Jan 24, 2020
The U.S. Government announces the restriction of the sale outside of the U.S. of AI for satellite image analysis. Baidu beats out Google and Microsoft for language “understanding” with its model ERNIE, which uses a technique that it developed specifically for the Chinese language. Samsung unveils NEON, its humanoid AI avatars. The U.S. Department of Defense stands up a counter-unmanned aerial system office. And GoogleAI publishes an AI system for breast cancer screening, but meets with some Twitter (and Wired) backlash on solving the “wrong problem.” Researchers at University of Vermont, the Allen Discovery Center/Tufts, and Wyss Institute/Harvard introduce the world’s “first living robots,” xenobots, constructed from skin and muscle cells of frogs (from designs made with evolutionary algorithms). RAND releases a report on an assessment and recommendations of the DOD’s posture for AI. AI for social good (AI4SG) releases its survey of research and publications on beneficial applications of AI. Daniel Dennett explores the question of whether HAL committed murder, in a classic 1996 essay. From the Bengio and Marcus debate, both references Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” And Robert Downey Jr. hosts a YouTube series on The Age of AI.
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