Mini Briefs

How machine learning is unlocking the secrets of human movement – and reshaping pro sports

A behind-the-scenes look at the Peak Performance Project (P3), which uses Microsoft Azure powered Machine Learning and special cameras to collect biomechanical data from elite athletes.

Launched in 2006, P3 is the first facility to apply a data-driven approach to understanding how elite competitors move. It uses advanced sports-science strategies to assess and train athletes in ways that will revolutionize pro sports – and, eventually, the bodies and abilities of weekend warriors.

The insights drawn by the lab can be used to identify hidden performance metrics that can predict long term performance. Additionally, the insights can also help athletes avoid injuries by adopting new training techniques better suited to their movement patterns.

An AI-Run World Needs to Better Reflect People of Color

Angela Benton, CEO of Streamlytics makes the case for protecting minority data. As we at Skynet Today have previously written about incomplete AI training data affecting people of colour, Angela argues that this data must be protected.

The AI that’s being developed today will serve as the baseline for how AI will be built in the future. Data ownership is essential. It’s not just our human right today, but also the key to our future rights. When we neither own their data nor have a say in how it’s used, we leave these decisions in the hands of a select few.

Advances & Business

• Meet Microsoft Suphx: The World’s Strongest Mahjong AI - At the Shanghai World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) on August 29, Microsoft’s Global Executive Vice President Harry Shum officially introduced MSRA’s Suphx (“Super Phoenix”) as “the most powerful Mahjong AI in history”.

• Scientists develop a traffic monitoring system based on artificial intelligence - Scientists of South Ural State University have developed a unique intelligent system for monitoring traffic flow using artificial intelligence, which does not require specific recording equipment and can work on almost any type of camera.

• Smile-to-pay: Chinese shoppers turn to facial payment technology - China’s shoppers are increasingly purchasing goods with just a turn of their heads as the country embraces facial payment technology.

• The Amazing Ways How L’Oréal Uses Artificial Intelligence To Drive Business Performance - An overview of L’Oréal’s incubator and the ways they are using artificial intelligence to power their products.

• A Breakthrough for A.I. Technology: Passing an 8th-Grade Science Test - The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a prominent lab in Seattle, unveiled a new system that passed a test to build AI systems that can pass an eighth-grade science test.

• Scientists develop a deep learning method to solve a fundamental problem in statistical physics - A team of scientists at Freie Universität Berlin has developed an Artificial Intelligence (AI) method that provides a fundamentally new solution of the “sampling problem” in statistical physics.

• A Summer Camp With a Long Plan: Keeping Bias Out of Artificial Intelligence - AI4ALL seeks to end bias in artificial intelligence. It’s conducting summer camps that aim to increase diversity and inclusion in AI education, research and policy.

Concerns & Hype

• How to Make Sure Robots Help Us, Not Replace Us - An MIT task force warns against ‘so-so’ technologies that offer few benefits other than paring corporate payrolls.

• What you need to know about ZAO–the new, viral Chinese deepfake app  - A Chinese deepfake app known as ZAO is blowing up the internet, receiving thousands of downloads while simultaneously raising privacy concerns.

• CMU Quietly Hosts Project Maven Offshoot Through Army AI Task Force - The U.S. Army is developing data surveillance and analysis technology in Pittsburgh, though an offshoot of the controversial Department of Defense initiative Project Maven within Carnegie Mellon University’s Army AI Task Force. 

• China to curb facial recognition and apps in schools - The Chinese government says it plans to “curb and regulate” the use of facial recognition technology and other apps in schools.

• Coming Soon to a Battlefield: Robots That Can Kill - Tomorrow’s wars will be faster, more high-tech, and less human than ever before. Welcome to a new era of machine-driven warfare.

• Artificial intelligence is changing every aspect of war - The idea of collecting data from sensors, processing them with algorithms fuelled by ever-more processing power and acting on the output more quickly than the enemy lies at the heart of military thinking across the world’s biggest powers. And today that is being supercharged by new developments in artificial intelligence.

• AI Is Coming for Your Favorite Menial Tasks - As AI gets better at performing routine tasks traditionally done by humans, only stressful ones will be left. The work experience could suffer.

• Facebook, Microsoft Back Contest to Better Detect Deepfakes - Deepfakes are improving. The contest, which will include deepfakes created by Facebook, is designed to help researchers keep up.

• The Next Hot Job: Pretending to Be a Robot - As the promise of autonomous machines lags the underlying technology, the growing need for human robot-minders could juice the remote workforce. Until the techno-utopian dream of full automation is realized, the growth of not-yet-autonomous technologies is creating opportunities for humans to help operate robots remotely, sometimes from thousands of miles away.

Analysis & Policy

• The Ghost Workers Powering The AI Economy - An analysis of the data annotation industry, where people from around the world help to prepare and tidy up the data used by the tech giants to train the algorithms upon which their fortunes increasingly rest.

• Halt the use of facial-recognition technology until it is regulated - Earlier this month, Ohio became the latest of several state and local governments in the United States to stop law-enforcement officers from using facial-recognition databases.

• Spending on AI systems set to surge and consultants are going to thrive - It’s a great time to be an AI consultant due to a lack of enterprise expertise. According to IDC, global spending on artificial intelligence systems is expected to hit $97.9 billion in 2023, up from $37.5 billion in 2019.

• The shift toward open source conversational AI - An analysis of how the field of conversational AI has adopted open-source NLU libraries.

• Algorithms Should’ve Made Courts More Fair. What Went Wrong? - A 2011 Kentucky law requires judges to consult an algorithm when deciding whether defendants must post cash bail. More whites were allowed to go home, but not blacks.

Expert Opinions & Discussion within the field

• Computer Pseudoscience - Artificial intelligence may prove more dangerous as it advances, but it will never generate actual intelligence so long as the basic assumptions of the field remain unchanged. In The AI Delusion, Gary Smith reveals why, and assesses the technology’s problems from an economist’s perspective.

• Human Rights Implications of IBM Watson’s ‘Personality Insights’ Tool - An analysis of IBM Watson’s Machine Learning powered product called Personality Insights.

• How Computers See Gender - A summary of a paper about how gender is represented in commercially available facial analysis computer vision systems.

• How to Build Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust - Computer systems need to understand time, space and causality. Right now they don’t.

Explainers

• Evolution Strategies - An introduction to Evolution Strategies (ES) which work well in the cases where we don’t know the precise analytic form of an objective function or cannot compute the gradients directly.

• AI-first biology - A post that explains biology’s AI moment, i.e., many areas of biology, and in particular, imaging, are being significantly transformed by the use of AI.

• How I’m using AI to write my next novel - This writer explains how she harnessed the power of Open AI’s GPT-2 system as a cognitive crutch to get over writer’s block.

• Five Fifty: Tech for the greater good - Can advanced technologies such as AI improve the well-being of humans? Only if we more carefully manage its deployment and its effects on human labor.

• How To Make Custom AI-Generated Text With GPT-2 - An explainer and guide to using gpt-2-simple, a Python package that allows you to finetune GPT-2 on your own dataset.

Awesome Videos

• AI Learns to Park - Deep Reinforcement Learning - An AI learns to park a car in a parking lot in a 3D physics simulation.

• Can An AI Be A Legal Person? - Is an algorithm a person? Can we make it one? Should we make it one?

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