Mini Briefs

Deepfakes could anonymize people in videos while keeping their personality

A new technique developed by researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology uses Generative Adversarial Networks, the technology used for deepfakes, to anonymize people in photos or videos. While interesting, the method is very much experimental and fails to work well on videos or when faces in photos are occluded or turned.

While GANs have developed a bad reputation for making it easier to produce persuasive misinformation, anonymization may allow them to redeem themselves. The technique developed has the advantage over traditional techniques in that it is complete, not allowing for the person’s identity to be discovered despite the anonymization, and can recreate people’s facial expressions in high resolution, which can eliminate the risk of stripping away someone’s personality.

Artificial Intelligence Can’t Think Without Polluting

A paper published in July by Roy Schwartz of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and other researchers makes the case for standardizing how we measure the carbon impact of AI.

The team wants all future A.I. research to tack on such a measurement—and believes that doing so will lead to new innovations in making the technology less taxing on the environment.

Because modern methods like deep learning models are trained on massive datasets, and often done so multiple times for experiments, a single paper or research project may involve the use of a great deal of computational power. Schwartz hopes to establish a trend of reporting not only traditional measures of performance in academic papers, but also disclosing the amount of computing it took to generate the results. Schwartz hopes that as a result, researchers will be rewarded for both creating more high-performing and more efficient models that are less energy-intensive.

Advances & Business

• Artificial Intelligence Takes On Big Pharma - My nose is pressed to the glass as I watch thousands of human cellular samples whisk by, running through a large, elaborate machine. There are lab workers bustling around in neatly pressed lab coats, jotting down notes on their clipboards. It looks like a scene from a futuristic movie.

• DeepMind, artificial intelligence and the future of the NHS - One morning a few weeks ago Stephen Foot, a warehouseman from Enfield, woke up in a London hospital to discover the unlikely harbinger of a coming medical revolution. This Ghost of Healthcare to Come took the form of a nephrologist at the end of his bed.

• AI Decoded: Evaluating Artificial Intelligence Startups - Since the term was coined in 1956, Artificial Intelligence has endured a lifetime of misunderstanding. The root of the problem lies in the interpretation of the word ‘intelligence.’

• AI learned to use tools and cooperate after 380 million games of hide and seek - In the early days of life on Earth, biological organisms were exceedingly simple. They were microscopic unicellular creatures with little to no ability to coordinate.

• AI can gauge the risk of dying from heart conditions - AI’s ability to predict threats to your health could soon include deadly heart conditions. Researchers at MIT’s CSAIL have developed a machine learning system, RiskCardio, that can estimate the risk of death due to cardiovascular issues that block or reduce blood flow.

• FarmWise and its weed-pulling agribot harvest $14.5M in funding - Automating agriculture is a complex proposition given the number and variety of tasks involved, but a number of robotics and autonomy companies are giving it their best shot. FarmWise seems to have impressed someone–it just raised $14.

• Amazon Releases Data Set of Annotated Conversations to Aid Development of Socialbots - Amazon announces the public release of the Topical Chat Dataset, a text-based collection of more than 235,000 utterances (over 4,700,000 words) that will help support high-quality, repeatable research in the field of dialogue systems.

• Executives Say $1 Billion for AI Research Isn’t Enough - The announcement Tuesday of a nearly $1 billion federal commitment toward artificial-intelligence research drew a mixed response from business leaders who said the U.S. needs to do more to maintain a competitive edge in AI. Government agencies requested $973.

• Benefits of Artificial Intelligence to Radiology Workflows - - Radiology has emerged as a leader in artificial intelligence out of a pressing need. The primary driver behind the emergence of AI in medical imaging has been the desire for greater efficacy and efficiency in clinical care, wrote Hosny et al.

• Waymo’s robotaxi pilot surpassed 6,200 riders in its first month in California - Waymo transported 6,299 passengers in self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans in its first month participating in a robotaxi pilot program in California, according to a quarterly report the company filed with the California Public Utilities Commission.

• DeepMind’s health team joins Google Health - Over the last three years, DeepMind has built a team to tackle some of healthcare’s most complex problems: developing AI research and mobile tools that are already having a positive impact on patients and care teams.

• Apple study suggests chattier users prefer chattier AI assistants - How might you characterize the conversational style of a digital assistant like Siri? No matter your impression, it stands to reason that striking the wrong tone could dissuade users from engaging with it in the future.

• Apple Overton: Automating Low-Code Machine Learning - Apple has struggled in recent years to establish a robust artificial intelligence (A.I.) practice. With a new system called Overton, Apple hopes to aid engineers in building, monitoring, and improving production ML systems “by automating the nitty-gritty of machine-learning model construction, deployment, and monitoring.”

• Built Robotics raises $33M for its self-driving construction equipment - Built Robotics, a company aiming to make construction equipment autonomous, is announcing a $33M Series B round this morning.

• Google sets up AI research lab in Bengaluru - Google on Thursday said it is setting up an artificial intelligence research unit at Bengaluru as the tech giant looks to continue developing products for India and taking them to global markets.

Concerns & Hype

• Artificial Intelligence Only Goes So Far In Today’s Economy, Says MIT Study - Artificial intelligence and machine learning may be ideal for picking up the day-to-day tasks of running enterprises, but still fall flat when it comes to innovation or reacting to unforeseen or one-off events.

• Artificial Intelligence Confronts a ‘Reproducibility’ Crisis - Sometimes, basic information is missing because it’s proprietary–an issue especially for industry labs. But it’s more often a sign of the field’s failure to keep up with changing methods, Dodge says.

• Maybe I should be scared: We asked a 47-year-old truck driver what he thinks about self-driving cars - Business Insider asked 47-year old truck driver Daniel McCreary what he thought about the state of trucking and where he saw his livelihood going in the coming decades.

• This AI image classifier is failing miserably at labeling human beings - Modern artificial intelligence is often lauded for its growing sophistication, but mostly in doomer terms.

• Ex-Google worker fears ‘killer robots’ could cause mass atrocities - Laura Nolan, who resigned from Google last year in protest at being sent to work on a project to dramatically enhance US military drone technology, has called for all AI killing machines not operated by humans to be banned.

• Automation Isn’t About to Make Truckers Obsolete - Hardly a day goes by without someone suggesting that technologies like AI, machine learning, and robotics will transform the 21st century labor market. A prominent example of this has been in truck driving, an occupation that spans multiples industries and moves over 70% of U.S.

• AI can’t protect us from deepfakes, argues new report - A new report from Data and Society raises doubts about automated solutions to deceptively altered videos, including machine learning-altered videos called deepfakes.

• Racist AI art warns against bad training data - An artificial-intelligence art project has been criticised for using racist and sexist tags to classify its users. When they share a selfie with ImageNet Roulette, the web app matches it to the ones it most closely resembles from an enormous library of profile photos.

• The world’s top deepfake artist: ‘Wow, this is developing more rapidly than I thought.’ - AI-powered deepfake video technology is advancing faster than even some of the world’s top experts thought possible.

Analysis & Policy

• Facial recognition tech is a problem. Here’s how the Democratic candidates plan to tackle it. - As the growing use of facial recognition technology draws criticism from the public, Democratic presidential candidates are starting to articulate how they’d handle the tech if they’re elected. Some candidates are staking out stronger positions than others. In August, Sen.

• Towards Fairer Datasets: Filtering and Balancing the Distribution of the People Subtree in the ImageNet Hierarchy - Kaiyu Yang (Princeton University), Klint Qinami (Princeton University), Li Fei-Fei (Stanford University), Jia Deng (Princeton University), Olga Russakovsky (Princeton University) As AI technology advances from research lab curiosities into people’s daily lives, ensuring that AI systems produce appropriate and fair results has become an important scientific question.

• Rep. Takano Introduces the Justice in Forensic Algorithms Act to Protect Defendants’ Due Process Rights in the Criminal Justice System - Today, Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) introduced the Justice in Forensic Algorithms Act of 2019 to ensure that defendants have access to source code and other information necessary to exercise their confrontational and due process rights when algorithms are used to analyze evidence in their case.

• Excavating AI - You open up a database of pictures used to train artificial intelligence systems. At first, things seem straightforward. You’re met with thousands of images: apples and oranges, birds, dogs, horses, mountains, clouds, houses, and street signs.

Expert Opinions & Discussion within the field

• The #BenderRule: On Naming the Languages We Study and Why It Matters - Progress in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) depends on the existence of language resources: digitized collections of written, spoken or signed language, often with gold standard labels or annotations reflecting the intended output of the NLP system for the task at hand (e.g.

• Facebook is betting the next big interface is conversation - This article is part of Fast Company’s editorial series The New Rules of AI. More than 60 years into the era of artificial intelligence, the world’s largest technology companies are just beginning to crack open what’s possible with AI and grapple with how it might change our future.

• Francois Chollet: Keras, Deep Learning, and the Progress of AI - Francois Chollet is the creator of Keras, which is an open source deep learning library that is designed to enable fast, user-friendly experimentation with deep neural networks. It serves as an interface to several deep learning libraries, most popular of which is TensorFlow, and it was integrated

• The key to a more human-like Amazon Alexa is unsupervised learning - Alexa, Amazon’s intelligent assistant that’s in well over 100 million devices and works with over 60,000 appliances from 7,400 brands, acquires new skills thanks to contributions from the thousands of employees tinkering away at its backend systems.

• Deep Learning Pioneer Yoshua Bengio Says AI Is Not Magic And Intel AI Experts Explain Why And How - Deep learning has moved us a step closer to human-level AI by allowing machines to acquire intuitive knowledge, according to Bengio.

• Atari founder, governor play pong with the future of work in the artificial intelligence age - The artificial intelligence revolution isn’t coming, it’s already here. Take it from Gov. Jared Polis, a veteran of the tech startup scene introduced as Colorado’s innovator in chief Wednesday at a Denver Startup Week panel on the evolution of technology and its impact on everyday life.

Explainers

• Attention Mechanism - Can I have your Attention please! The introduction of the Attention Mechanism in deep learning has improved the success of various models in recent years, and continues to be an omnipresent component in state-of-the-art models.

• How Backpropagation Works - An 18-minute video from Brandon Rohrer on how backpropagation works!

• Cloud AI - Learning Machine Learning: An Online Comic from Google AI

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