Feb 5, 2021
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In COVID-related AI news, Andy and Dave discuss a machine learning
transformer model from Facebook AI and the NYU School of Medicine
that uses x-rays to determine whether a COVID patient might need
more intensive care. A for-pay report from Synced provides a survey
of China’s AI efforts in response to COVID-19. In regular AI news,
European Parliament members adopt guidelines for military and
non-military uses of AI. Meanwhile, the UK Competition and Markets
Authority cautions that algorithms can damage online competition
and should face regulatory scrutiny. Researchers at NOIRLab use
machine learning to identify just over 1200 potential new
gravitational lenses. Researchers at Harvard use fish-inspired
robots to demonstrate coordinated swarm movements without any
outside control. Nature provides reflections from various authors
on AI. And the AI Newsletter compiles a list of the 100 most
influential people in AI. In research topics, researchers at
Cornell demonstrate a curriculum strategy to solve hard Sokoban
(the “warehouse man” game) problems, and builds on a pool of
sub-tasks. And in a similar, but unrelated effort, researchers at
Berkeley and Google Research create a trio of agents to create
challenging but feasible environments for the primary agent, the
protagonist to navigate; they use an antagonist agent, which tries
to create hard environments, while a third agent maximizes the
differential between the other two agents, which keeps the tasks
just at the edge of the protagonist’s ability to solve. An article
in the Journal of AI Research demonstrates that containment of a
superintelligence is impossible, due to fundamental limits inherent
in computing itself. And finally, Chitta Ranjan provides the book
of the week, in Understanding Deep Learning: Application to Rare
Event Prediction.
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