Know What It’s Talking About? Here’s One Way To Find Out. - "While Jian-Yang’s creation may seem absurd, in fact his app displays an intelligence that most AI models in use today do not: it only gives an answer that it knows is 100% accurate."
Google Survey Explores Methods for Making DL Models ‘Smaller, Faster, and Better’ - "Deep Learning (DL) has become the dominant methodology in the machine learning field. But there is more to DL than just performance: as today’s complex models demand more and more parameters and compute resources, researchers are also critically examining these important footprint metrics."
These Are The Startups Applying AI To Tackle Climate Change - "Climate change is the most pressing threat that the human species faces today. Artificial intelligence is the most powerful tool that humanity has at its disposal in the twenty-first century. Can we deploy the second to combat the first?"
Linux Foundation initiative advocates open standards for voice assistants - "Elevate your enterprise data technology and strategy at Transform 2021. Organizations are beginning to develop, design, and manage their own AI-powered voice assistant systems independent of platforms such as Siri and Alexa."
Leaked memo: Google is spinning up a new internal group focused on machine learning in a push to make 'substantial gains' in AI - "Google is spinning out dozens of employees from its artificial-intelligence research division into a new group focused on machine learning, as part of a push to make "substantial gains" in AI, Insider has learned."

Concerns & Hype

Machine learning’s rise, applications, and challenges - "Elevate your enterprise data technology and strategy at Transform 2021. The terms “artificial intelligence” and “machine learning” are often used interchangeably, but there’s an important difference between the two."
This Agency Wants to Figure Out Exactly How Much You Trust AI - "An AI system used by doctors to diagnose disease should be more accurate than one recommending music. The National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) is a federal agency best known for measuring things like time or the number of photons that pass through a chicken."
What’s Going on With Amazon’s “High-Tech” Warehouse Robots? - "Amazon describes these as high-tech autonomous vehicles, but the technology looks like it’s already out of date"
A New Approach To Mitigating AI’s Negative Impact - "Stanford launches an Ethics and Society Review Board that asks researchers to take an early look at the impact of their work."
Now is the Time. Tell Congress to Ban Federal Use of Face Recognition - "Cities across the country have banned government use of face surveillance technology, and many more are weighing proposals to do so."
The World Needs Deepfake Experts to Stem This Chaos - "Sam Gregory is an expert on human rights, video, and deepfakes. He has led a global effort focused on preparing better for deepfakes at WITNESS, which helps people use video and technology for human rights. He is also a long-time advocate for human rights in Myanmar."
How Twitter hired tech's biggest critics to build ethical AI - "Machine learning engineer Ari Font was worried about the future of Twitter's algorithms. It was mid-2020, and the leader of the team researching ethics and accountability for the company's ML had just left Twitter. For Font, the future of the ethics research was unclear."
The Alarming Blind Spots in Healthcare AI - "Artificial intelligence is everywhere. And increasingly, it's becoming a critical part of healthcare. Doctors use it to try to suss out symptoms of deadly infections like sepsis; companies like Google are developing apps to help you identify ailments just by uploading some pics. "

Expert Opinions & Discussion within the field

Computer scientists are questioning whether Alphabet’s DeepMind will ever make A.I. more human-like - "Computer scientists are questioning whether DeepMind, the Alphabet-owned U.K. firm that's widely regarded as one of the world's premier AI labs, will ever be able to make machines with the kind of "general" intelligence seen in humans and animals."