A.I. IN THE NEWS
Human translators would help. ProPublica reported that the U.S. government has recommended Google Translate as a tool that officials should use to help "decide whether refugees should be allowed into the United States." Besides noting that Google already advises people that its translate tool is "not intended to replace human translators," the article details the problems the tool has understanding the nuances of language, which could lead to a host of potentially bad scenarios. As the article states, "The government may misconstrue harmless comments or miss an actually threatening one," because of Translate's limitations.
A.I. hiring hits the United Kingdom. Companies in the U.K. have star are now using A.I. technologies to analyze people's facial expressions and voices during job interviews, The Telegraph reports. The article discusses Unilever and its use of technology from Hirevue and contrasts both the pros and cons of using A.I. for hiring, such as potential bias concerns.
Beating the language benchmarks. Google AI and Toyota Technological Institute of Chicago researchers created an A.I. system called ALBERTA that has achieved "state-of-the-art results" on several popular benchmarks involving natural language processing, a type of A.I. that understands human language, VentureBeat reported. The article explains that ALBERTA improves upon Google's previous BERT system, which other researchers have used to build their own A.I. models that have performed well on benchmark tests related to language.
Alibaba's new chip. Alibaba has developed its own computer chip designed to handle A.I. inference tasks, which is when A.I. systems makes predictions based on the data they ingests, the South China Morning Post reported. The article said that the new chip is "currently being used within Alibaba to power product search, automatic translation, and personalised recommendations on the company's websites."
BEWARE OF BENCHMARKS
Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer talked to Fortune about the problems with benchmarks and the false impression they may create regarding A.I.'s overall abilities. "The mistake we can make is constructing a very specific benchmark and then creating something that is better than everything else, or even people sometimes, at that benchmark," Schroepfer said. "You'll see these big headlines, 'A.I. is better than people at language,' and they basically assume all tasks, when really all it was was better at a very, very specific thing."
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EYE ON A.I. TALENT
Yum! Brands, the fast-food giant that operates KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell, hired Clay Johnson to be its chief digital and technology officer. Johnson was previously the chief information officer and global business services head at Walmart.
Dynam.AI picked Dr. Michael Zeller to be the enterprise startup's CEO. Zeller was previously the senior vice president of A.I. strategy and innovation at Software AG.
EYE ON A.I. RESEARCH
Deep learning on the highways. Researchers from the University of Siena in Italy published a paper about using deep learning to create a video-surveillance system that analyzes traffic on highways. The researchers wrote that their "results have shown that these networks can efficiently learn the temporal information from the video stream, simplifying the feature engineering process and making very promising predictions."
Cancer research gets a supercomputing boost. Researchers from Oak Ridge National Lab and Sony Brook University published a paper about using high-performance computing (HPC), or the use of supercomputers, to boost the efficiency of neural networks used to aid cancer research. The team wrote, "The ability to use HPC to produce networks that are capable of fast and accurate predictions makes HPC a significant enabling technology in using deep learning for scientific analysis."
FORTUNE ON A.I.
Learning to Love the Bot: Managers Need to Understand A.I. Logic Before Using It as a Business Tool– By Jeremy Kahn
A.I. Security Cameras Are the Latest High-Tech Attempt to Combat Mass Shooters– By Bernhard Warner
Amazon Unveils Echo Studio Speaker, Noise-Cancelling Earbuds, and Smart Glasses– By JP Mangalindan
BRAIN FOOD
Musical minds. Rolling Stonepublished a short profile about musician Holly Herndon, who used neural networks to help create music for her most recent album, PROTO. Herndon, who has a PhD in composition from Stanford University , trained a neural network with human vocals so that the software—dubbed Spawn—learned to mimic the voices. She then wove the A.I.'s vocals into her songs, creating an "uncanny beauty" like "an alien child moaning and wailing in harmony with its mother," the article said. Herndon, the story notes, has also made "explicit the human labor that went into Spawn," in order to "help set the norms for A.I. music and prevent uncredited mooching off others' music." Herndon said: "I really wanted to make audible the people who went into the training data."
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