Feb 26, 2021
In AI news, researchers from the University of Copenhagen
develop a machine learning model that estimates the chances of risk
of death due to COVID at various stages of a hospital stay,
including a 80 percent accuracy whether a patient with COVID will
require a respirator. The Joint AI Center has a
double-announcement, with the Tradewind Initiative, which seeks to
develop an acquisition ecosystem to speed the delivery of AI
capabilities, and with Blanket Purchase Agreements for AI testing
and evaluation services. Kaggle publishes a survey on the 2020
State of Data Science and ML, which examines information from ~2000
data scientists about their jobs and their experiences. PeopleTec
releases an “Overhead MNIST,” a dataset containing benchmark
satellite imagery for 10 categories (parking lots, cars, plans,
storage tanks, and others). Epic’s Unreal Engine introduces the
MetaHuman Creator for release later this year, which purports to
create ultra-realistic visuals for virtual human characters; Andy
uses the moment to describe the “Uncanny Valley,” which the Epic
tech might manage to leap out of. And researchers from Carnegie
Mellon and George Washington show that, like language transformers,
image representations contain human-like biases. In research,
researchers at the Israel Institute of Technology create a
Ramanujan Machine, which can generate conjectures for mathematical
constants, without proof. Researchers demonstrate initial steps of
reconstructing video from brain activity. The report of the week
examines U.S. public opinion on AI, with views on declining support
for development and divided views on facial recognition. DeepMind
London approaches the topic of common sense from the viewpoint of
animals. And the book of the week comes from the author of the
aforementioned paper, Murray Shanahan, and his 2010 book Embodiment
and the Inner Life.
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