Data scientists are modern-day wizards who can turn digital coal into virtual diamonds. But data scientists are unique individuals with special talents, and organizations risk squandering those gifts if data scientists are managed like any other employee. Some organizations are finding that the individual best suited to manage data scientists is another data scientist, also known as the Chief Data Scientist. Read More
Monthly Archives: September 2020
Causal Machine Learning Represents Next Evolution of AI
The Covid era is a proving ground. For example, alternative data providers have been espousing the wonders of their unique datasets, but if you can’t prove that your datasets are valuable in these volatile markets, the oxygen in the room is going to escape real quick.
Now stretching into its ninth month here in the US, the pandemic has also turned up the heat on machine-learning models that have historically relied on correlations between different types of datasets. Some very interesting work underway by IBM and Refinitiv could help brace these models for the future. Read More
These weird, unsettling photos show that AI is getting smarter
Models are learning how to generate images from captions, a sign that they’re getting better at understanding our world.
Of all the AI models in the world, OpenAI’s GPT-3 has most captured the public’s imagination. It can spew poems, short stories, and songs with little prompting, and has been demonstrated to fool people into thinking its outputs were written by a human. But its eloquence is more of a parlor trick, not to be confused with real intelligence.
Nonetheless, researchers believe that the techniques used to create GPT-3 could contain the secret to more advanced AI. … Now new research from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, AI2, has taken this idea to the next level. The researchers have developed a new text-and-image model, otherwise known as a visual-language model, that can generate images given a caption. Read More
Rethinking human-AI interaction
Imagine 1977, sitting at the helm of one of your very first personal computers. The Commodore “Personal Electronic Transactor,” endearingly nicknamed the PET, promised to be an all-in-one “bookkeeper, cook, language tutor, inventory clerk, and playmate.” For the first time, you could type up programs on the tiny “chiclet” keyboard — working out your math homework, saving snippets of recipes, designing simple graphics — and see the results spring up before your eyes. Unlike a washing machine or a calculator, here was a first encounter with a machine that was fundamentally open-ended, dynamic, and responsive in a tangible way. Read More
GPT-3’s bigotry is exactly why devs shouldn’t use the internet to train AI
It turns out that a $1 billion investment from Microsoft and unfettered access to a supercomputer wasn’t enough to keep OpenAI’s GPT-3 from being just as bigoted as Tay, the algorithm-based chat bot that became an overnight racist after being exposed to humans on social media. Read More
Model Lifecycle: From ideas to value
Value scoping, discovery, delivery, and stewardship
In Part 1 of this series we examined the key differences between software and models; in Part 2 we explored the twelve traps of conflating models with software; and in Part 3 we looked at the evolution of models. In this article, we go through the model lifecycle, from the initial conception of the idea to build models to finally delivering the value from these models. Read More
Knowledge in the grey zone: AI and cybersecurity
Cybersecurity protects citizens and society from harm perpetrated through computer networks. Its task is made ever more complex by the diversity of actors—criminals, spies, militaries, hacktivists, firms—operating in global information networks, so that cybersecurity is intimately entangled with the so-called grey zone of conflict between war and peace in the early twenty-first century. To counter cyber threats from this environment, cybersecurity is turning to artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI) to mitigate anomalous behaviours in cyberspace. This article argues that AI algorithms create new modes and sites of cybersecurity knowledge production through hybrid assemblages of humans and nonhumans. It concludes by looking beyond ‘everyday’ cybersecurity to military and intelligence use of AI and asks what is at stake in the automation of cybersecurity. Read More
Computer Vision software for image and video identification
Computer vision often detects and locates objects in digital images and videos. As living organisms process images with their visual cortex, many researchers have taken the architecture of the mammalian visual cortex as a model for neural networks structured to perform image recognition.
Over the past 20 years, progress in computer vision has been remarkable. Read More
An extensible, interactive visualization framework to measure gender bias in the news
How we successfully integrated Dash (by Plotly) into our NLP and linguistics research to study women’s portrayal in mainstream Canadian news Read More
Machine learning and Doppler vibrometer monitor household appliances
A way of monitoring household appliances by using machine learning to analyse vibrations on a wall or ceiling has been developed by researchers in the US. Their system could be used to create centralized smart home systems without the need for individual sensors in each object. What is more, the technology could help track energy use, identify electrical faults and even remind people to empty the dishwasher. Read More
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