When Jagadish Mahendran heard about his friend’s daily challenges navigating as a blind person, he immediately thought of his artificial intelligence work.
“For years I had been teaching robots to see things,” he said. Mahendran, a computer vision researcher at the University of Georgia’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence, found it ironic that he had helped develop machines — including a shopping robot that could “see” stocked shelves and a kitchen robot — but nothing for people with low or no vision.
After exploring existing tech for blind and low vision people like camera-enabled canes or GPS-connected smartphone apps, he came up with a backpack-based AI design that uses cameras to provide instantaneous alerts. Read More
Monthly Archives: March 2021
Amazon Web Services partners with Hugging Face to simplify AI-based natural language processing
Amazon Web Services Inc. said today it’s partnering with an artificial intelligence startup called Hugging Face Inc. as part of an effort to simplify and accelerate the adoption of natural language processing models.
… For its part, Hugging Face has announced a couple of new services built using Amazon SageMaker, including AutoNLP, which provides an automatic way to train, evaluate and deploy state-of-the-art NLP models for different tasks, and the Accelerated Inference API, which is used to build, train and deploy machine learning models in the cloud and at the edge. The startup has also chosen AWS as its preferred cloud provider. Read More
Text-Gen, a python library that allows you to build a custom text generation model
Defence review: British army to be cut to 72,500 troops by 2025
The size of the Army is to be reduced to 72,500 soldiers by 2025 as part of a move towards drones and cyber warfare.
Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said “increased deployability and technological advantage” meant greater effect could be delivered by fewer people.br>
He set out plans for new capabilities such as electronic warfare and drones in the Commons. Read More
Small, cheap spy satellites mean there’s no hiding place
IN THE MIDDLE of last year, Ecuadorians watched with concern as 340 foreign boats, most of them Chinese, fished just outside the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) around their country’s westernmost province, the Galapagos Islands. The law of the sea requires such vessels to carry GPS-based automatic identification systems (AIS) that broadcast where they are, and to keep those systems switched on. Some boats, however, failed to comply. There were more than 550 instances of vessels not transmitting their locations for over a day. This regular radio silence stoked fears that the boats concerned were sneaking into Ecuador’s waters to plunder its fish.
Both local officials and China’s ambassador to Ecuador denied this, and said all the boats were sticking to the rules. In October, however, HawkEye 360, a satellite operator based in Virginia, announced it had detected vessels inside Ecuador’s EEZ on 14 occasions when the boats in question were not transmitting AIS (see map). HawkEye’s satellites could pinpoint these renegades by listening for faint signals emanating from their navigation radars and radio communications. Read More
GPT-3 tries pickup lines
AI blogger Janelle Shane, the author of “You Look Like a Thing and I Love You” , used four variants of GPT-3 to generate humorous pickup lines with varying degrees of success. Some lines they generated included “I’m losing my voice from all the screaming your hotness is causing me to do” and “I will briefly summarize the plot of Back to the Future II for you.” Read More
A ‘Glut’ of Innovation Spotted in Data Science and ML Platforms
These are heady days in data science and machine learning (DSML) according to Gartner, which identified a “glut” of innovation occurring in the market for DSML platforms. From established companies chasing AutoML or model governance to startups focusing on MLops or explainable AI, a plethora of vendors are simultaneously moving in all directions with their products as they seek to differentiate themselves amid a very diverse audience.
“The DSML market is simultaneously more vibrant and messier than ever,” a gaggle of Gartner analysts led by Peter Krensky wrote in the Magic Quadrant for DSML Platforms, which was published earlier this month. “The definitions and parameters of data science and data scientists continue to evolve, and the market is dramatically different from how it was in 2014, when we published the first Magic Quadrant on it.”
The 2021 Magic Quadrant for DSML is heavily represented by companies to the right of the axis, which anybody who’s familiar with Gartner’s quadrant-based assessment method knows represents the “completeness of vision.” No fewer than 13 of the 20 vendors to make the quadrant’s cut landed on the right side, which indicates active innovation. Read More
How can we keep algorithmic racism out of Canadian health care’s AI toolkit?
Chances are that artificial intelligence is already helping a hospital near you to diagnose patients or monitor surgeries. But health care has a long, ugly history of racial biases that prevent everyone from getting the best treatment
In health care, the promise of artificial intelligence is alluring: With the help of big data sets and algorithms, AI can aid difficult decisions, like triaging patients and determiningdiagnoses. And since AI leans on statistics rather than human interpretation, the idea is that it’s neutral – it treats everyone in a given data set equally.
But what if it doesn’t? Read More
AI Can Now Debate with Humans and Sometimes Convince Them, Too
Today on the Science Talk podcast, Noam Slonim of IBM Research speaks to Scientific American about an impressive feat of computer engineering: an AI-powered autonomous system that can engage in complex debate with humans over issues ranging from subsidizing preschool and the merit of space exploration to the pros and cons of genetic engineering.
In a new Nature paper, Slonim and his colleagues show that across 80 debate topics, Project Debater’s computational argument technology has performed very decently—with a human audience being the judge of that. “However, it is still somewhat inferior on average to the results obtained by expert human debaters,” Slonim says. Read More
AI Could Enable ‘Swarm Warfare’ for Tomorrow’s Fighter Jets
A Pentagon project is testing scenarios involving multiple aircraft that could change the dynamics of air combat.
Two F-16s engaged with an opposing F-16 at an altitude of 16,000 feet above rocky desert terrain. As the aircraft converged from opposite directions, the paired F-16s suddenly spun away from one another, forcing their foe to choose one to pursue. The F-16 that had been left alone then quickly changed course, maneuvering behind the enemy with textbook precision. A few seconds later, it launched a missile that destroyed the opposing jet before it could react.
The battle took place last month in a computer simulator. Here’s what made it special: All three aircraft were controlled by artificial intelligence algorithms. Those algorithms had learned how to react and perform aerial maneuvers partly through a state-of-the-art AI technique that involves testing different approaches thousands of times and seeing which work best. Read More
Rick's Cafe AI 