Deadline: AI centre stage in weird and wonderful take on Festival Fringe. “The researchers instructed the ImprovBot to repetitively mine the 100-word text descriptions of every show from 2011 to 2019, amounting to more than two million words. Online audiences will be allowed to interact with ImprovBot on Twitter that created the new shows based on previous fringe listings from 1pm on Friday, August 7. The bot will use this data to devise the world’s first AI-generated event blurbs for an imagined festival of comedy, plays, musicals, and cabaret.”
AI
NIST: How Automation and AI May Help Level the Playing Field for Women in Manufacturing
NIST: How Automation and AI May Help Level the Playing Field for Women in Manufacturing. “Women make up about 29 percent of the manufacturing workforce despite filling 47 percent of the positions in the overall workforce, according to the Manufacturing Institute. While there have been periods of growth and decline, the dynamic is mostly unchanged since 1970, when women held 27 percent of the manufacturing jobs. But many experts say the growing adoption of automation and artificial intelligence (AI), combined with the critical need for knowledge-based workers, will create more opportunities for women in manufacturing.”
A lesson in automated journalism: Bring back the humans (NiemanLab)
NiemanLab: A lesson in automated journalism: Bring back the humans. “It’s an important discovery not just for automation in fact-checking, but for similar efforts in other journalistic genres. We’ve found that artificial Intelligence is smart, but it’s not yet smart enough to make final decisions or avoid the robotic repetition that is an unfortunate trait of, um, robots. In the case of Squash, we need humans to make final decisions about which fact-checks to display on the screen. Our voice-to-text and matching algorithms are good — and getting better — but they’re not great. And sometimes they make some really bad matches. Like, comically bad.”
ZDNet: Myth-busting AI won’t work
ZDNet: Myth-busting AI won’t work . “People have myths because that is one kind of response to the unknown. If you take away their myths, you may leave them with nothing. That’s why a very well-intentioned, thoughtful effort of scholars over at the Mozilla dot org foundation to debunk nonsense about artificial intelligence is bound to fail.”
MIT Technology Review: A new neural network could help computers code themselves
MIT Technology Review: A new neural network could help computers code themselves. “Automated code generation has been a hot research topic for a number of years. Microsoft is building basic code generation into its widely used software development tools, Facebook has made a system called Aroma that autocompletes small programs, and DeepMind has developed a neural network that can come up with more efficient versions of simple algorithms than those devised by humans. Even OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model can churn out simple pieces of code, such as web page layouts, from natural-language prompts. [Justin] Gottschlich and his colleagues call this machine programming.”
Carnegie Mellon University: Live-Streamed Game Collects Sounds To Help Train Home-Based Artificial Intelligence
Carnegie Mellon University: Live-Streamed Game Collects Sounds To Help Train Home-Based Artificial Intelligence . “From yawning to closing the fridge door, a lot of sounds occur within the home. Such sounds could be useful for home-based artificial intelligence applications, but training that AI requires a robust and diverse set of samples. A video game developed by Carnegie Mellon University researchers leverages live streaming to collect sound donations from players that will populate an open-source database.”
MIT Technology Review: An AI hiring firm says it can predict job hopping based on your interviews
MIT Technology Review: An AI hiring firm says it can predict job hopping based on your interviews. “As we’ve written before, the idea of ‘bias-free’ algorithms is highly misleading. But PredictiveHire’s latest research is troubling for a different reason. It is focused on building a new machine-learning model that seeks to predict a candidate’s likelihood of job hopping, the practice of changing jobs more frequently than an employer desires. The work follows the company’s recent peer-reviewed research that looked at how open-ended interview questions correlate with personality (in and of itself a highly contested practice).”
Engadget: DeepMind and Oxford University researchers on how to ‘decolonize’ AI
Engadget: DeepMind and Oxford University researchers on how to ‘decolonize’ AI. “In a moment where society is collectively reckoning with just how deep the roots of racism reach, a new paper from researchers at DeepMind — the AI lab and sister company to Google — and the University of Oxford presents a vision to ‘decolonize’ artificial intelligence. The aim is to keep society’s ugly prejudices from being reproduced and amplified by today’s powerful machine learning systems.”
EurekAlert: New machine learning method allows hospitals to share patient data — privately
EurekAlert: New machine learning method allows hospitals to share patient data — privately. “To answer medical questions that can be applied to a wide patient population, machine learning models rely on large, diverse datasets from a variety of institutions. However, health systems and hospitals are often resistant to sharing patient data, due to legal, privacy, and cultural challenges. An emerging technique called federated learning is a solution to this dilemma, according to a study published Tuesday in the journal Scientific Reports, led by senior author Spyridon Bakas, PhD, an instructor of Radiology and Pathology & Laboratory Medicine in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.”
CNN: This buzzy new AI can make human-sounding recipes, but they still taste gross
CNN: This buzzy new AI can make human-sounding recipes, but they still taste gross. “Last week I whipped up a batch of watermelon cookies. The recipe called for watermelon, of course, along with sugar, flour, an egg white, and a few other ingredients. The directions were pretty simple: stir the watermelon gently in a saucepan filled with sugar water over medium-high heat, add in the egg white, and mix in flour, baking powder and salt. The result was barely edible. It looked more like a watermelon omelette muffin than a cookie, and tasted like a sugary, gloopy nightmare. My four-year-old daughter was the only fan in our house, saying they tasted ‘weird’ but also protesting when I threw them in the compost.”
EurekAlert: Researchers build first AI tool capable of identifying individual birds
EurekAlert: Researchers build first AI tool capable of identifying individual birds. “New research demonstrates for the first time that artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to train computers to recognise individual birds, a task humans are unable to do. The research is published in the British Ecological Society journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution.”
Business Insider: A new algorithm could catch social-media trolls as they try to influence US elections. Researchers are offering it for free.
Business Insider: A new algorithm could catch social-media trolls as they try to influence US elections. Researchers are offering it for free.. “The tool, described in a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, works by learning to recognize known, common patterns associated with troll activity and disinformation campaigns. Russian troll accounts, for instance, have posted many links to far-right websites, but the content on those sites didn’t always match the posts’ accompanying text or images. Venezuelan trolls, meanwhile, have often posted fake websites.”
Phys .org: People are using artificial intelligence to help sort out their divorce. Would you?
Phys .org: People are using artificial intelligence to help sort out their divorce. Would you?. “According to Amica’s website, it ‘considers legal principles and applies them to your circumstances’. In other words, the software draws on mass data (collected and embedded by its designers) from similar past cases to make suggestions to users. Amica demonstrates AI’s potential in solving legal problems in family disputes. Interestingly, it’s not the only tool of this kind in the legal field. There are a range of AI-powered family legal services used in Australia, including Penda and Adieu.”
Medical Xpress: Using lung X-rays to diagnose COVID-19
Medical Xpress: Using lung X-rays to diagnose COVID-19. “Researchers from the Department of Computer Architecture and Technology at the University of Seville’s School of Computer Engineering (ETSII) are working on a system that uses X-ray images of patients’ lungs to help diagnose COVID-19. This system uses deep learning to train a neural network model that can distinguish between healthy patients, pneumonia patients and COVID-19 patients. This has been achieved using a freely accessible online database that medical professionals from around the world have been feeding with lung X-rays since the onset of the pandemic.”
MIT News: Tackling the misinformation epidemic with “In Event of Moon Disaster”
MIT News: Tackling the misinformation epidemic with “In Event of Moon Disaster”. “This provocative website showcases a ‘complete’ deepfake (manipulated audio and video) of U.S. President Richard M. Nixon delivering the real contingency speech written in 1969 for a scenario in which the Apollo 11 crew were unable to return from the moon. The team worked with a voice actor and a company called Respeecher to produce the synthetic speech using deep learning techniques. They also worked with the company Canny AI to use video dialogue replacement techniques to study and replicate the movement of Nixon’s mouth and lips. Through these sophisticated AI and machine learning technologies, the seven-minute film shows how thoroughly convincing deepfakes can be.”
