Mini Briefs

Designed to Deceive: Do These People Look Real to You?

We've all heard of "don't believe everything you see online." With advancing deepfake technologies, the threshold for what's real and fake is growing ever more grey. This improvement is primarily accelerated by GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) where there is a generative network that spits out fake images and a discriminative network, which attempts to detect fake images in a sort of zero sum game. Companies like NVIDIA have outsourced GANs capable of generating convincing portraiture known as StyleGan2. These development raises questions about the proliferation of disinformation on social media and the risk in which fake profiles can lead to the integrity of our online society.

Big pharma is using AI and machine learning in drug discovery and development to save lives

Pharmaceutical companies have been slow in adopting digital health technologies. Yet, large pharmaceutical companies have invested tremendously in AI technologies at every stage from drug discovery to clinical trials. AI can reduce drug discovery costs by up to 70% by analyzing existing literature and modeling potential drugs interact with the human body. Furthermore, AI can make trials more efficient, reducing recurrent costs and improve participant monitoring. While not quite ready for primetime, AI can help mitigate future pandemics by making drug discovery more efficient and empower new healthcare technologies.

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News

Advances & Business

• Facial recognition software is learning to identify bear and cow faces - "Nowadays almost everyone uses facial recognition in some form or another -- maybe it's to get into your iPhone, or when social media platforms suggest tags in photos. But if you thought humans had the monopoly on facial recognition software, think again."

• Google: BERT now used on almost every English query - "BERT powers almost every single English based query done on Google Search, the company said during its virtual Search on 2020 event Thursday. That’s up from just 10% of English queries when Google first announced the use of the BERT algorithm in Search last October."

• Can an Algorithm Prevent Suicide? - "The Department of Veterans Affairs has turned to machine-learning to help identify vets at risk of taking their own lives. At a recent visit to the Veterans Affairs clinic in the Bronx, Barry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, learned that he belonged to a very exclusive club. According to a new A.I."

• How Zillow, Census Data, and Machine Learning Could Improve Our Water Use - "The gateway to more informed water use and better urban planning in your city could already be bookmarked on your computer."

• AI Can Run Your Work Meetings Now - "Julian Green was explaining the big problem with meetings when our meeting started to glitch. The pixels of his face rearranged themselves. A sentence came out as hiccups. Then he sputtered, froze, and ghosted."

• Need a Hypothesis? This A.I. Has One - "Slowly, machine-learning systems are beginning to generate ideas, not just test them."

• Northwestern Researchers Report Breakthrough Chest X-Ray Using AI To Detect COVID-19 - "It could be a game-changer; a COVID-19 test that’s cheaper and faster than the rest. CBS 2’s Jim Williams reports it’s artificial intelligence making the diagnosis. The technology is called Deep COVID-XR."

• An Open-Source Challenger to Popular Virtual Assistants - "Stanford researchers hope their open virtual assistant Almond can increase competition and better protect privacy."

• UC Berkeley Researchers Use AI For Digital Voicing Of Silent Speech - "Researchers at UC Berkeley have developed an AI model that detects ‘silent speech.’ The model is based on digital voicing to predict words and generate synthetic speech. Electromyography (EMG), with electrodes located at the face and throat, is used to detect the silent speech."

• Robotics researchers propose AI that locates and safely moves items on shelves - "A pair of new robotics studies from Google and the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) propose ways of finding occluded objects on shelves and solving “contact-rich” manipulation tasks like moving objects across a table."

• Percepto raises $45 million for robots that inspect critical infrastructure - "Autonomous inspection solutions company Percepto today announced a $45 million round. The funds come as Percepto pivots from drone-based products to general robotics-driven inspections incorporating third-party platforms like Boston Dynamics’ Spot."

• Cannabis companies use AI to create purer, stronger weed as marijuana industry booms - "Artificial intelligence is being used to create stronger strains of cannabis in a bid to find the most effective medical marijuana. Firms across Europe and the US are currently producing a raft of cannabis products – with the industry expected to be worth £32 billion by 2024."

• Gordon Bell Prize Winners Leverage Machine Learning For Molecular Dynamics - "A team of eight scientists from both the United States and China, using the “Summit” supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has developed a new protocol based on machine learning techniques that it says can simulate the movements of more than 100 million atoms per day"

Concerns & Hype

• Can We Make Our Robots Less Biased Than We Are? - "A.I. developers are committing to end the injustices in how their technology is often made and used."

• How AI bots and voice assistants reinforce gender bias - "The world may soon have more voice assistants than people—yet another indicator of the rapid, large-scale adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) across many fields. The benefits of AI are significant: it can drive efficiency, innovation, and cost-savings in the workforce and in daily life."

• Health Care AI Systems Are Biased - "Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, computer systems can now diagnose skin cancer like a dermatologist would, pick out a stroke on a CT scan like a radiologist, and even detect potential cancers on a colonoscopy like a gastroenterologist."

• Training AI algorithms on mostly smiling faces reduces accuracy and introduces bias, according to research - "Facial recognition systems are problematic for a number of reasons, not least of which they tend to exhibit prejudice against certain demographic groups and genders."

• This AI tool generates your creepy lookalikes to trick facial recognition - "If you’re worried about facial recognition firms or stalkers mining your online photos, a new tool called Anonymizer could help you escape their clutches. The system was trained on tens of thousands of photos taken in the Generated Media studio."

• Facial-recognition research needs an ethical reckoning - "Over the past 18 months, a number of universities and companies have been removing online data sets containing thousands — or even millions — of photographs of faces used to improve facial-recognition algorithms. In most cases, researchers scraped these images from the Internet."

• Playing psychotherapist to a troubled AI in 'Syntherapy' - "In the visual novel Syntherapy, everyone has a complex: The president of the university, the Clippy-like OS assistant and especially the depressed AI who you’ve been sent to help. Not to mention the protagonist."

• Study: While text-generating AI can write like humans, it lacks common sense - "AI software may be able to generate text that is grammatically correct and very human-like, but when it comes to common sense they’re still lagging severely behind us humans."

• Facebook’s AI Mistakenly Bans Ads for Struggling Businesses - Facebook's content moderation bots accidentally took down compliant ads from small businesses.

• Deep Learning Has Reinvented Quality Control in Manufacturing—but It Hasn’t Gone Far Enough - "AI systems that make use of “lifelong learning” techniques are more flexible and faster to train"

Analysis & Policy

• The State of AI in 2020 - "The results of this year’s McKinsey Global Survey on artificial intelligence (AI) suggest that organizations are using AI as a tool for generating value."

• State of Data Science and Machine Learning 2020 - "Kaggle 2020 Survey of Data Science as a profession, community, and science."

• 2020’s Top AI & Machine Learning Research Papers - "Despite the challenges of 2020, the AI research community produced a number of meaningful technical breakthroughs. GPT-3 by OpenAI may be the most famous, but there are definitely many other research papers worth your attention."

• 2021 will see the spread of AI and automation in the workplace - "Enterprises are already interested in how to automate invoicing and expensing procedures, says SAP Concur. Businesses are always looking to optimize and streamline services to cut costs."

• Could AI Save the World? - "Latest XPRIZE competition looking for brightest AI minds to improve how people, governments and organizations respond to pandemic environments."

• AI and the transformation of the medical world - For some tedious medical tasks, "AI accuracy is far greater and there is much less chance of errors" and can process far more data than human doctors can.

• How Can Artificial Intelligence Help Curb Deforestation in the Amazon? - "Some of the most promising innovations for enhancing the monitoring of forests involve artificial intelligence (AI) and associated technologies, such as deep learning and machine learning."

• When A.I. Falls in Love - "GPT-3, the latest incarnation of artificially intelligent natural-language systems, knows how to write — and write and write and write. For a taste of what it can (and cannot) do, here are three examples of its verbosity."

• Does AI in Healthcare Need More Emotion? - "Emotion AI, also known as affective computing, is rare in certain healthcare applications. Should emotion be included as a parameter?"

Expert Opinions & Discussion within the field

• Mixing psychology and AI takes careful thought - "It has become easier to train an algorithm than it is to reason about whether or not one should."

• AI automation promises to have a big, and not always positive, impact - "Commentary: Just as telephone operators struggled with the automation of switching, AI promises to change global economies for the better, even as it wreaks havoc on individuals' jobs. The robots may not be taking over, but they just might erase your job."

• Can a Computer Devise a Theory of Everything? - "It might be possible, physicists say, but not anytime soon. And there’s no guarantee that we humans will understand the result. Once upon a time, Albert Einstein described scientific theories as “free inventions of the human mind."

• Bridging the Gap Between AI and the Public ([email protected]) - "Given that AI is often thought of as something reserved for killer robots, I wanted to show how AI in its current format could potentially achieve far worse than a killer robot ever could."

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Recent Articles:

• The State of Deepfakes in 2020

• A Brief History of Neural Nets and Deep Learning

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

• GPT-3: An AI Breakthrough, but not Coming for Your Job

• IBM, Microsoft, and Amazon Halt Sales of Facial Recognition to Police, Call for Regulations

• When to Assume Neural Networks Can Solve a Problem

• The Nooscope — a visual manifesto of the limits of AI

• Bots, Lies, and DeepFakes — Online Misinformation and AI's Role in it

• Retraining as a Response to Automation — Promising, but Only if Done Right

• So-So Artificial Intelligence

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