Search Engine Journal: Edge Browser Will AI Improve All Web Images. “Microsoft Bing announced a new AI technology that will bring 4K image experience to websites through Microsoft Edge, automatically enhancing website images. The technology, called Turing Image Super-Resolution, makes images display at a high resolution, no matter how poor the original image is.”
The Next Web: DeepMind’s astounding new ‘Gato’ AI makes me fear humans will never achieve AGI. “DeepMind today unveiled a new multi-modal AI system capable of performing more than 600 different tasks. Dubbed Gato, it’s arguably the most impressive all-in-one machine learning kit the world’s seen yet.”
The Ohio State University: The deadly impact of urban streets that look like highways. “Serious auto crashes in urban areas are more likely on city streets that look to drivers like highways, new research suggests. The study used a novel approach: Ohio State University researchers applied machine learning techniques to analyze more than 240,000 images of road segments in Columbus, Ohio, taken from Google Street View. The goal was to see what the roads looked like to drivers and whether that was linked to serious and deadly crashes.”
The Verge: Google is using a new way to measure skin tones to make search results more inclusive. “The tech giant is working with Ellis Monk, an assistant professor of sociology at Harvard and the creator of the Monk Skin Tone Scale, or MST. The MST Scale is designed to replace outdated skin tone scales that are biased towards lighter skin. When these older scales are used by tech companies to categorize skin color, it can lead to products that perform worse for people with darker coloring, says Monk.”
Motherboard: Facebook’s New AI System Has a ‘High Propensity’ for Racism and Bias. “Facebook and its parent company, Meta, recently released a new tool that can be used to quickly develop state-of-the-art AI. But according to the company’s researchers, the system has the same problem as its predecessors: It’s extremely bad at avoiding results that reinforce racist and sexist stereotypes.”
Loughborough University: Using Artificial Intelligence to improve the health and wellbeing of people with learning disabilities. “A new study led by Loughborough University and the Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust will use Artificial Intelligence to improve the health and wellbeing of people with learning disabilities.”
Leiden University: Humanities and AI: A fruitful combination. “What do a linguist, an artist, a Professor of Conservation and Restoration, and a lecturer at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science have in common? They all use Artificial Intelligence. On 7 April they discussed the use of AI at Leiden’s Kijkhuis cinema.”
Denver Post: Is artificial intelligence the next tool to fight wildfires in the West?. “With wildfires becoming bigger and more destructive as the West dries out and heats up, agencies and officials tasked with preventing and battling the blazes could soon have a new tool to add to their arsenal of prescribed burns, pick axes, chain saws and aircraft. The high-tech help could come by way of an area not normally associated with fighting wildfires: artificial intelligence. And space.”
BusinessWire: Global Plastic Watch: Satellite Eyes Pinpoint Waste From Space to Reduce Ocean Pollution (PRESS RELEASE). “Global Plastic Watch (globalplasticwatch.org) is a tool which combines earth observation with artificial intelligence to create the first-ever near-real-time high-resolution map of plastic pollution. This is the largest open-source dataset of plastic waste across dozens of countries.”
MIT Sloan Management Review: AI on the Front Lines. “AI progress can stall when end users resist adoption. Developers must think beyond a project’s business benefits and ensure that end users’ workflow concerns are addressed.”
Hürriyet Daily News: Google translation’ of book into Turkish sparks debate. “A veteran translator has stirred controversy among literature experts by announcing that he has translated a biography of Milan Kundera from French into Turkish although he is not a francophone. Osman Akınhay, co-founder of Istanbul-based publishing house Agora Kitaplığı, said in a tweet on April 27 that the book was ready to be published after eight months of ‘sentence-based work with the help of Google Translate,’ though admitting that he does not have full command of French.”
Brookings Institution: How to tackle the data collection behind China’s AI ambitions. “Although we have some insight into Chinese A.I. funding generally—see, for example, a recent report from the Center for Security and Emerging Technology on the People’s Liberation Army’s AI investments—we know far less about China’s strategy for data collection and acquisition. Given China’s interest in integrating cutting-edge AI into its intelligence and military enterprise, that oversight represents a profound vulnerability for U.S. national security. Policymakers in the White House and Congress should thus focus on restricting the largely unregulated data market not only to protect Americans’ privacy but also to deny China a strategic asset in developing their AI programs.”
New York Times: Another Firing Among Google’s A.I. Brain Trust, and More Discord. “Less than two years after Google dismissed two researchers who criticized the biases built into artificial intelligence systems, the company has fired a researcher who questioned a paper it published on the abilities of a specialized type of artificial intelligence used in making computer chips.”
BusinessWire: Arolsen Archives’ #everynamecounts Project Uses Artificial Intelligence to Help Uncover Information on Victims of Nazi Persecution (PRESS RELEASE). “A team of volunteers from Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has built an artificial intelligence (AI)-based solution that helps extract information on victims of Nazi persecution from documents in the Arolsen Archives 40 times faster than previous efforts.”
Mozilla Hacks: Common Voice dataset tops 20,000 hours. “The latest Common Voice dataset, released today, has achieved a major milestone: More than 20,000 hours of open-source speech data that anyone, anywhere can use. The dataset has nearly doubled in the past year.”
The ResearchBuzz Firehose is regular RB content presented as individual posts.
For digest-type posts a couple of times a day, please visit ResearchBuzz.
Want to know how to best use the Firehose for content discovery?
Check out this handy article.