Mini Briefs

IEEE calls for standards to combat climate change and protect kids in the age of AI

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is one of the largest organizations of engineers and scientists in the world. It recently released a report “calling for engineers to consider the impact their work will have on climate change, children, and society.” The report discusses the need to build “earth-friendly AI,” noting potential applications of AI in areas like “water supply management, clean power, fishing sustainability.” Another point of focus is protecting children from data collection on the Internet. Underlying these goals is need for tech giants to shift from optimizing just for profts to broader societal benefits, so that:

human well-being and ecological sustainability replace exponential growth as our new metrics of societal success.

Artificial intelligence applications surge as China battles to contain coronavirus epidemic

AI and robotics have seen new applications amidst the coronavirus outbreak. Hospital robots have been deployed to spray disinfectants at segregated wards and “can work nonstop for over three hours.” Hospitals are also using voice assistant bots to call high-risk patients for reminders and recommending home quarantine. Railway stations and airports are using automated temperature sensors that can direct sensing to the foreheads of moving passengers, performing more efficient temperature checks.

These examples reflect what makes AI and robotics useful for healthcare - reducing human-to-human contact in hospitals to prevent a disease from spreading, and scaling up routine medical duties without needing a larger number of doctors and nurses, which may be in short supply.

Advances & Business

• Will A.I. save us from the coronavirus pandemic? - Startup Insilico Medicine’s software generates thousands of possible drug candidates in just four days

• Someone used neural networks to upscale a famous 1896 video to 4k quality - Machine-learning software fills in missing details to produce realistic images.

• Twitter to label tweets with deceptively edited forms of media - Twitter said on Tuesday it would start applying a label to tweets containing synthetic or deceptively edited forms of media, as social media platforms brace for a potential onslaught of misinformation ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

• Google has released a tool to spot faked and doctored images - Jigsaw, a technology incubator at Google, has released an experimental platform called Assembler to help journalists and front-line fact-checkers quickly verify images.

• An algorithm that can spot cause and effect could supercharge medical AI - Understanding how the world works means understanding cause and effect. Why are things like this? What will happen if I do that? Correlations tell you that certain phenomena go together. Only causal links tell you why a system is as it is or how it might evolve.

• ArbiLex, A Harvard Law School Legal Tech Startup, Uses AI To Settle Arbitrations - The main benefit of ArbiLex’s product is mapping out risk factors associated with an arbitration case. The startup’s algorithms can help benchmark and quantify probabilities, which allows users to think more probabilistically when assessing settlement outcomes as opposed to maintaining a binary mindset.

• A Warehouse Robot Learns to Sort Out the Tricky Stuff - At a facility near Berlin, a new kind of robot is automating tasks that until recently had been out of the reach of machines.

• January 2020 robotics transactions start off strong - In January 2020, robotics investments and mergers and acquisitions showed continued strength across applications, even as economic challenges affected manufacturing and food service robots. In January 2020, Robotics Business Review tracked a total of $1.

• Musicians Are Using AI to Create Otherwise Impossible New Songs - Progress in AI music field has rapidly accelerated in the past few years, thanks in part to devoted research teams at universities, investments from major tech companies and machine learning conferences like NeurIPS.

• Artificial intelligence tool developed to predict the structure of the universe - A new dark matter simulator powered by machine learning could shed light on the origins of the universe.

Concerns & Hype

• Facial recognition scanners at US airports under more scrutiny - Philadelphia International Airport is the latest to roll out the technology. Passengers will step up to the machines and have their faces scanned before boarding their flight.

• Moscow rolls out live facial recognition system with an app to alert police - Moscow is the latest major city to introduce live facial recognition cameras to its streets, with Mayor Sergei Sobyanin announcing that the technology is operating “on a mass scale” earlier this month, according to a report from Russian business paper Vedomosti.

• YouTube demands Clearview AI stop scraping its videos for facial recognition database - YouTube has sent a cease and desist letter to Clearview AI demanding that the controversial facial recognition startup stop scraping YouTube videos to gather faces for its database and delete any images it’s already collected.

• Clearview AI Wants To Sell Its Facial Recognition Software To Authoritarian Regimes Around The World - Facebook confirmed to BuzzFeed News that it has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Clearview AI, asking the company to stop using information from Facebook and Instagram.

• Artificial Intelligence Is Not Ready For The Intricacies Of Radiology - Radiology is one of the most essential fields in clinical medicine. Experts in this field are specialists in deciphering and diagnosing disease based on various imaging modalities, ranging from ultrasound, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computerized tomography (CT), and x-rays.

• Welfare surveillance system violates human rights, Dutch court rules - The case was seen as an important legal challenge to the controversial but growing use by governments around the world of artificial intelligence (AI) and risk modelling in administering welfare benefits and other core services.

• Coronavirus Fears Will Leave Empty Seats at a Top AI Conference - The event, organized by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, will be missing hundreds of leading Chinese researchers who are hampered by travel restrictions.

• Software that swaps out words can now fool the AI behind Alexa and Siri - Software called TextFooler can trick natural-language processing (NLP) systems into misunderstanding text just by replacing certain words in a sentence with synonyms. In tests, it was able to drop the accuracy of three state-of-the-art NLP systems dramatically.

Analysis & Policy

• Changemakers in AI report on AI ethics and societal impact - Case studies, surveys, and insights from emerging AI talent.

• Group Asks Federal Trade Commission To Regulate Use Of Artificial Intelligence In Pre-Employment Screenings - The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has charged that HireVue, a leading provider of artificial intelligence-based pre-employment screenings, is flouting national and international standards of transparency, fairness and accountability.

Expert Opinions & Discussion within the field

• Yann LeCun - “sometimes, requiring explanability is counterproductive.” - Sometimes people have accurate models of a phenomenon without any intuitive explanation or causation that provides an accurate picture of the situation.

Explainers

• Artificial intelligence: Does another huge language model prove anything? - This article is part of our reviews of AI research papers, a series of posts that explore the latest findings in artificial intelligence. This week, Google introduced Meena, a chatbot that can “chat about” anything.

• The 17 Best AI and Machine Learning TED Talks for Practitioners - The editors at Solutions Review curated this list of the best AI and machine learning TED talks for practitioners in the field. TED Talks are influential videos from expert speakers in a variety of verticals.

• Quantifying Independently Reproducible Machine Learning - Peer review has been an integral part of scientific research for more than 300 years. But even before peer review was introduced, reproducibility was a primary component of the scientific method.

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