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Image credit: Evan Ackerman via IEEE Spectrum

Mini Briefs

Robotics investments recap: September 2020

Looking at areas of investment is a strong indicator of what the future of AI and robotics will look like. For the first time in months, autonomous vehicles were not the biggest area of investments in robotics and related technologies. Healthcare systems and processors for artificial intelligence pulled ahead in September 2020. Large scale investments into state of the art surgical robotics is making the vision of telemedicine a reality for high skill operations that need to be conducted remotely.

A GPT-3 bot posted comments on Reddit for a week and no one noticed

Under the username “/u/thegentlemetre”, a chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model posted roughly once a minute in a subreddit of over 30 million users. With quality of text generation increasing, it’s important to think about the ethics and ramifications of AI in the real world. With incidents appearing like this in the wild, this largely confirms concerns OpenAI raised over its previous language model GPT-2, which it said was too dangerous to release to the public because of its potential for misuse. The AI lab is trying to keep GPT-3 under control as well, giving access (via a website) only to selected individuals and licensing the whole software exclusively to Microsoft.

News

Advances & Business

• Nvidia unveils Maxine, a managed cloud AI videoconferencing service - Nvidia today launched Nvidia Maxine, a platform that provides developers with a suite of GPU-accelerated AI conferencing software to enhance video quality.

• Headroom, which uses AI to supercharge videoconferencing, raises $5M - Videoconferencing has become a cornerstone of how many of us work these days — so much so that one leading service, Zoom, has graduated into verb status because of how much it’s getting used.

• Anticipating heart failure with machine learning - Every year, roughly one out of eight U.S. deaths is caused at least in part by heart failure. One of acute heart failure’s most common warning signs is excess fluid in the lungs, a condition known as “pulmonary edema.” 

• AI-Powered Drone Learns Extreme Acrobatics - Researchers from the Robotics and Perception Group at the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, in collaboration with Intel, have developed a neural network training method that “enables an autonomous quadrotor to fly extreme acrobatic maneuvers with only onboard sensing and computation.”

• Waymo will allow more people to ride in its fully driverless vehicles in Phoenix - Waymo, the self-driving unit of Alphabet, announced it will be opening up its fully driverless vehicles to all customers of its ride-hailing service in Phoenix, Arizona. Previously, the company only allowed a select few people.

• An AI can simulate an economy millions of times to create fairer tax policy - Deep reinforcement learning has trained AIs to beat humans at complex games like Go and StarCraft. Could it also do a better job at running the economy?

Concerns & Hype

• UK passport photo checker shows bias against dark-skinned women - Women with darker skin are more than twice as likely to be told their photos fail UK passport rules when they submit them online than lighter-skinned men, according to a BBC investigation.

• Sales Calls Have Gone Virtual, and AI Is Listening In - The Covid-19 pandemic has converted thousands of salespeople from road warriors to Zoom warriors. Some companies are making the most of this shift by using tools powered by artificial intelligence to track and analyze their salesforce’s virtual pitches.

• Live facial recognition is tracking kids suspected of being criminals - In Buenos Aires, the first known system of its kind is hunting down minors who appear in a national database of alleged offenders.

Expert Opinions & Discussion within the field

• 9 months after my ICLR spotlight award, as an Independent Researcher. - In December 2019, I got published at ICLR 2020 as an Independent Researcher and received a Spotlight award for my publication. The goal, to get enough recognition to become a Research Software Engineer at a known industrial research group.

• The biggest barrier to humane, ethical AI: Capitalism itself - Money speaks louder than anything. 4 minute ReadOver the last several years, a growing chorus of academics, activists, and technologists have decried the ways in which artificial intelligence technology could engender bias, exacerbate inequity, and violate civil rights.

• Inside the strange new world of being a deepfake actor - There’s an art to being a performer whose face will never be seen.

That’s all for this week! If you are not subscribed and liked this, feel free to subscribe below!

Recent Articles:

• The Rise of “Killer Robots” and the Race to Restrain Them

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