NOAA’s Arcade

03/20/20 • 39 min

AI with AI: Artificial Intelligence with Andy Ilachinski

In news items, Andy and Dave discuss an effort by Boston Children’s Hospital to use machine learning to help track the spread of COVID-19. Meanwhile, a proposal from researchers wants to use mobile phones to track the virus’s spread. Fifty-two organization have come together to develop the “first-ever industry-led” standard for AI in healthcare. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announces its AI strategy. And IBM and Promare begin sea trials for Mayflower, an autonomous ship that, later this year, will make the reverse of the 1620 Mayflower transit, completely unmanned. In research, Google and Columbia University enable a robot to teach itself how to walk with minimal human intervention (bounding the terrain, and making the robot’s trial movements more cautious). Researchers at Harvard, MIT CSAIL, IBM-Watson-AI Lab, and DeepMind introduce CLEVRER (Collision Events for Video Representation and Reasoning), a diagnostic video dataset for the evaluation of models on a wide range of reasoning tasks. And DeepMind proposal a new reinforcement learning technique that models human behavior, using a gifting game in which agents learn to trust each other. The Berkman Klein Center at Harvard updates its data map of Ethical and Rights-based approaches to Principles for AI. The Center for the Study of the Dragon releases its likely last paper, Unarmed and Dangerous, which looks at how non-weaponized drones can still have lethal effects. Cansu Canca has provided a database and interface that looks at global dynamics of AI principles. Mario Alemi provides the book of the week, with the Amazing Journey of Reason: from DNA to AI. And the livestream talks from the 34th AAAI Conference are now available online.

Click here to visit our website and explore the links mentioned in the episode.

Click here to visit our website and explore the links mentioned in the episode.

Previous Episode

Dyson's Punch-out!!

In news, Andy and Dave discuss announcements from two Chinese firms that have developed AI that can identify COVID-19 infections with high accuracy. And the Francis Crick Institute makes DeepMind's AlphaFold data on COVID-19 available for free access to researchers. Scientists at the University of Southampton and the University of Padova demonstrate that artificial and biological neurons can communicate over the internet (using memristors). Researchers at the University of Miguel Hernandez develop a new brain implant that bypasses eye and optical nerves and sends visual signals straight to the brain's visual cortex. DARPA announces the winners of the second circuit of its Subterranean Challenge (with CoSTAR taking the honors). And DARPA also kicks off its ASIST (Artificial Social Intelligence for Successful Teams) program. In other news, Freeman Dyson has passed away, at the age of 96; Andy recommend's Dyson's talk from 2014 on "Are Brains Analogue or Digital?" among many other works by the late physicist. In research, UC Berkeley demonstrates that deep learning reinforcement algorithms can be attacked and made to malfunction through their policies that govern overall behavior. Researchers at Northwestern University create the first decentralized algorithm with collision-free (and deadlock-free) movement for a swarm of agents (over 1,000 robots virtually, and 100 real robots in a lab). A report from the Stanford Law School and the NY University School of Law examines the use of AI across all U.S. federal administrative agencies. Frontiers in Robotics and AI provides a review and discussion of the challenges in successfully developing swarms of Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs). The Army Futures Command publishes Non-simplicity: The Warrior's Way. And Georgia Tech shines the spotlight on its music playing and improvising robot, Shimon.

Next Episode

We’ve Got You COVID

Not surprisingly, COVID-19 has taken over the news section, but still as it all relates to AI and machine learning. Andy and Dave discuss the COVID-19 Open Research Data Set, a free resource of over 29,000 scholarly articles on the coronavirus family, made available for the Allen Institute, CSET, CZI, Microsoft Research, NIH, and the White House OSTP. In similar news, over 100 organizations have signed a “wellcome statement” to make COVID-19 research and data open for access. The New England Complex Systems Institute provides a host of pandemic resources online. The CDC is using machine learning to forecast COVID-19 (adapting its efforts in forecasting influenza outbreaks). And Anodot launches a public machine learning-driven service to track COVID-19. In research, somehow not COVID-19 related, Google Brain and Google Research demonstrate Auto-ML Zero, which discovers complete machine learning algorithms by using basic mathematical functions as building blocks. The report of the week comes from Complex Multilayer Networks Lab along with Harvard, which provides a COVID-19 Infodemics Observatory, processing more than 100M tweets to quantify various sentiments as well as reliability of information from around the globe (with Singapore topping the list for most reliable information). David Barber provides Bayesian Reasoning and Machine Learning for free. And the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense and Max Brooks provide Germ Warfare: a Very Graphic History (published in 2019).

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