Apr 2, 2021
Andy and Dave discuss the latest in AI news, including a letter
from the National Transportation Safety Board that asks the
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to regulate more
strictly autonomous vehicles and driver assistance technologies; of
note, the letter also uses Tesla as an example, stating that the
company is using its customers to beta test its full self-driving
technology on public roads. KMPG surveys business leaders on a
variety of AI-related topics and finds that, among other things,
many more leaders have the perception that AI tech is moving out
too quickly. Researchers at Aston University announce a three-year
study to explore the utility of human brain stem cells grown on a
microchip, a so-called Neu-ChiP. Researchers from Norway and
Australia unveil DyRET, a quadruped robot that can adapt its
morphology (such as growing taller or shorter) as it encounters
different environments. And Japanese researchers describe a decoded
neurofeedback (DecNef) method, which uses fMRI to visualize brain
activity and then calculate the similarity between real-time brain
activity and brain activity patterns corresponding to specific
pre-established memory and mental states. Microsoft’s PowerPoint
has a Presenter Coach that will listen and watch your presentation
and give you pointers on speech patterns, pacing, attention, body
language, and other attributes. The two main research items both
involve AI agents playing in the Atari Learning Environment (57
games from Atari’s library), and both with groundbreaking results
in different ways: Uber AI and OpenAI use a model-free approach in
Go-Explore, which uses a concept of “first return (to previous
states), and then explore; GoogleAI use a world model approach with
DreamerV2, which learns behaviors inside a separately trained world
model (they also recommend a “clipped record mean” to aggregate
scores across the various games). The survey of the week looks at
Deepfakes Generation & Detection. Marjorie McShane and Sergei
Nirenburg publish Linguistics for the Age of AI, arguing that
researchers must place linguistics front and center for machines to
achieve human-level language understanding, with big data and stats
approaches as contributing methods. And in the video of the week,
Steven Gouveia has produced a documentary on The Age of AI.
Listeners Survey: https://bit.ly/3bqyiHk
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