Just what i find

Among many promising applications for AI in medicine, cardiology is one with the greatest potential. Current clinical practice calls for manual analysis of a wide range of complex diagnostic imagery, and this analysis is time consuming and error prone, even for the most experienced doctors. Advances in the technology are hampered by ethical concerns that augmenting human decisions with AI violates the relationship between doctor and patient. https://www.news-medical.net/health/Artificial-Intelligence-in-Cardiology.aspx The continuous development of the technological sector has enabled the industry to merge with medicine in order to create new integrated, reliable, and efficient methods of providing quality health… Continue reading →

Following the controversy around (and expiration of) Google's $15 million contract with the US Department of Defense (https://mashable.com/2018/06/02/google-defense-department-project-maven-contract-not-renewed/?europe=true#ebCfKFgiPPqN), the US government has now signed an $885 million contract with Booz Allen – and i'm willing to bet that there will be far less public debate around the ethics of the applications of technology under this contract than with Google. https://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2018/07/30/pentagon-signs-885-million-artificial-intelligence-contract-with-booz-allen/ The U.S. Department of Defense will for the first time be using large-scale AI systems that could automate mundane tasks and augment the work of military members. The contract also will go toward… Continue reading →

Yet another example of the value of simulated training, researchers at OpenAI trained a robotic hand using hundreds of years of  object manipulation inside a computer simulation. The resulting hand movements are significantly more dexterous than anything developed so far. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611724/artificial-intelligence-driven-robot-hand-spends-a-hundred-years-teaching-itself-to-rotate/ A reinforcement-learning algorithm allows Dactyl to learn physical tasks by practicing them in a virtual-reality environment. Continue reading →

In an interesting piece of research intended to highlight the biases embedded in AI systems and training data, a team at the University of Melbourne produced a system capable of making assessments of physical attributes and the emotional state of people in a photo. Hidden in the assessments are a range of biases – gender is assumed to be a binary state, there are only five ethnicities, and emotional judgement or "responsibilities" are clearly highly subjective. https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/biometric-mirror-judges-your-looks/ Would you be freaked out if a facial recognition mirror started making judgments about your age, gender, race, attractiveness, and even trustworthiness? Get… Continue reading →

Two years after the unveiling of the original Tensor Processing Unit, Google's announced "Edge TPU" – tiny AI accelerator chips designed to be embedded in IoT devices. Models will be trained on large, server clusters like today, and then embedded in edge devices in factories or workshops – perhaps analysing samples for quality control, processing movement of objects around a plant, etc. https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/26/17616140/google-edge-tpu-on-device-ai-machine-learning-devkit The hardware is destined for enterprise applications, not your phone Continue reading →

In a major breakthrough, researchers from Deep Mind have improved the accuracy of AI lip reading, with half the error rate of previous methods, and over 50% accuracy. If embedded in to smart devices, it could make lip reading accessible to anyone with a smartphone – both helping the many people who struggle in noisy and crowded environments, and putting at risk the privacy of many others. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/lip-reading-artificial-intelligence-could-help-deaf-or-spies A new algorithm silences its competition Continue reading →

One of the questions we often ask in interviews is for a candidate to talk about a piece of data they've seen recently which surprised or interested them – an interest in data journalism is (for my team) an indicator of a person interested in numbers, a prerequisite for a successful career in data and analytics. These sorts of data are going to become more accessible as Google News starts to include them in search results to help quash "fake news" https://www.engadget.com/2018/08/01/google-search-data-journalism/ Google is shining its Search spotlight on useful news data. Continue reading →

One obvious use case for autonomous cars is to ferry people on the "last mile" between their starting point (e.g. home, office etc.) and public transport, and Google's Waymo has started a pilot programme in Phoenix to help evaluate the model. https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/31/waymo-partners-with-phoenix-to-connect-people-to-public-transit/ Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that spun out to become a business under Alphabet, is launching a program in Phoenix next month that will focus on delivering people to bus stops and… Continue reading →

Perhaps further evidence that "fitting to a curve" can produce syntactically and mathematically correct prose (e.g. which rhymes, has the correct pace and tone), without truly understanding the meaning of the content that's being generated, the emotion is missing. I'm sure simulation will continue to improve, but without true understanding of the causal link between words and the emotions they invoke, it's hard to see how truly creative, emotionally evocative content will ever be generated. https://www.datanami.com/2018/08/01/deep-speare-emulates-the-bard-with-ai/ A deep learning model trained on 2,700 of William Shakespeare’s sonnets is giving poetry fans fits trying to tell the AI-generated poems from the… Continue reading →

I've never considered before what's missed when faces are "blurred" to provide anonymity – of course, you lose facial expression and so emotions. A new technique allows faces to be anonymised without losing that expressive motion. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180801131551.htm Researchers have devised a way to replace the use of ‘blurring’ faces in news reports when anonymity is needed. The team’s method uses artificial intelligence (AI) techniques that aim to improve… Continue reading →