| GENERAL INDUSTRY NEWS |
This is How the CDC is trying to Forecast Coronavirus’s Spread
It has tapped one of the nation’s best flu-forecasting labs to retool its prediction algorithms for the Covid-19 pandemic. Now the agency is tapping several dozen teams to adapt their techniques to forecast the spread of the coronavirus in an effort to make more informed decisions. Among them is a group at Carnegie Mellon University that, over the last five years, has consistently achieved some of the best results. Last year, the group was designated one of two National Centers of Excellence for Influenza Forecasting and asked to lead the design of a community-wide forecasting process.
The Pope’s Plan to Fight Back Against Evil AI
The Vatican’s interest in artificial intelligence isn’t new, but pay attention to the tech companies that are joining along. On Friday, Pope Francis backed a document that outlines how artificial intelligence, including facial recognition technology, should be regulated. This so-called “Rome Call for AI Ethics” carries the endorsement of the Vatican as well as Microsoft and IBM. Believe it or not, the future of AI is actually one of the pope’s passion projects — and greatest worries.
VOX
Biotech Companies Tap AI to Speed Path to Coronavirus Treatments
Scientists racing to find a vaccine for the Wuhan coronavirus are hoping a cutting-edge approach called “rapid response platforms” will quickly yield a breakthrough. WSJ’s Jason Bellini explains what these are and how they work.
How Artificial Intelligence Can Help Fight Coronavirus
Artificial Intelligence, or more commonly known as AI, can warn of an upcoming epidemic and give us enough time to prepare. For example, BlueDot, a global artificial intelligence database company, uses A.I.-powered algorithm, machine learning, and natural-language processing to analyze information from a multitude of sources and track over a hundred infectious diseases.
AI vs. Coronavirus: How Artificial Intelligence is Now Helping in the Fight Against COVID-19
The initiative, building on AI2’s Semantic Scholar project, uses natural language processing to analyze scientific papers about coronavirus, including the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. The goal is to help researchers better analyze and understand a growing set of scholarly articles about coronavirus. As reported by GeekWire on Monday, the technology helps to combat information overload, making it easier for researchers find relevant studies. This could lead to new insights or approaches to address the COVID-19 outbreak.
Is Your Company Using Artificial Intelligence to Transform an Industry?
Artificial intelligence technology is powering big changes across all industries, but it’s tough to separate out the companies with truly transformative applications from marketing hype. That’s why Forbes is compiling a list of promising startups that are emerging as leaders in this space. Nominations are now open for the second annual Forbes AI list, which seeks to highlight private companies that are applying artificial intelligence to solve problems in innovative ways..
Artificial-intelligence Development Should be Regulated, says Elon Musk
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has said development of advanced artificial intelligence, including AI created by his own companies, should be regulated. He tweeted the remark in response to an article published this week by MIT Technology Review about OpenAI (which Musk cofounded but has since left), describing how it has drifted from its initial purpose of developing AI safely and fairly to become secretive and preoccupied with raising money. When Musk was asked if he meant AI should be regulated by individual governments or on a global scale, for example by the UN, he replied: “Both.”
AI is an Ideology, Not a Technology
At its core, “artificial intelligence” is a perilous belief that fails to recognize the agency of humans. Without the constraints on data collection that liberal democracies impose and with the capacity to centrally direct greater resource allocation, the Chinese will outstrip the West. AI is hungry for more and more data, but the West insists on privacy. This is a luxury we cannot afford, it is said, as whichever world power achieves superhuman intelligence via AI first is likely to become dominant.
Big Picture: AI Chips
Semiconductor chips are the engines of our digital lives. Fitted with billions of electronic transistors that constitute elaborate integrated circuits, these chips power everything from laptops and mobile phones to smart TVs and automobiles. And the next frontier in this ~$450 billion industry are chips that support artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. These “AI chips” are forecast to comprise up to 20% of the total semiconductor chip market by 2025
AI Is Coming for Your Most Mind-Numbing Office Tasks
There is a very high demand for AI & ML professionals who are qualified enough to do state-of-the-art research and engineering. At the same time, the supply of specialized AI talent is scarce – though the situation is gradually improving thanks to the new Master’s and Ph.D. programs in data science and machine learning that have been launched all over the world in the last few years.
Comprehensive Guide To Hiring AI And Machine Learning Engineers
The majority (77%) of CEOs say that AI threatens to increase vulnerability and disruption to the ways they do business. Unfortunately, the call for responsible AI has taken a backseat for many companies. Only 25% of companies say that they definitely prioritize considering the ethical implications of an AI solution before investing in it, according to research by PwC. In this article, we share with you our detailed guidelines for recruiting AI & ML professionals, including the skills to look for, the recruiting strategies to apply depending on the situation, and the advantages you can show off to attract the top talent.
This Is the Ad Clearview AI Used to Sell Your Face to Police
Emails obtained by OneZero reveal the controversial company’s marketing to law enforcement. Months before facial recognition company Clearview AI was on the front page of the New York Times, the company was quietly advertising to police departments across the country, emails obtained by OneZero show.
Lie Detectors Have Always Been Suspect. AI has Made the Problem Worse
But polygraph machines are still too slow and cumbersome to use at border crossings, in airports, or on large groups of people. As a result, a new generation of lie detectors based on artificial intelligence have emerged in the past decade. Their proponents claim they are both faster and more accurate than polygraphs.
AI, Education and Ethics: Who Should Profit from Learning?
Artificial intelligence carries potential for good in the classroom, but risks abuse by businesses. The world of education is heading for an unpredictable destination. New technologies, especially pattern-recognition software commonly referred to as artificial intelligence, are descending upon the learning process, changing how we retain and test knowledge.
The Amazing Ways Goodyear Uses Artificial Intelligence And IoT for Digital Transformation
Regardless if it’s an autonomous, electric, or a traditional vehicle, they all need a solid foundation of the right tire for the specific demands of the vehicle. Goodyear uses internet of things technology in its Eagle 360 Urban tire. The tire is 3D printed with super-elastic polymer and embedded with sensors. These sensors send road and tire data back to the artificial intelligence-enhanced control panel that can then change the tread design to respond to current road conditions on the fly and share info about conditions with the broader network. If the tire tread is damaged, the tire moves the material and begins self-repair.
The Real Threat to Business Schools from Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) will change the way we learn and work in the near future. Nearly 400 million workers globally will change their occupations in the next 10 years, and business schools are uniquely situated to respond to the shifts coming to the future of work. However, a recent study, “Implications of Artificial Intelligence on Business Schools and Lifelong Learning,” shows that business schools remain cautious in adapting management education to address the changing needs of students, workers and organizations, writes Anne Trumbore in this opinion piece.
How to Know if Artificial Intelligence is about to Destroy Civilization
Could we wake up one morning dumbstruck that a super-powerful AI has emerged, with disastrous consequences? Books like Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom and Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark, as well as more recent articles, argue that malevolent superintelligence is an existential risk for humanity. But one can speculate endlessly. It’s better to ask a more concrete, empirical question: What would alert us that superintelligence is indeed around the corner?
CIOs Face Uphill Climb in Finding Skilled Artificial Intelligence Talent
New data from Gartner Inc. suggests that the recruiting, management, and retention of artificial intelligence talent (AI) will be a strategic challenge globally for the foreseeable future. For the past four years, Gartner found, the strongest demand for talent with AI skills has come from non-IT departments.
Who is Benefiting in the Pandemic Fallout? Amazon, Netflix, and Artificial Intelligence
Chaturvedi says that artificial intelligence, the ability of computer systems to solve problems and perform tasks that would otherwise require human intelligence, is also going through a growth phase as well because it’s a technology based entirely on computers, without any need for humans. There has been significant fear around the potential for AI to control society in unforeseen ways, but the virus may create a unique opportunity for people to realize its benefits and potential as well, Chaturvedi highlighted.
Here’s How Walmart Is Using Artificial Intelligence to Keep Prices Low
Major retailers have a lot of power over vendors. A chain like Walmart (NYSE:WMT) can, for example, go to a medium-sized vendor and ask it to cut prices by 2% or lose some of its shelf space. That’s typical and it helps keeps prices low for consumers. It’s also challenging to keep track of for a company operating on the scale Walmart does. To help with that, the retail giant has reached a deal to pilot technology from Pactum to help it negotiate contracts with some of its vendors.
Artificial intelligence is Making Artificial Intelligence Easier to Build
Artificial intelligence and machine learning will automate many business and life tasks, from driving trucks to piloting ships to handling customer calls — and actually carrying on rudimentary chats with them. What’s not discussed often enough, however, is the actually impact on the jobs of AI creators and administrators themselves — developers, analysts, and data administrators and everyone else in the information technology orbit charged with building out these revolutionary systems. In essence, AI will play a role in helping to smooth out the rough spots of AI development.
Can Artificial Intelligence Replace the Role of Doctors?
The development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has increased rapidly. Not only does it play a role in the field of entertainment and communication, but the future traces of AI in the area of health and life begin to be seen. In some countries, AI is integrated into sophisticated analytical tools to help doctors in hospitals diagnose cancer and other diseases. But can artificial intelligence replace the role of doctors.
| MICROSOFT IN THE NEWS |
Microsoft, White House, and Allen Institute Release Coronavirus Data Set for Medical and NLP Researchers
The COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19), a repository of more than 29,000 scholarly articles on the coronavirus family from around the world, is being released today for free. The data set is the result of work by Microsoft Research, the Allen Institute for AI, the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the White House Office of Science and Technology (OSTP), and others. It includes machine-readable research from more than 13,000 scholarly articles. The aim is to empower the medical and machine learning research communities to mine text data for insights that can help fight COVID-19.
AI2 and Microsoft Join the White House’s Push to Enlist AI for the War on Coronavirus
A consortium of tech leaders — including Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Microsoft and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s charity — today unveiled an AI-enabled database that’s meant to give researchers quicker, surer access to resources relating to coronavirus and how to stop it. The COVID-19 Open Research Dataset, or CORD-19, was created in response to a request from the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. It takes advantage of AI tools to organize more than 24,000 articles about the COVID-19 disease and the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that causes it..
Pentagon Rethinks Parts of $10 billion JEDI Cloud Contract Awarded to Microsoft
The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is seeking court permission to reconsider certain aspects of its decision to award a $10 billion cloud computing contract to Microsoft, court filings showed on Thursday. A U.S. judge last month granted Amazon’s request to temporarily prevent the DoD and Microsoft from moving forward with the deal, which Amazon had said reflected undue influence by President Donald Trump.
Microsoft’s AI Generates 3D Objects from 2D Images
The AI research labs at Facebook, Nvidia, and startups like Threedy.ai have at various points tried their hand at the challenge of 2D-object-to-3D-shape conversion. But in a new preprint paper, a team hailing from Microsoft Research detail a framework that they claim is the first “scalable” training technique for 3D models from 2D data.
Big Tech Swallows Most of the Hot AI Startups
An acquisition spree by Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft eliminated potential rivals and concentrated brain power in this critical field. The industry’s deal spree has raised concern that the biggest technology companies have a lock on brain power in a field that’s considered critical to the future of computing, global competitiveness and even military supremacy.
Microsoft Makes Windows ML Standalone to Support Older Systems
Microsoft today announced that Windows ML, the API for running machine learning inferences on Windows devices, will soon make its way to more places. Going forward, it will be available as a standalone package that can be shipped with any Windows app, enabling Windows ML support for CPU inference on Windows versions 8.1 and newer and GPU hardware-acceleration on Windows 10 1709 and newer.
Microsoft Researchers Create AI Ethics Checklist with ML practitioners from a Dozen Tech Companies
While speaking on a panel recently, Landing AI founder and Google Brain cofounder Andrew Ng described a moment when he read the OECD’s AI ethics principles to an engineer, and the engineer told him the words give no instruction on how he should change how he does his job. That’s why, Ng said, any code of conduct should be designed by and for ML practitioners. Well, Microsoft Research must’ve heard that, because it recently created an AI ethics checklist together with nearly 50 engineers from a dozen tech companies.
How Microsoft 365’s New Solution uses Machine Learning to Stop Data Leaks and Insider Attacks
That’s why Microsoft is offering a new Insider Risk Management solution within Microsoft 365 that uses machine learning to intelligently detect potentially risky behavior within a company. It also quickly identifies which activities are most likely to pose real security threats, even inadvertently.
Microsoft To Help Kubota Explore AI Application In Agriculture
Tech giant Microsoft (MSFT) is set to help Japanese tractor and heavy equipment manufacturer Kubota with digital transformation. Both the companies have entered a multi-year strategic alliance, through which Kubota will migrate its IT infrastructure and SAP mission-critical systems onto Microsoft Azure cloud platform.
Microsoft Researchers Train AI in Simulation to Control a Real-World Drone
In a preprint paper, Microsoft researchers describe a machine learning system that reasons out the correct actions to take directly from camera images. It’s trained via simulation and learns to independently navigate environments and conditions in the real world, including unseen situations, which makes it a fit for robots deployed in search and rescue missions. Someday, it could help those robots more quickly identify people in need of help.
Artificial intelligence Makes a Splash in Efforts to Protect Alaska’s Ice Seals and Beluga Whales
The teams are training AI tools to distinguish a seal from a rock and a whale’s whistle from a dredging machine’s squeak as they seek to understand the marine mammals’ behavior and help them survive amid melting ice and increasing human activity.
| RESEARCH & TUTORIALS |
COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19)
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Allen Institute for AI has partnered with leading research groups to prepare and distribute the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19), a free resource of over 45,000 scholarly articles, including over 33,000 with full text, about COVID-19 and the coronavirus family of viruses for use by the global research community.
UN, WHO & Mila Map the AI vs COVID-19 Battlefield
AI tools have already joined the fight, guiding UAVs to automatically disinfect public areas, tracking disease spread vectors, diagnosing patients, etc. A new project from researchers with the UN Global Pulse Data Science Team, the World Health Organization and the Mila – Quebec AI Institute looks at current studies and programs that are using AI to tackle the COVID-19 crisis and suggests some promising future research directions. The team categorizes the AI applications in three areas; medical, which includes individual patient diagnosis and treatment; molecular, comprising drug discovery-related research; and societal.
Introducing Dreamer: Scalable Reinforcement Learning Using World Models
Research into how artificial agents can choose actions to achieve goals is making rapid progress in large part due to the use of reinforcement learning (RL). Model-free approaches to RL, which learn to predict successful actions through trial and error, have enabled DeepMind’s DQN to play Atari games and AlphaStar to beat world champions at Starcraft II, but require large amounts of environment interaction, limiting their usefulness for real-world scenarios.
White House & Partners Launch COVID-19 AI Open Research Dataset Challenge on Kaggle
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the White House on Monday joined a number of research groups to announce the release of the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) of scholarly literature about COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, and the Coronavirus group. The release came with an urgent call to action to the world’s AI experts to “develop new text and data mining techniques that can help the science community answer high-priority scientific questions related to COVID-19.”
Rapid AI Development Cycle for the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic
A research team has proposed non-contrast thoracic chest CT scans as an effective tool for detecting, quantifying, and tracking COVID-19.
Artificial Intelligence in Cancer Therapy
AI platforms ranging from machine learning to neural networks can accelerate drug discovery, harness biomarkers to accurately match patients to clinical trials, and truly personalize cancer therapy using only a patient’s own data. These advances are indicators that practice-changing cancer therapy empowered by AI may be on the horizon.
Composing New Proteins with Artificial Intelligence
In this week’s APL Bioengineering, researchers in the United States and Taiwan explore how to create new proteins by using machine learning to translate protein structures into musical scores, presenting an unusual way to translate physics concepts across disparate domains.
A Neural Weather Model for Eight-Hour Precipitation Forecasting
Building on our previous research into precipitation nowcasting, we present “MetNet: A Neural Weather Model for Precipitation Forecasting,” a DNN capable of predicting future precipitation at 1 km resolution over 2 minute intervals at timescales up to 8 hours into the future. MetNet outperforms the current state-of-the-art physics-based model in use by NOAA for prediction times up to 7-8 hours ahead and makes a prediction over the entire US in a matter of seconds as opposed to an hour.
The Early Phase of Neural Network Training
Recent studies have shown that many important aspects of neural network learning take place within the very earliest iterations or epochs of training. For example, sparse, trainable sub-networks emerge (Frankle et al., 2019), gradient descent moves into a small subspace (Gur-Ari et al., 2018), and the network undergoes a critical period (Achille et al., 2019). Here we examine the changes that deep neural networks undergo during this early phase of training. We perform extensive measurements of the network state during these early iterations of training and leverage the framework of Frankle et al. (2019) to quantitatively probe the weight distribution and its reliance on various aspects of the dataset.
