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Last Week in AI News #81

Sep 7, 2020

Welcome to Last Week in AI, our newsletter about each week's most important news related to Artificial Intelligence.

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Mini Briefs

Robotics, AI, and Cloud Computing Combine to Supercharge Chemical and Drug Synthesis

IBM recently demoed a complex system for chemical testing and drug synthesis. The system has an AI component that predicts the results of chemical reactions, and a fully automated robotic experiment setup that runs chemical tests 24/7. Users can access the remote robotics lab online, and IBM can also install the system on-premise. With these tools working together, IBM is hoping to reduce typical drug discovery and verification time by half.

AI researchers use heartbeat detection to identify deepfake videos

Researchers from multiple groups are tackling the challenge of detecting deepfake videos by analyzing the apparent heartbeat of the people depicted in the video. This is possible, because a person’s blood flow changes their skin color ever so slightly, and this change is often detectable via a process called photoplethysmography (PPG). Because deepfakes are not currently optimizing to generate realisitic heartbeats, temporal or spatial anomalies in PPG signals allow resesarchers to detect deepfakes with a 97% accuracy.

News

Advances & Business

This AI Expert From Senegal Is Helping Showcase Africans In STEM - Adji Bousso Dieng will be Princeton’s School of Engineering’s first Black female faculty.
Google’s AI-powered flood alerts now cover all of India and parts of Bangladesh - India, the world’s second most populated nation, sees more than 20% of the global flood-related fatalities each year as overrun riverbanks sweep tens of thousands of homes with them. Two years ago, Google volunteered to help.
Finding magnetic eruptions in space with an AI assistant - MMS look for explosive reconnection events as it flies through the magnetopause - the boundary region where Earth’s magnetic butts up against the solar wind that flows throughout the solar system.
This know-it-all AI learns by reading the entire web nonstop - Diffbot is building the biggest-ever knowledge graph by applying image recognition and natural-language processing to billions of web pages.
Bosch and Ford will test autonomous parking in Detroit - Ford, Bosch, and Dan Gilbert’s real estate firm Bedrock today detailed an autonomous parking pilot scheduled to launch in September at The Assembly, a mixed-used building in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood.
Create your own moody quarantine music with Google’s AI - Lo-Fi Player, the latest project out of Google Magenta, lets you mix tunes with the help of machine learning by interacting with a virtual room.
Apple launches AI/ML residency program to attract niche experts - As Apple’s artificial language and machine learning initiatives continue to expand, its interest in attracting talent has grown - a theme that’s barely under the surface of the company’s occasionally updated Machine Learning Research blog.
Dusty Robotics CEO Tessa Lau Discusses Robotics Start-Ups and Autonomous Robots for Construction - Tessa Lau is Founder/CEO at Dusty Robotics, whose mission is to increase construction industry productivity by introducing robotic automation on the jobsite.

Concerns & Hype

Google Offers to Help Others With the Tricky Ethics of AI - Companies pay cloud computing providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google big money to avoid operating their own digital infrastructure.
The Peace Dividends Of The Autonomous Vehicle Wars - The rapid growth of the mobile market in the late 2000s and early 2010s led to a burst of technological progress.
Ethics must be part of the development process’ - The increasing use of AI (artificial intelligence) in the development of new medical technologies demands greater attention to ethical aspects.

Analysis & Policy

White House announces $1 billion for research into AI and Quantum Computing - In its effort to become the computing superpower of the free world, the US has decided to pour in $1 billion into what it thinks are the two most up and coming technologies in the world of computers AI and Quantum Computers.
China’s new AI trade rules could hamper a TikTok sale - TikTok’s attempt to sell itself and avert a possible US ban may run into some complications. The Wall Street Journal reports that China has unveiled new restrictions on AI technology exports that could affect TikTok.

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