In January 2019, DeepMind revealed AlphaStar to the world—the first artificial intelligence (AI) system to beat a professional player at the game of StarCraft II—representing a milestone in the progress of AI. AlphaStar draws on many areas of AI research, including deep learning, reinforcement learning, game theory, and evolutionary computation (EC). In this paper we analyze AlphaStar primarily through the lens of EC, presenting a new look at the system and relating it to many concepts in the field. We highlight some of its most interesting aspects—the use of Lamarckian evolution,competitive co-evolution, and quality diversity. In doing so,we hope to provide a bridge between the wider EC community and one of the most significant AI systems developed in recent times. Read More
Monthly Archives: June 2019
The Power of Self-Learning Systems
AI Codes its Own ‘AI Child’ – AutoML
a16z Podcast: The History and Future of Machine Learning
How have we gotten to where were are with machine learning? Where are we going?
a16z Operating Partner Frank Chen and Carnegie Mellon professor Tom Mitchell first stroll down memory lane, visiting the major landmarks: the symbolic approach of the 1970s, the “principled probabalistic methods” of the 1980s, and today’s deep learning phase. Then they go on to explore the frontiers of research. Along the way, they cover:
– How planning systems from the 1970s and early 1980s were stymied by the “banana in the tailpipe” problem
– How the relatively slow neurons in our visual cortex work together to deliver very speedy and accurate recognition
– How fMRI scans of the brain reveal common neural patterns across people when they are exposed to common nouns like chair, car, knife, and so on
– How the computer science community is working with social scientists (psychologists, economists, and philosophers) on building measures for fairness and transparency for machine learning models
– How we want our self-driving cars to have reasonable answers to the Trolley Problem, but no one sitting for their DMV exam is ever asked how they would respond
– How there were inflated expectations (and great social fears) for AI in the 1980s, and how the US concerns about Japan compare to our concerns about China today
– Whether this is the best time ever for AI and ML research and what continues to fascinate and motivate Tom after decades in the field
Read More
This Robot Artist Just Became the First to Stage a Solo Exhibition. What Does That Say About Creativity?
Standing in a wood-paneled room at the University of Oxford, surrounded by her artwork, Ai-Da looks out at her creations. “I want people to know that our times are powerful times,” she says slowly, pausing between sentences. Like many artists, she wants her work to promote discussion. And yet unlike other artists, Ai-Da tells us with a blank expression and glassy eyes that only blink occasionally, she does not have consciousness, thoughts and feelings. At least, not yet.
Ai-Da’s creators bill her as the world’s first robot artist, and she’s the latest AI innovation to blur the boundary between machine and artist; a vision of the future suddenly becoming part of our present. She has a robotic arm system and human-like features, is equipped with facial recognition technology and is powered with artificial intelligence. She is able to analyze an image in front of her, which feeds into an algorithm to dictate the movement of her arm, enabling her to produce sketches. Her goal is creativity. Read More
Google Turns to Retro Cryptography to Keep Datasets Private
Certain studies require sensitive datasets: the relationship between nutritious school lunch and student health, the effectiveness of salary equity initiatives, and so on. Valuable insights require navigating a minefield of private, personal information. Now, after years of work, cryptographers and data scientists at Google have come up with a technique to enable this “multi-party computation” without exposing information to anyone who didn’t already have it.
Today Google will release an open source cryptographic tool known as Private Join and Compute. It facilitates the process of joining numeric columns from different datasets to calculate a sum, count, or average on data that is encrypted and unreadable during its entire mathematical journey. Only the results of the computation can be decrypted and viewed by all parties, meaning that you only get the results, not the data you didn’t already own. Read More
How not to prevent a cyber war with Russia
In the short span of years in which the threat of cyberwar has loomed, no one has quite figured out how to prevent one. As state-sponsored hackers find new ways to inflict disruption and paralysis on one another, that arms race has proven far easier to accelerate than to slow down. But security wonks tend to agree, at least, that there’s one way not to prevent a cyberwar: launching a preemptive or disproportionate cyberattack on an opponent’s civilian infrastructure. As the Trump administration increasingly beats its cyberwar drum, some former national security officials and analysts warn that even threatening that sort of attack could do far more to escalate a coming cyberwar than to deter it. Read More
The fourth Industrial revolution emerges from AI and the Internet of Things
Big data, analytics, and machine learning are starting to feel like anonymous business words, but they’re not just overused abstract concepts—those buzzwords represent huge changes in much of the technology we deal with in our daily lives. Some of those changes have been for the better, making our interaction with machines and information more natural and more powerful. Others have helped companies tap into consumers’ relationships, behaviors, locations and innermost thoughts in powerful and often disturbing ways. And the technologies have left a mark on everything from our highways to our homes. Read More
Three Core Principles of Venture Capital Portfolio Strategy
Lesson 1 — Home Runs Matter
Lesson 2 — Finding Home Runs
Lesson 3 — Following-on is critical
From humble beginnings, the venture capital (VC) industry has evolved into one of the most significant, and certainly best-known, asset classes within the private equity space. Venture-backed startups have redefined entire concepts of industry, with some of the trailblazers usurping the traditional oil and banking giants to become the most valuable companies on earth.
Partly as a result of this, the venture capital space has seen an influx of participants and professionals. Read More
Connecting Touch and Vision via Cross-Modal Prediction
Humans perceive the world using multi-modal sensory inputs such as vision, audition, and touch. In this work, we investigate the cross-modal connection between vision and touch. The main challenge in this cross-domain modeling task lies in the significant scale discrepancy between the two: while our eyes perceive an entire visual scene at once, humans can only feel a small region of an object at any given moment. To connect vision and touch, we introduce new tasks of synthesizing plausible tactile signals from visual inputs as well as imagining how we interact with objects given tactile data as input. To accomplish our goals, we first equip robots with both visual and tactile sensors and collect a large-scale dataset of corresponding vision and tactile image sequences. To close the scale gap, we present a new conditional adversarial model that incorporates the scale and location information of the touch. Human perceptual studies demonstrate that our model can produce realistic visual images from tactile data and vice versa. Finally, we present both qualitative and quantitative experimental results regarding different system designs, as well as visualizing the learned representations of our model. Read More
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