Jul 16, 2021
Andy and Dave discuss the latest in AI news, including a report
that the Israel Defense Forces used a swarm of small drones in
mid-May in Gaza to locate, identify, and attack Hamas militants,
using Thor, a 9-kilgram quadrotor drone. A paper in the Journal of
American Medical Association examines an early warning system for
sepsis, and finds that it misses out on most instances (67%) of
cases, and frequently issued false alarms (to which the developer
contests the results). A new bill, the Consumer Safety Technology
Act, directs the US Consumer Product Safety Commission to run a
pilot program to use AI to help in safety inspections. A survey
from FICO on The State of Responsible AI (2021) shows, among other
things, a disinterest in the ethical and responsible use of AI
among business leaders (with 65% of companies saying that can’t
explain how specific AI model predictions are made, and 22% of
companies have an AI ethics board to consider questions on AI
ethics and fairness). In a similar vein, a survey from the Pew
Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center
found that 68% of respondents (from across 602 leaders in the AI
field) believe that AI ethical principles will NOT be employed by
most AI systems within the next decade; the survey includes a
summary of the respondents’ worries and hopes, as well as some
additional commentary. GitHub partners with OpenAI to launch
CoPilot, a “Programming Partner” that uses contextual cues to
suggest new code. Researchers from Stanford University, UC San
Diego, and MIT research Physion, a visual and physical prediction
benchmark to measure predictions about commonplace real world
physical events (such as when objects: collide, drop, roll, domino,
etc). CSET releases a report on Machine Learning and Cybersecurity:
Hype and Reality, finding that it is unlikely that machine learning
will fundamentally transform cyber defense. Bengio, Lecun, and
Hinton join together to pen a white paper on the role of deep
learning in AI, not surprisingly eschewing the need for symbolic
systems. Aston Zhang and Zack C. Lipton, and Alex J Smola release
the latest version of Dive into Deep Learning, now over 1000 pages,
and living only as an online version.
Follow the link below to visit our website and explore the links mentioned in the episode.