Mini Briefs

DeepMind touts predictive healthcare AI ‘breakthrough’ trained on heavily skewed data

DeepMind recently announced that it had trained a model capable of predicting “acute kidney injury,” a life-threatening condition, 48 hours in advance, which is “within a clinically actionable window.”

However, the research comes with “serious caveats”:

… the data used to train the model skews overwhelmingly male: 93.6%. This is because DeepMind’s AI was trained using patient data provided by the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs (VA). The research paper states that females comprised just 6.38% of patients in the training data set. “Model performance was lower for this demographic,” it notes, without saying how much lower.

The skewed dataset limits the usability of the model, and it highlights the problem of dataset bias that is common for many machine learning systems today.

This AI detects 11 types of emotions from a selfie

From the Next Web:

Researchers from the University of Colorado and Duke University have developed the neural net that can accurately classify images in 11 emotional categories. To train the model, researchers used 2,187 videos that were clearly classified into 27 distinct emotion categories including anxiety, surprise, and sadness.

The resesarchers argue the trained neural network, called the “EmoNet”, may have potential applications in mental health “therapeutics, treatments, and interventions.” However, as the article notes, recent research has put significant doubts on the ability to infer human emotions from facial expression alone. While there are few common and easy to detect signals such as “smile -> happy” and “frown -> sad”, most emotions have many different expressions, especially across different cultures, that make their detection from facial muscles incredibly difficult without further contexts.

Advances & Business

• America is drowning in garbage. Now robots are being put on duty to help solve the recycling crisis - The U.S. is facing a recycling crisis that is burying cities and towns in tens of millions of tons of garbage a day.

• Artificial Intelligence Can Now Create Perfumes, Even Without A Sense Of Smell - Isn’t a sense of smell a critical part of creating perfume? While it’s not unimportant, a lot of the groundwork when developing a new fragrance is done by evaluating data, and that’s something artificial intelligence is highly qualified to do.

• NASA’s Robotic Arm will Work Just Like a Human Geologist on Mars - The robotic arm can be seen doing a bicep curl in combination with its turret as it emulates a load-lifting manoeuvre.

• This autonomous bicycle shows China’s rising AI chip expertise - It might not look like much, but this wobbly self-driving bicycle is a symbol of Chinese growing expertise in advanced chip design. Look, no hands: The bike not only balances itself, it steers itself around obstacles, and even responds to simple voice commands.

• A new tool uses AI to spot text written by AI - AI algorithms can generate text convincing enough to fool the average human—potentially providing a way to mass-produce fake news, bogus reviews, and phony social accounts. Thankfully, AI can now be used to identify fake text, too.

• Science Goes Too Far, Creates AI That Turns You Into an Anime Character - We live in an age of miracles and horrors. Artificial intelligence now has the power to create fake videos of people doing and saying things they’d never say or do, simulate the ravages of age, and transform you into a classical work of art.

• China has started a grand experiment in AI education. It could reshape how the world learns. - Zhou Yi was terrible at math. He risked never getting into college. Then a company called Squirrel AI came to his middle school in Hangzhou, China, promising personalized tutoring.

Concerns & Hype

• Reducing malicious use of synthetic media research - Jess Whittlestone and I recently published a paper exploring the challenges and options around ensuring that machine learning research is not used for harm, focusing on the challenges of synthetic media.

• Toby Walsh, A.I. Expert, Is Racing to Stop the Killer Robots - Autonomous weapons, capable of acting without human oversight, are closer than we think, Dr. Walsh believes, and must be banned. Toby Walsh, a professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, is one of Australia’s leading experts on artificial intelligence.

• California Police Are Sharing Facial Recognition Databases to ID Suspects - Dave GershgornAug 1 · 6 min readany of California’s local law enforcement agencies have access to facial recognition software for identifying suspects who appear in crime scene footage, documents…

Expert Opinions & Discussion within the field

• Huge computing power ‘can deliver human-level AI in 5 years’ - In the race to build a machine with human-level intelligence, it seems, size really matters. “We think the most benefits will go to whoever has the biggest computer,” said Greg Brockman, chairman and chief technology officer of OpenAI.

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